Dead Sea Scroll Fragment May Point to an Unknown Manuscript
The Fellowship | May 2, 2018
Newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll fragments were presented at the Israel Museum in honor of Israel’s 70th anniversary. These fragments help fill in the gaps of the already published scrolls, as well as provide evidence of an unknown manuscript.
One of the dead sea scroll fragments, unusually written 2,000 years ago in anachronistic First Temple script, may even point to a wholly unique, previously unknown manuscript. “This fragment could not be attributed to any one of the known manuscripts,” the conference organizers said. “This raises the possibility that it belonged to a still unknown manuscript.”
One scroll fragment, containing the single Hebrew word, “zamra,” has been tentatively identified as a lost portion of the Great Psalms Scroll, one of the largest and best preserved of the Qumran manuscripts. The word “zamra” appears only once in the Book of Psalms. Another word with the same sequence of letters, “zimra,” is found another three times in the Hebrew Bible.