Showing posts with label Shaare Zedek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shaare Zedek. Show all posts

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Uncovered in Jerusalem, 9 tiny unopened Dead Sea Scrolls

An unrolled tefillin parchment from Qumran. 4Q135, Plate 212, Frag 2 (photo credit: Shai Halevi via Israel Antiquities Authority)

Uncovered in Jerusalem, 

9 tiny unopened Dead Sea Scrolls



Researcher finds tantalizing tefillin parchments
from Second Temple era, overlooked for decades
and unread for 2,000 years

BY ILAN BEN ZION March 12, 2014


Ilan Ben Zion Ilan Ben Zion is a news editor at The Times of Israel. 
He holds a Masters degree in Diplomacy from … [More]
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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.

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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)

At least two dozen tefillin scroll fragments were known to have 
been found during excavations of the limestone caves overlooking 
the Dead Sea at Qumran in the 1950s (several phylactery boxes 
and straps were unearthed as well). They were among the 
world-famous cache of thousands of scrolls and scroll fragments 
containing biblical and sectarian texts from the Second Temple 
period. Since their discovery, the Qumran scrolls have been housed 
at the Israel Museum, and scholars have pored over the ancient 
documents and opened a window into ancient Jewish theology.

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 MRI 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, head of the IAA’s 
Department of Artefact Treatment and 
Conservation, 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 maintaining the thousands of scroll 
fragments found at Qumran, removing them 
from the glass casings in which they were 
entombed in the 1950s and mounting them on 
fine cloth mesh, then digitizing each minute scrap 
with multi-spectral photography. Each scroll 
fragment is photographed at 56 different exposures 
— 28 per side (as some scrolls have writing on 
both) — in 12 different wavelengths ranging as 
far as the 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)

Uncovered in Jerusalem, 9 tiny unopened Dead Sea Scrolls
Researcher finds tantalizing tefillin parchments from 
Second Temple era, overlooked for decades and 
unread for 2,000 years.

Read more: Uncovered in Jerusalem, 9 tiny unopened 
Dead Sea Scrolls | The Times of Israel 
http://www.timesofisrael.com/nine-tiny-new-dead-
sea-scrolls-come-to-light/#ixzz2vm8fwaVN
Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter
timesofisrael on Facebook

Read more: Uncovered in Jerusalem, 9 tiny unopened 
Dead Sea Scrolls | The Times of Israel 
http://www.timesofisrael.com/nine-tiny-new-dead-
sea-scrolls-come-to-light/#ixzz2vm8YDsJx
Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter
timesofisrael on Facebook