2,000-Year-Old Biblical Text Found in Israel

Stand for Israel  |  March 16, 2021

Cave in Judean desert, site of discovered biblical texts

In the Holy Land, biblical history truly comes alive through archaeology. The latest discovery by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) not only proved important historically, but in a biblical sense, as well. The Jerusalem Post’s Rossella Tercatin reports on the IAA’s exciting findings in a cave above the Judean desert:

A 2,000-year-old biblical scroll has been unearthed in the Judean desert, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Tuesday. The groundbreaking discovery marks the first time that such an artifact has been uncovered in decades, since the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The two dozen fragments were found in a cave in the Judean Desert, as a result of a several-year-long breathtaking rescue operation with the purpose of surveying all the caves of the area, carried out by the IAA in cooperation with the Archaeology Department of the Civil Administration.

The scroll was written in Greek, but God’s name appears in paleo-Hebrew. It contains passages from the Minor Prophets, including Nahum.

Besides the manuscript, the cave harbored several other unique findings, including a trove of coins from the time of the Bar Kochba Revolt, the skeleton of a child dating back to some 6,000 years, and a 10,000-year-old exceptionally well-preserved basket which experts say might be the earliest item of this kind ever uncovered…