found http://www.timesofisrael.com/nine-tiny-new-dead-sea-scrolls-come-to-light/
Researcher finds tantalizing tefillin parchments from Second Temple era, overlooked for decades and unread for 2,000 years
They’re not much larger than lentils, but size
doesn’t minimize the potential significance of nine newfound Dead Sea
Scrolls that have lain unopened for the better part of six decades.
An
Israeli scholar turned up the previously unexamined parchments, which
had escaped the notice of academics and archaeologists as they focused
on their other extraordinary finds in the 1950s. Once opened, the
minuscule phylactery parchments from Qumran, while unlikely to yield any
shattering historic, linguistic or religious breakthroughs, could shed
new light on the religious practices of Second Temple Judaism.
The Israel Antiquities Authority has been
tasked with unraveling and preserving the new discoveries — an acutely
sensitive process and one which the IAA says it will conduct
painstakingly, and only after conducting considerable preparatory
research.
Phylacteries, known in Judaism by the Hebrew term tefillin, are
pairs of leather cases containing biblical passages from the books of
Exodus and Deuteronomy. One case is bound by leather thongs to the head
and one to the arm during morning prayers, as prescribed by rabbinic
interpretation of the Bible. The case worn on the head contains four
scrolls in individual compartments, while the arm phylactery holds one
scroll.
The interior of the Shrine of the book, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum. (photo credit: Flash90)
But these nine latest tiny scrolls had been overlooked — until now.
Dr. Yonatan
Adler, a lecturer at Ariel University and a post-doctoral researcher on
Qumran tefillin at Hebrew University, was searching through the Israel
Antiquities Authority’s climate-controlled storerooms in the Har Hotzvim
neighborhood of Jerusalem in May 2013. There he found a phylactery case
from Qumran among the organic artifacts stored in climate-controlled
warehouses. Suspecting the case could contain a heretofore undocumented
scroll, he had it scanned by an CT at Shaare Zedek Hospital. The
analysis suggested there might indeed be an unseen parchment inside.
While that analysis has yet to be confirmed,
Adler was spurred on by the discovery, and in December visited the Dead
Sea Scroll labs at the Israel Museum. There he found two tiny scrolls
inside the compartments of a tefillin case that had been documented but
then put aside some time after 1952. The scrolls were never photographed
or examined, and so have remained bound inside the leather box for
roughly 2,000 years.
Then, just last month, Adler told The Times of
Israel he “found a number of fragments of tefillin cases from Qumran
Cave 4, together with seven rolled-up tefillin slips” which had never
been opened.
Dr. Yonatan Adler of Ariel University (photo credit: Devorah Adler)
“Either they didn’t realize that these were
also scrolls, or they didn’t know how to open them,” Pnina Shor, curator
and head of the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls Projects, explained.
Józef Tadeusz Milik, the most prolific
publisher of the scrolls after their discovery last century, reported on
the Cave 4 tefillin case finds but he “didn’t say why they didn’t open
them, [and] he also didn’t say they were scrolls,” even though the
parchments were identified as part of tefillin assemblage, she said.
Shor and her team have managed the painstaking
task of preserving and maintaining the thousands of scroll fragments
found in the Judean Desert caves, removing tehm from the glass cases in
which they were entombed in the 1950s, treating them and storing them on
acid-free boards in a climate-controlled vault. As part of an overall
digitization project of the scrolls, each minute fragment is imaged with
multi-spectral imaging. Each scroll fragment is imaged at 56 different
exposures — 28 per side (as some scrolls have writing on both) — in 12
different wavelengths ranging as far as near infrared. The team will be
tasked with a similar mission with the new scrolls once they’ve been
opened.
Dead Sea Scroll expert Eibert Tigchelaar of
the University of Leuven in Belgium said that the fact that these nine
scrolls went undetected for so long should not come as a surprise,
considering the scrolls’ complicated administrative history (which
includes a change in sovereignty in 1967). ”Things physically remained
somewhere, but administratively were forgotten,” Tigchelaar said.
Moreover, “confronted with 10,000 or more
fragments from Cave 4, of which the last were only published a few years
ago, there was little attention [paid] to those tefillin that might not
be opened at all,” he said.
None of the phylacteries has been radiocarbon
dated, but the cache of scrolls and religious objects from the caves at
Qumran date from the second and first centuries BCE and first century CE
— a critical time in the development of Judaism and early Christianity.
Like many of the finds at Qumran, some of the tefillin slips that have previously been opened have yielded astonishing differences from the standard Rabbinic text known as the Masoretic.
“Some tefillin use a spelling very close to
the traditional one, [but] there are several tefillin that use an
extreme form of divergent spelling that also occurs in many other
scrolls,” such as additional letters in possessive suffixes, Tigchelaar
said.
Seven recently rediscovered unopened tefillin scrolls from Qumran. (photo credit: Shai Halevi via Israel Antiquities Authority)
Professor Lawrence Schiffman, a vice provost
at Yeshiva University and expert on Second Temple Judaism, explained
that some of the tefillin texts from Qumran were identical to those used
today, but others have the same text with additional passages, extended
to include the Ten Commandments. He also pointed out that it would be
interesting to see the order in which the scrolls were placed inside the
tefillin compartments — a practice debated by rabbis for centuries.
“From my point of view, the most significant
thing about all of this is that they actually have tefillin from 2,100
and plus years ago,” Schiffman said of the Dead Sea Scrolls generally.
The continuity of phylactery traditions — over the centuries and across
the various sects that comprised Second Temple Jewry — was something he
found remarkable.
“We have to be prepared for surprises,”
Professor Hindy Najman of Yale University said, of the new discoveries.
“On the one hand there’s tremendous continuity between what we have
found among the Dead Sea Scrolls — liturgically, ritually and textually —
and contemporaneous and later forms of Judaism. But there’s also
tremendous possibility for variegated practices and a complex
constellation of different practices, different influences, different
ways of thinking about tefillin.”
Tefillin cases from Qumran (photo credit: Clara Amit via Israel Antiquities Authority)
Schiffman, however, said he doesn’t expect any
“bombshells” emerging from the new scrolls that will “overturn the
concepts that we have.”
“Given the amount of research that’s been
done… important discoveries like this don’t overturn previous ideas,” he
said. “We’re going to be able to augment what we know about the
tefillin already.”
Tigchelaar concurred, saying that the Dead Sea
Scrolls in general, and these tefillin in particular, are important not
because they would shed light on one particular sect during the Second
Temple Era, but because they demonstrate that rabbinic practices had
deeper roots.
“Whether one wants to emphasize the continuity, or the differences, is another thing,” he said.
Shor will be in charge of the project of meticulously unraveling the newfound scrolls and ensuring their preservation.
“We’re going
to do it slowly, but we’ll first consult with all of our experts about
how to go about this,” she said, reluctant to say when the process would
commence. “We need to do a lot of research before we start doing this.”
A single tefillin scroll found in phylacteries at Qumran. (photo credit: Shai Halevi via Israel Antiquities Authority)
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