One Of The Last Mysterious Fragments Of Dead Sea Scrolls Translated
A conservator examines Dead Sea Scroll fragments in 2016. Image by Getty
By Ari Feldman January 23, 2018
Some of the last remaining obscure fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been decoded — and it looks like the original author made a mistake, the BBC reported.
Israeli researchers at Haifa University worked more than a year to piece together small fragments of what is considered the oldest copy of the bible ever found. It was discovered in Israel, in the caves of Qumran, in 1947.
These fragments, some smaller than a square centimeter, detailed special events celebrated by the Esseans, the mysterious Jewish cult that created the scrolls and lived in the desert south of Jerusalem. One of the events discovered was called “tekufah,” meaning “period” in Hebrew, which marked the change of the seasons.
The researchers were able to make the translations with help from annotations on the original scrolls, apparently made by a scribe correcting the scrolls’ author.
“What’s nice is that these comments were hints that helped me figure out the puzzle – they showed me how to assemble the scroll,” Dr. Eshbal Ratzon told Haaretz.
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
