Israel, fragments of 2,000-year-old biblical manuscripts discovered in ancient Greek

TheIsrael Antiquities Authority has announced an extraordinary discovery: fragments of biblical manuscripts in ancient Greek dating back two thousand years have been found in a cave in the Judean desert. This is a major find, since the last discovery was sixty years ago with the Dead Sea Scrolls; the latter were a set of ancient Judaic manuscripts with religious content found in the Qumran caves of the Judean Desert on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea.

Israeli archaeologists claim that the newly unearthed manuscript fragments were hidden in the course of a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly two thousand years ago.Portions of Greek text can be recognized from the books of twelve minor prophets, particularly Zechariah and Naum, and the carbon-14 method was used for dating. The discovery is, however, the result of a long surveillance operation of all the caves in the area aimed at the protection and preservation of the finds carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority in cooperation with the Department of Archaeology of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria.

The discovery took place in the so-called"cave of horror," the name of which refers to the discovery at that site of forty human skeletons dating back to the 1960s. Perhaps they were hidden in the cave in the course of Bar Kokhba’s armed revolt against Rome ruled by Emperor Hadrian.

Ph.Credit Israeli Antiquities Authority

Israel, fragments of 2,000-year-old biblical manuscripts discovered in ancient Greek

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