Find in Israel: Eleven lines from biblical times

W.if he takes another closer look, now and then he sees something previously unrecognized. And sometimes makes a historical discovery. First Bedouins and later Israeli archaeologists found the remains of a 2,000-year-old biblical scroll in a cave in the Judean Desert by the Dead Sea around 60 years ago. They left behind the investigated bulk material in this cavern known as the “Cave of Horror”. More than a year ago, this bulk material was examined again in the cave – and another 20 or so scroll fragments were found. The Israel Antiquities Authority presented them on Tuesday in the research department of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

In a small, windowless room, the curator Oren Ableman and the conservator Tanya Bitler have initially placed the pieces of parchment, which are often less than one centimeter in size, between the larger scroll fragments known from the cave. Because of their size, the finds did not always allow conclusions to be drawn about their text, says Ableman. But as far as can be recognized, the parchment fragments belong to sections from the Book of the Twelve Prophets, including parts of Nahum’s writings, chapter one, verse five and six, and Zecharyas, chapter eight, verse 16 and 17. In total, the researchers reconstructed eleven lines of text. They have a larger and a smaller handwriting in Greek, the lingua franca of the day. Only the name of God is written in ancient Hebrew. According to the Antiquities Authority, this is the first such finding of biblical text fragments in 60 years.

In the forties and fifties in the same area a few kilometers away in caves near Qumran on the Dead Sea in the West Bank, Bedouin manuscripts were discovered, which are considered to be the oldest biblical text fragments in the world and have largely been preserved due to the desert climate. The copies cover a period between about 300 BC and 100 AD; their authors are unknown. A total of around 900 such scrolls are known, of which, however, little more than a dozen have survived as a partially preserved book scroll.

The “Horror Cave” is named after the discovery of 40 skeletons there, including those of women, children and men. They are presumably refugees from the time of the Jewish Bar Kochba uprising against the Roman governor from around 132 to 135 AD. It was knocked down after initial successes and some of the refugees may have been hiding in this cave. They are said to have starved to death in the course of the Roman siege. Because the cave is located in a steep rock, 80 meters below the summit, on which the remains of a Roman camp were found. So perhaps the Romans simply starved the members of Jewish rebels. Escape seemed hardly possible, in any case the researchers had to abseil from the cliff in order to get into the “cave of horror”. The documents found there were probably written at least 100 years before the Bar Kochba uprising, but perhaps also carried there as a valuable sanctuary by the fleeing insurgents.

Two coins that were found there in 2018 and have now also been presented could prove that the cave that has now been investigated may have been left behind from the time of Bar Kochba. The embossed bronze coins bear Jewish symbols such as the lyre and the date palm, which the chief numismatist Donald Tzvi Ariel described as a symbol of Jerusalem used by the rebels who were no longer to reach the city. Ariel presented other coin finds from other caves in the desert.