New fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls found for the first time in 60 years

Fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls displayed yesterday in Jerusalem by the Israel Antiquities Authority.MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP

The discovery of dozens of new fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls, presented publicly yesterday in Jerusalem, has ended six decades without discoveries at the site where the first preserved texts of the Bible were found.

Since the scrolls dated 2,300 years ago were located in 1947 in the caves of Qumran (40 kilometers east of the Holy City), only a few more fragments had been located in 1961 in the Cave of Horrors, so called by the dozens of corpses buried inside.

• The most mysterious Dead Sea manuscript tells of Noah's departure after the flood

Thereafter, Israeli archaeologists excavating the ravines of the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, only heard of the appearance in recent years of uncategorized scraps of parchment from the book of books on the black market for antiques.

In an operation against the looters of the historical heritage that has been carried out since 2017, the new fragments have been found, which make up a 2,000-year-old puzzle that reconstructs verses in Greek from the book of the twelve minor prophets, specifically from Zacharias and Nahum.

The new parts of the biblical scrolls were located in the same Cave of Horrors, together with the mummified remains of a child who lived 6,000 years ago and a basket from the Neolithic era dated more than 10,000 years ago, in good condition a Because of the extremely dry Dead Sea environment.

The researchers emphasize that the fragments have served to complete parchments already preserved from 1947. They have also verified that the slight linguistic variations detected in the biblical text show that they were not static copies, but that they evolved along with the culture of the time .

“These are the things you have to do: tell the truth to each other, act with perfect justice on your doorstep.

Do not harm the other and do not lean towards perjury, because those are things that I hate ', says the word of the Lord ”, according to the reconstructed text with the fragments now found by archaeologists, according to the translation published by the

Haaretz

newspaper

.

• Sheep skin helps solve the puzzle of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (AAI), which reported these discoveries in a statement, had to use drones to inspect some 500 caves and cavities lined up over tens of kilometers, into which they descended with rappels of up to 80 meters from the crest of cliffs that border the depression that separates the Jordanian from the Palestinian territory.

Of the nearly a thousand rescued Dead Sea scrolls, only three are relatively complete.

The researchers argue that the new discovery will serve to review the history of Greek translations of the Bible, which later moved to Latin and contemporary languages.

AAI experts assured that they had to act very quickly to avoid looting by looters.

International law, however, prohibits the occupying power from removing finds of cultural property from occupied territory.

Archaeological discoveries often generate disputes between Israel, whose Army has administered the territorial occupation for the past 54 years, and the Palestinian Authority, which has exercised limited self-government in part of the West Bank since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

The researchers argue that the new discovery will serve to review the history of Greek translations of the Bible, which later moved to Latin and contemporary languages.

“We have found new pieces of the puzzle to add to the wide-angle picture,” Oren Abelman, director of the investigation of the Dead Sea scrolls at the Israel Antiquities Authority, told Reuters, “but they are still small.

With this new information that we did not have before, we continue to advance to decipher them ”.

Those in charge of the team still do not know the characteristics of the Jewish sect that took refuge in the Dead Sea almost 20 centuries ago and that bequeathed the first biblical texts preserved today.

The absence of signs of violence in the remains found in the Cave of Horrors has led them to think that the Roman troops besieged them in their caves and ravines until they perished from starvation.

The simultaneous discovery of 1,900-year-old coins with “Jewish symbols” also in the Cave of Horrors is seen by those responsible for the Israeli historical heritage as a confirmation of the past presence of the Jewish people in the Jordan Valley, where many families they took refuge after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD and the beginning of a two-thousand-year diaspora.

A thousand texts to decipher

The Dead Sea Scrolls number nearly a thousand scrolls and papyri written in Aramaic and Hebrew that were recovered from 11 caves out of nearly 300 inspected at Qumran, in the Judean Desert of the West Bank, between 1947 and 1956. One of the largest manuscripts Mysterious, a copy of Genesis in Aramaic from the first century BC that tells of Noah's departure after the flood, was presented for the first and last time in 2018 at the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, in whose Shrine of the Book original and reproductions of the first biblical texts.

Much of the rolls are in pieces. Historians, theologians, linguists and palaeographers have been ordering them and trying to put them together for more than 70 years. The genetic analysis of sheepskin has recently helped to solve part of the puzzle.