JERUSALEM – Israeli archaeologists on Tuesday announced the discovery of dozens of fragments of the Dead Sea Scroll with a biblical text found in a desert cave and believed to be hidden during a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly 1,900 years ago.
The parchment fragments contain lines of Greek text from the books of Zechariah and Nahum and have been dated to around the 1st century according to the style of writing, according to the authority of antiquities of Israel. They are the first new parchments found in archaeological excavations in the desert south of Jerusalem in 60 years.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish texts found in the caves of the West Bank desert near Qumran, between the 1940s and 1950s, date from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD They include the first known copies of texts biblical and documented beliefs of a poorly understood Jewish sect.
The approximately 80 new pieces are believed to belong to a set of parchment fragments found in a place in southern Israel known as the “Cave of Horror,” so named because of the 40 human skeletons found there during the excavations of the sixties, which also bear a Greek. interpretation of the Twelve Minor Prophets, a book of the Hebrew Bible. The cave is located in a remote canyon about 40 kilometers south of Jerusalem.
The artifacts were found during an operation in Israel and the occupied West Bank conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority to find scrolls and other artifacts to prevent possible looting. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war and international law prohibits the withdrawal of cultural property from the occupied territory. The authority held a press conference on Tuesday to publicize the discovery.
The fragments are believed to have formed part of a scroll hidden in the cave during the Bar Kochba Revolt, an armed Jewish uprising against Rome during the reign of Emperor Hadrian between 132 and 136. Coins struck by rebels and arrowheads finds in other caves in the region also come from this period.
“We have found a textual difference that bears no parallel to any other manuscript, either in Hebrew or Greek,” said Oren Ableman, a researcher on the Dead Sea Scroll of the Authority for Israel’s Antiquities. He referred to slight variations in the Greek interpretation of the Hebrew original compared to the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek made in Egypt in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.
“When we think of the biblical text, we think of something very static. It was not static. There are small differences and some of those differences are important, ”said Joe Uziel, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls antiquities authority unit. “Every little information we can add, we can understand a little better” as the biblical text entered into its traditional Hebrew form.
Along with artifacts from the Roman era, the exhibit included much older and minor discoveries found during his sweep of more than 500 caves in the desert: the mummified skeleton of a 6,000-year-old boy, an immense and complete woven basket from the Neolithic Period, it is estimated to be 10,500 years old and a large number of other delicate organic materials preserved in the arid climate of the caves.
In 1961, Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni excavated the “Cave of Horror” and his team found nine fragments of parchment that belonged to a scroll with texts from the twelve minor prophets in Greek and a fragment of Greek papyrus.
Since then, no new texts have been found during archaeological excavations, but many have appeared on the black market, apparently looted from the caves.
For the past four years, Israeli archaeologists have launched a major campaign to tour caves in the barren canyons of the Judean desert in search of scrolls and other rare artifacts. The goal is to find them before the looters disturb the remote sites, destroying strata and archaeological data in search of antiques destined for the black market.
So far the hunt had only found a handful of parchment remains that bore no text.
Amir Ganor, head of the anti-theft theft prevention unit, said that since the start of the operation in 2017 there has been virtually no looting of antiques in the Judean desert, and described the operation of success.
“For the first time in 70 years, we were able to avoid looters,” he said.