From "The Priestly Benediction
on a Silver Amulet."
Ca. 600 B.C. Jerusalem.

Courtesy of the
Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

The Oldest-Known Fragments of the Bible

A Silver Amulet

In 1979 two small rolled pieces of silver were discovered in a burial cave in Jerusalem, Israel. When the little scrolls were carefully unrolled, researchers found words from the Book of Numbers inscribed into the silver, written in characters from an ancient Hebrew script.

The scrolls contain the text of the Priestly Benediction, which appears in Chapter 6 of Numbers, and which is still recited today by Jews in synagogue prayer throughout the world.

The dating of the silver scrolls is based on new laboratory techniques. The results were very recently published in a scientific journal in the United States. Tests carried out in NASA laboratories confirm that these words were written around 600 B.C.E., in the days when Solomon's Temple still stood on the Jerusalem mountain.

"Archaeologist Gabi Barkai of Bar Ilan University, who discovered the amulets during a salvage excavation on the slopes overlooking the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem, said that additional fragments of texts on the amulets have been deciphered and one identified as a verse from the book of Deuteronomy."

Jewish tradition tells us that the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomony) was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But, scholars have debated the origins of these writings, proposing that it is instead made up of separate strands of religious writings woven together sometime after the Second Temple was destroyed in 587 B.C.E. One of these sources, they hypothesize, was written by Priests long after the Jews returned from Babylon - in the time of the Second Temple.

The silver scrolls contain words from the Book of Numbers and possibly from the Book of Deuteronomy - all on material that is older than the destruction of the First Temple!!