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THE ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021
Archaeologists discover more Dead Sea Scrolls
By ILAN BEN ZION
Associated Press
JERUSALEM — Israeli archaeologists
on Tuesday announced the discovery of
dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments bear-
ing a biblical text found in a desert cave
and believed hidden during a Jewish revolt
against Rome nearly 1,900 years ago.
The fragments of parchment bear lines of
Greek text from the books of Zechariah and
Nahum and have been dated around the fi rst
century based on the writing style, accord-
ing to the Israel Antiquities Authority. They
are the fi rst new scrolls found in archaeolog-
ical excavations in the desert south of Jeru-
salem in 60 years.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of
Jewish texts found in desert caves in the
West Bank near Qumran in the 1940s and
1950s, date from the third century B.C. to
the fi rst century A.D. They include the earli-
est known copies of biblical texts and docu-
ments outlining the beliefs of a little under-
stood Jewish sect.
The roughly 80 new pieces are believed
to belong to a set of parchment fragments
found in a site in southern Israel known as
the “Cave of Horror” — named for the 40
human skeletons found there during excava-
tions in the 1960s — that also bear a Greek
rendition of the Twelve Minor Prophets,
a book in the Hebrew Bible. The cave is
located in a remote canyon around 25 miles
south of Jerusalem.
The artifacts were found during an oper-
ation in Israel and the occupied West Bank
conducted by the Israel Antiquities Author-
ity to fi nd scrolls and other artifacts to pre-
vent possible plundering. Israel captured the
West Bank in the 1967 war, and international
law prohibits the removal of cultural prop-
erty from occupied territory. The authority
held a news conference Tuesday to unveil
the discovery.
The fragments are believed to have been
part of a scroll stashed away 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
found in other caves in the region also hail
from that period.
“We found a textual diff erence that has
no parallel with any other manuscript, either
in Hebrew or in Greek,” said Oren Able-
man, a Dead Sea Scroll researcher with the
Israel Antiquities Authority. He referred to
slight variations in the Greek rendering of
the Hebrew original compared to the Septu-
agint — a translation of the Hebrew Bible to
Greek made in Egypt in the third and second
centuries B.C.
“When we think about the biblical text,
we think about something very static. It
wasn’t static. There are slight diff erences
and some of those diff erences are import-
ant,” said Joe Uziel, head of the antiquities
Sebastian Scheiner/AP Photos
TOP: Israel Antiquities Authority conservator
Tanya Bitler shows newly discovered Dead
Sea Scroll fragments at the Dead Sea Scrolls
conservation lab in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
LEFT: The Israel Antiquities Authority displays
newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll fragments
at the Dead Sea Scrolls conservation lab.
authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls unit. “Every
little piece of information that we can add,
we can understand a little bit better” how
the Biblical text came into its traditional
Hebrew form.
Alongside the Roman-era artifacts, the
exhibit included far older discoveries of no
lesser importance found during its sweep
of more than 500 caves in the desert: the
6,000-year-old mummifi ed skeleton of a
child, an immense, complete woven basket
from the Neolithic period, estimated to be
10,500 years old, and scores of other deli-
cate organic materials preserved in caves’
arid climate.
In 1961, Israeli archaeologist Yohanan
Aharoni excavated the “Cave of Horror”
and his team found nine parchment frag-
ments belonging to a scroll with texts from
the Twelve Minor Prophets in Greek, and a
scrap of Greek papyrus.
Since then, no new texts have been found
during archaeological excavations, but many
have turned up on the black market, appar-
ently plundered from caves.
For the past four years, Israeli archaeol-
ogists have launched a major campaign to
scour caves nestled in the precipitous can-
yons of the Judean Desert in search of scrolls
and other rare artifacts. The aim is to fi nd
them before plunderers disturb the remote
sites, destroying archaeological strata and
data in search of antiquities bound for the
black market.
Until now the hunt had only found a hand-
ful of parchment scraps that bore no text.
Amir Ganor, head of the antiquities theft
prevention unit, said that since the com-
mencement of the operation in 2017 there
has been virtually no antiquities plundering
in the Judean Desert, calling the operation a
success.
“For the fi rst time in 70 years, we were
able to preempt the plunderers,” he said.
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