In recent decades, a series of archaeological discoveries in the Near East has gradually been uncovering a picture of the ancient history of that area which holds important implications for our conceptions of world history and of the roles of various ancient peoples, among them the Jews, in the development of civilization. William F. Albright, professor of Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University, who has been a leading figure in the archaeological study of the Near East, here describes the most recent achievements in this field. Professor Albright’s own work, mostly centering on Palestine, has done much to re-establish the significance of the Hebrew Bible as a historical source; among other achievements, he has identified the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah and demonstrated that they had been destroyed by a natural catacylsm. This past winter, on an expedition to the peninsula of Sinai, he succeeded in deciphering a group of inscriptions, written in the earliest known variant of the alphabet, which had resisted all efforts at a full interpretation for thirty-three years.
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Archaeological undertakings come into being in as many different ways as there are archaeologists and expeditions. But all, including Biblical archaeology, share one common feature—the call of the unknown, the lure of uncharted country. It was this that attracted a young English lad named Flinders Petrie, who was to organize and direct nearly a hundred archaeological expeditions in a career of two-thirds of a century, ending in Palestine. This was the vision which led a country boy from Illinois, James Henry Breasted, into the study of Egyptology; this same vison enabled him to fire men like John D. Rockefeller Jr. with his own enthusiasm and to found the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which at one time in the 30’s had a score of major archaeological projects under way.
To such adventurous expeditions we owe much of the extension and transformation that has been wrought, during little more than a century, in man’s sense of his own history. We hardly realize that in the early 19th century nothing was known about the origin or early development of our Western civilization, which arose from the ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible then stood practically alone as a source of information for the pre-Hellenic world, with virtually no external sources of information. It was impossible to confirm or to illustrate its contents, much less set it in its historical background and environment. Around 1821, the first steps were taken to recover the great ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia with their amazing artistic achievements, which now adorn most of the great museums of Europe and America. Since then the artist and the historian, the anthropologist and the student of religion have vied with one another to help recover this historic past which had vanished almost completely from the memory of man.
Through the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, archaeological research gained momentum, and when the First World War brought a sudden end to field work, the enforced breathing spell gave a chance for system-atizers and interpreters to catch up with the influx of new data. Between the wars there was an unexampled acceleration of archaeological exploration and excavation in Bible lands, with vastly improved field technique and scientific method. When the Second World War again put a complete stop to all field activity we were again given an interim period for the assimilation of results and for useful stocktaking.
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In the world of learning, the greatest contrast between 1921 and 1948, three years after the close of each war, is the shift of free intellectual enterprise in the humanities from Central Europe to America, and from Western Europe to the Near and Middle East. Germany and surrounding regions will scarcely be able to take part actively in such studies as Biblical archaeology for a long time to come, though there are still some German scholars who received their training before Hitler’s advent and continue research as best they can. Within the Soviet orbit significant research in the humanities is rapidly stagnating, just as has already happened in Russia itself. With entire areas of the humanities, such as free historical and philosophical research, banned, even such studies as Slavonic philology are at present almost totally without representatives whose names carry weight in Western scholarly circles. How much more is this true of Biblical archaeology, which is so remote from the immediate intellectual demands of Marxism!
On the other hand, America, thanks to the spirit of free intellectual enterprise and the great influx of well-trained refugee scholars, is developing rapidly to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Central European culture. It is even more important that natives of the Middle East are themselves now taking a major part in excavation and exploration, particularly in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria-Lebanon. Egypt came first, with many men trained abroad in Egyptology and related fields, and with a considerable number of archaeologists who have learned their craft from foreign excavators. Jewish Palestine came second, and since the early 20’s there has been an increasing number of competent specialists in archaeology and related ancient disciplines. Men like E. L. Sukenik, Leo Mayer, B. Maisler, I. Ben Dor, have set a high scholarly level and there is now a group of younger men and women who provide for continuity. The technique of pottery chronology, for instance, needs trained practitioners of every age group in order to prevent loss of one of the most valuable aids furnished to the historian by the field archaeologist.
Between the two world wars field archaeology made great progress in technique and interpretation of results. So steady was this advance, under the influence of methods of digging and recording introduced by a great Englishman, Sir Flinders Petrie, and two Americans, G. A. Reisner and C. S. Fisher, that archaeologists began to expect a phase of increasing precision along lines already drawn, without any startling shift in direction. This attitude is proving just as fallacious in archaeology as in physics and genetics. For instance: As a result of investigations begun very recently with the search for the causes of radioactivity in Baltimore sewage, it is now known that carbon isotope 14 is likely to become an aid of the first importance in fixing chronology. This radioactive carbon isotope collects in living plants and ceases to be added after the death of the plant which harbors it. Its life span is said to be some six millennia, and we can accurately measure the point a given mass of radioactive carbon has reached in this span with a mass spectroscope. We may safely expect a land like Egypt, where organic material turns up constantly in excavations of whose date we are sure, to enable us to test the validity of this new chronological clue. Since artifacts of stone, metal, and clay often are found together with organic remains, we may be able to date them with a precision hitherto undreamed of, and know the exact time-relation of cultural events during the last four millennia BCE. With such a prospect in view, the historian can no longer neglect the ancient Orient without dangerous foreshortening of perspective and loss of an invaluable historical source.
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Owing largely to the influence of archaeology, there has been during these past two decades an almost unnoticed shift of the historian’s center of interest into regions previously disregarded. Thus, over half of Arnold J. Toynbee’s twenty-one distinct “societies” are now extinct, and of these no fewer than seven have been brought to light and reconstructed by the archaeologist. The historian who aspires to dominate world history must now perforce become acquainted with archaeology. This is just as true of the anthropologist and the geographer. In research on the Southwest and Middle America there has been increasing realization of the importance of archaeology, yet the American cultural anthropologist of the functional school has, with notable exceptions, tended to disregard historical and archaeological materials. But recently one may detect among American anthropologists a greater interest in history—and for anthropologists, this means mostly archaeology—as illustrated by the work of such men as Alfred L. Kroeber and Leslie A. White.
The science of geography is replete with examples of the dangerous effects of incorrect archaeology. One of the most striking illustrations was the late Ellsworth Huntington, whose daring theories of the determining role of climate on the development of civilization and of the superiority of the New England Anglo-Saxon stock were based primarily on archaeological data gathered in Turkestan, in Turkey, in Central America, and especially in Palestine. After exploring Palestine for several months in 1909, he published his once famous book, Palestine and Its Transformation (1911), maintaining in it, with rich archaeological documentation, that the history of the ancient East must be explained almost exclusively from such geographical factors as climate and rainfall. Scientific archaeological and geographical research since then, and Nelson Glueck’s remarkable surface explorations of Transjordan in particular, has proved that the facts are entirely different from what Huntington had supposed. Since Huntington’s climatic theory was linked with a theory of the predominating influence on civilization of the Anglo-Saxon stock, the work of Nelson Glueck becomes as important for sound anthropology as the direct attack on racialism made by such anthropologists as Ashley Montagu.
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In surveying the most significant archaelological discoveries of recent years, we cannot limit ourselves exclusively to finds which throw direct light on the Bible. The ultimate value for Biblical studies of new data which clarify the general development of ancient life and thinking is often much greater than that of individual corroborations or corrections of the Bible. Thanks to the almost incredible magnitude of the archaeological discoveries made during the past century and a quarter, the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor, Arabia, and the Aegean, entirely unknown—or at best known only from a few fragmentary monuments or facts transmitted through the Bible and Greco-Roman writers—as late as 1821, have been brought into the full light of history. Scores of scripts and languages, some of which stand in no relationship to any surviving tongues, have been deciphered; many grammars and dictionaries of previously unknown tongues have been written, and elaborate syntheses of different aspects of historical cultures have been constructed on the basis of inscriptions and figured monuments.
We turn first to the three thousand years, roughly from 5000 to 2000 BCE, which preceded the age of the Patriarchs—the age of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was then that the life of the ancient East became stabilized and that the foundations were laid on which the civilization of Israel later arose. Thanks to excavations carried out during the past ten years in Iraq, it has been possible to settle the sequence of cultures in Babylonia and Assyria between the first beginnings of settled village life in the early fifth millennium BCE and the earliest written monuments, toward the end of the fourth. Since 1946 very important excavations have been in progress at Eridu, the ancient holy city south of Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham’s home, and during the past winter some ten successive strata of temple construction have been dug there. All of them antedate the middle of the fourth millennium and show that Mesopotamian civilization then had already assumed the basic forms which it was to exhibit for over three thousand years.
In Egypt, new discoveries and publication of earlier finds have since 1938 virtually revolutionized our knowledge of the first dynasties, following the unification of Egypt under Menes at the beginning of the third millennium. Objects from the First Dynasty prove that the art of this period had reached an astonishingly high level of beauty (according to our dominant post-Hellenic standards) and technical skill. By that time the busy hands and minds of sedentary man had discovered or devised tens of thousands of independent processes and techniques in scores of arts and crafts. When we bear in mind the fact that writing had not yet become a significant instrument for transmission of such knowledge, the inventive capacity of our precursors, more than five thousand years ago, appears in its true light. In comparison with their achievements, the triumphs of modem technology, aided by all the tools now provided by science and transmitted by every conceivable visual and auditory aid, do not seem quite so unique.
Nor has archaeology been stagnant in Palestine, though the disorders of 1936-1939 and the Second World War enormously slowed progress. Since the end of the war two very instructive digs have been initiated and carried out, one by Stekelis, Maisler, and Avi-Yonah at the great site of Beth-yerah (modem Khirbet Kerak) at the southwestern corner of the Sea of Galilee, the other by Roland de Vaux at the large mound of Tell el-Far’ah, perhaps the Tirzah of early Israelite history. These two excavations have definitely settled the succession of cultural phases in Palestine from about 3500 to about 2400 BCE. In those ages there were already flourishing towns and fortresses in Palestine, though there were frequent invasions and no city could hope to escape destruction under the most favorable conditions for more than two or three centuries.
In 1940 M. Georges Posener, an able young Jewish Egyptologist (since appointed professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France), published a very important group of hieratic Egyptian inscriptions on clay statuettes representing Asiatic prisoners. These documents carry us forward to early patriarchal Palestine, about 1800 BCE, and they give us the names of scores of tribes and towns, with their chieftains. Combined with some similar material which had been previously published and with the results of excavations in Palestine, they give us a clear historical picture of an age which seemed only a generation ago to be doomed to perpetual obscurity.
But the most important materials for the recovery of the history of Palestine and Syria during the age of the Patriarchs and Moses, it seems likely, will come from André Parrot’s sensational discovery of the great palace of the Amorite kings of Mari, on the Middle Euphrates, with some twenty thousand cuneiform tablets dating from the very heart of the Patriarchal Age, about 1750-1695 BCE. After several years of feverish study of these priceless archives, the war came and the tablets were removed to safer places for the duration. Three volumes of cuneiform texts have already been published. Since these documents swarm with personal names and other indications of the close linguistic and cultural kinship of the population of Mari to the Hebrews of Genesis, we await further publication and analysis of their contents with the greatest impatience.
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Nineteen years ago a remarkable discovery was made by French archaeologists on the coast of northern Syria. In 1929 C. F. A. Schaeffer and his colleagues, excavating the site of Ras Shamrah opposite the island of Cyprus, discovered clay tablets inscribed in a new cuneiform alphabet. Though previously quite unknown, this new script was deciphered within a few weeks of its first publication.
Hundreds of new documents were uncovered in the ten years following, nearly all of which have since been published. The most remarkable of them was a group of mythological epics and religious texts, dating from the beginning of the 14th century BCE. Their language—Ugaritic—is substantially identical with that of contemporary Canaan (Lebanon and Western Palestine); it thus closely resembles the language which must have been spoken by Moses a few generations later. The chief difference between it and Biblical Hebrew lies in its archaic flavor when compared to the classical language of pre-exilic Hebrew prose. On the other hand, there are astonishingly close parallels between Ugaritic and Hebrew poetry, especially the poems of early Israel.
In Psalm 92: 10, for example, we read:
For behold, thine enemies, O Lord,
For behold, thine enemies shall perish;
All doers of iniquity shall be scattered!
This appears in a Ugaritic episode of the combat of Baal with the sea dragon as:
Behold, thine enemies, O Baal
Behold, thine enemies shalt thou smite,
Behold, thou shalt destroy thy foes!
It will be noticed that the prosodic style is the same: three closely joined verse units of three word accents each; poetic parallelism modified by being distributed over three verse units instead of two, with a strong tendency to repeat words at the beginning of each unit. But there is an equally striking difference in the content of the two passages, besides the fact that the older Canaanite praises the storm-god Baal, head of a whole pantheon of deities, while the Hebrew psalm praises Yahweh, the only deity: in the third verse unit we find “doers of iniquity” substituted for “foes,” a verbal alteration which implies that men who do evil become automatically enemies of God, regardless of other considerations. This is not only a pronounced ethical advance over Canaanite mythology, but it illustrates the weakness of Mowinckel’s theory that the “doers of evil” mentioned so often in the Psalter are to be understood in the restricted sense of “magicians.”
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Two generations ago critical scholars of the Bible did not believe that any system of writing was employed by the Semites of Palestine and adjacent districts as early as the age of Moses. Then in 1887 came the discovery of the Amarna Tablets, a collection of letters written to the King of Egypt from Canaan, followed by additional tablets from various mounds of Palestine. These documents proved that Canaanite scribes learned both the complicated Babylonian cuneiform script and the Babylonian (Accadian) language in order to carry on correspondence as well as to keep accounts and record important business transactions. Some of the letters are written in virtually pure Canaanite, with Babylonian words inserted occasionally. All the Babylonian tablets so far found in Palestine date from between 1500 and 1300 BCE, but tablets from the 18th century BCE have already been excavated in Syria. After the Israelite invasion of Canaan, cuneiform disappeared from the country for centuries until it was brought back by Assyrian administrators in the seventh century BCE.
The Babylonian cuneiform system of writing was anything but easy for the Canaanite youth to master. In the first place he had to learn at least three hundred different characters, each one consisting of more or less complicated arrangements of wedges. Each of the characters might be either phonetic or ideographic, or it might be both; it might also possess several different phonetic values. Then the youth had to learn the Babylonian language, as different from Canaanite as French is from Spanish today, and acquire a smattering of Sumerian (the non-Semitic tongue of academic Babylonia), including many words and sign-groups or formulas. We can scarcely be surprised, then, to find ingenious Canaanites inventing new and simpler scripts in order to write their own tongues.
The first script to be invented, as far as we yet know, seems to have been the so-called enigmatic script of Byblus, first discovered on a stone slab which Maurice Dunand published in 1930. Dunand discovered ten additional inscriptions of the same type on stone and copper, which he published in 1945. Recently Edouard Dhorme has tried to decipher this new script, assuming with reason that the language must be an early form of Canaanite-Phoenician. But since there are some 114 different characters on the few known inscriptions and the entire number must have been at least 150, it is very questionable whether Dhorme’s impressive effort to read them is correct. This script was apparently in use from before 180000 down to after 1400 BCE; it was also employed by Semites in Egypt, as J. Leibovitch will soon demonstrate. However, it was too complex to stand its ground indefinitely or even to compete effectively with Babylonian cuneiform, and it was soon displaced by two consonantal alphabets.
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The first of these two consonantal alphabets was invented by the southern Canaanites, who were under strong Egyptian influence. Our knowledge of these alphabetic beginnings comes mainly from about thirty stone inscriptions found near the Egyptian turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadem in southern Sinai. The first of them were discovered by Sir Flinders Petrie in 905, and others have been added by the members of three Harvard and one Finnish expedition since that time.
During the writer’s visit to Egypt and Sinai this past winter he was able to study Serabit and its inscriptions, establishing a date for them in the 5th century BCE and working out a new decipherment. This decipherment is based on the brilliant discovery by Sir Alan Gardiner in 1915 that a number of the signs in this script could be plausibly identified with Hebrew letters by applying the acrophonic principle. In applying this principle, he noted a succession of signs which looked like objects (house-eye-“ox-goad”-cross) and gave each of them the value of the initial consonant of the Hebrew name of the object in question (which in these four cases was luckily also preserved as the Hebrew-Phoenician-Greek name of the letter): b(eth)—(ayin)—l(amed)—t(au) = B’lt, “Baalath,” the name of the lady of the gods in Canaanite polytheism.
Subsequent efforts to carry Gardiner’s decipherment further were almost total failures, because of the shortness of the inscriptions, and because the tentative dating of the fragments and interpretation of their purpose were incorrect, but especially because of our ignorance of the Canaanite language then spoken. Today, employing our new, greatly increased knowledge of the speech of Palestine and Syria in that period, it is not difficult to go ahead with the decipherment and to reach a point where we can propose reasonable translations of most of the inscriptions. Since these translations are not only in accord with the kind of thing we should expect at that time and place, but also yield a vocabulary and grammar which are absolutely normal for Northwest Semitic of the age in question, they offer a solid basis on which to proceed, though we badly need more documents. Excavation of all the turquoise mines at Serabit would unquestionably bring more to light.
At present our oldest completely intelligible inscriptions in this ancestral alphabet of ours come from Byblus (Hebrew Gebal) in Phoenicia and may be conservatively dated about 1000 BCE. Before this there are various groups of fragments, the earliest of which go back to between 1700 and 1550 BCE. Our ancestral alphabet was thus invented before the 16th century BCE by some Canaanite who imitated the forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs (but not their meaning), and devised the acrophonic system of consonantal values, again in imitation of a group of Egyptian uniconsonantal hieroglyphs.
Finally, in northern Canaan another inventive genius devised a consonantal alphabet composed of some twenty-nine simple arrangements of cuneiform wedges—the Ugaritic alphabet that we have already encountered. Two inscriptions in this alphabet have been discovered in Palestine in recent years; both show peculiar forms of several letters and run from right to left instead of from left to right like Babylonian cuneiform and normal Ugaritic. This alphabet was thus invented not later than the 15th century BCE and was in use until the 13th century, at least.
Thus the day when the age of Moses could be considered illiterate is definitely past. For it is certain that the Western Semites of the time of Moses or shortly before were accustomed to three entirely different native scripts, as well as to Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics (which were sparingly used by native scribes to write their own tongue). We can therefore no longer assume as a matter of course that the early parts of the Bible were transmitted orally for hundreds of years before being written down. Of course, it does not necessarily follow that the Mosaic Torah was written down by Moses in its extant form. That is a question for historical and philological criticism to answer—but to answer with caution and without antecedent prejudice.
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Up until the end of the First World War our knowledge of the chronology of Palestinian archaeology in the Israelite period (that is, in the Iron Age, between the twelfth and the sixth centuries BCE) was unbelievably chaotic. Between 1890 and 1921 there was no systematic excavation and no archaeological specialists who applied their knowledge to each new excavation, improving its chronology by use of its own intrinsic new evidence. Bit by bit since 1921 a solid chronology has been worked out, until we can now date practically any substantial collection of pottery, whole or broken, which belongs to one time (without spreading over too long a period) within half a century. Such sites as Megiddo and Samaria, Debir (Tell Beit Mirsim) and Beth-shemesh, all dug in whole or in part by Americans, have contributed most to the picture which now exists; a number of Palestinian Jewish archaeologists control the relevant pottery chronology very well indeed.
For later Israelite history, under the Judges, the United Monarchy of David and Solomon, and the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, perhaps the most important new finds have been building remains and art objects illustrating the reign of Solomon. There is, of course, scant hope of ever obtaining any direct traces of the Temple itself or of the other royal buildings in Jerusalem, described in Kings and Chronicles, since these structures have more than once been leveled to the native rock. Most striking of all Solomonic remains have been the Megiddo stables for royal chariot-horses, which were much better built than the average better-class residence of the time. At Ezion-geber on the Red Sea, Nelson Glueck excavated part of the royal copper refineries, which also went back to the age of Solomon. These refineries show an unexpectedly high development of metallurgical technique; in fact, though there can be no doubt whatever about the purpose of the complex installations, specialists are still unable to explain just how they were used. It would appear from the evidence of this site that the art of copper refining had developed far beyond what has been commonly supposed by historians of technology.
Our readers may be reminded that research on the lost Egyptian art of sawing granite blocks with copper saws is deadlocked at present, since no means of giving copper or bronze sufficient temper is known, and analyses of ancient Egyptian copper have failed to yield any clue. No trace of anything like a modem copper-beryllium alloy has been found, and it is exceedingly improbable that beryllium could have been known to the Egyptians. Nor is there any trace of true steel, which could also be used to cut granite, before the first century CE, when it is found at Pompeii.
The late pre-exilic period has been illuminated by many important finds, chief among which are the now well-known ostraca of Lachish—broken shards of pottery covered with letters and memoranda from the time of Jeremiah (beginning of the sixth century BCE). These documents, which number over a score in various states of preservation, are the only extensive body of contemporary writings in classical Hebrew known outside of the Hebrew Bible. They have considerable historical interest for the last days of the First Temple, and an even greater philological significance for the light they throw on Hebrew prose style, grammar, and spelling. While these documents are all in Hebrew, an Aramaic papyrus discovered at Saqqarah near Cairo in 1943 proves to contain a letter from an otherwise unknown Palestinian prince named Adon to some Pharaoh describing the advance of the conquering Babylonian army, perhaps in the year 603 BCE. This new document confirms a natural inference from the statement in II Kings 18: 26 (referring to events of 701 BCE) that Aramaic had become the diplomatic language of Palestine before the Exile.
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In addition to the famous Aramaic papyri from Elephantine, most of which were first published in 1911, there are a good many more Aramaic documents from Egypt which are soon to be published. Among them are fourteen leather rolls and fragments containing letters from Arsames, viceroy of the southwestern provinces of the Persian empire about 410 BCE, to officials in Egypt. These letters are of great value for the light they throw on conditions in the Persian Empire at the time of the Elephantine Papyri, as well as for the new evidence they furnish for the early date of the work of the biblical Chronicler. In 1944 eight Aramaic papyri were discovered near Hermopolis in Middle Egypt; they contain evidence that there was a large Semitic colony there in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Though this colony may have been in large part non-Jewish, the cult of the Queen of Heaven is mentioned in it, thus illustrating the insolent defiance of Jeremiah by the Jewish colonists in Upper Egypt (Jer. 44: 15 ff.) and their worship of this goddess. Incidentally, “Queen of Heaven” was apparently the title of the Canaanite goddess Astarte (Ashtaroth) in the Aramaic letter from about 603 BCE which was mentioned above. Several hundred Aramaic ostraca from Elephantine, discovered over forty years ago by Clermont-Ganneau, are soon to be published by Dupont-Sommer; these documents will throw a great deal of fresh light on the Jewish life of the fifth century BCE.
However, all these discoveries are overshadowed by the latest find, made a year ago by simple Bedouins. In a cave near the northern end of the Dead Sea these Arabs discovered some ten large parchment and leather rolls, four of which were purchased by the Syrian monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, while the rest were bought by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since their discovery was reported a few months ago by Professors E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University and Millar Burrows of Yale University, the principal facts have become known and preliminary descriptions have just been published. According to Sukenik, who is an eminent authority on the chronology of ancient writing, none of these documents can be later than the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The present writer has seen photographs of several of the rolls, and after studying them feels certain that at least two of the three rolls in the possession of the Syrian monks cannot be later than the end of the Maccabean period and the accession of Herod the Great (37 BCE). Their script is older than that of the Nash Papyrus, which can be shown to belong to the first century BCE, and it is entirely possible that the new rolls go back in part to the second century BCE. In that case they would be very little, if any, later than the time in which the latest parts of the Hebrew Bible were written. Only future work on the part of many scholars can establish the true dating, with the aid of still unpublished discoveries in Egypt and Syria.
The most striking single roll contains virtually the entire prophecy of Isaiah; it dates a good thousand years before the oldest Hebrew manuscript of Isaiah previously known. The text is nearly the same as that of the Massoretic Hebrew Bible (the traditional consonantal text of the Bible), but the spelling is very different and there are many new details which will compel some revision of our standard Hebrew grammars.
Other rolls contain portions of Biblical and apocryphal literature, all in Hebrew or Aramaic. It seems that these original Hebrew books resembling the books of the Apocrypha will compel a redating of some of the books already known from the period between the end of the Biblical canon and the age of the Tannaim (the time of the Mishnah). Most surprising in this connection is the discovery of books which appear to belong to a class of Hebrew sectarian literature hitherto illustrated by only one book, the so-called Zadokite document of the “covenant of Damascus,” which was discovered by Solomon Schechter in the Cairo Geniza about fifty years ago. Published in 1910, this work has been studied by many scholars, but generally dated much too late. Thus the late R. H. Charles dated it just before the Christian era, while C. C. Torrey places it in the first century CE. The new finds seem to push the original composition of this book back to the early first or even the second century BCE, in which case the Book of Jubilees, which is quoted by it, must go back a century or two before the late date (toward the end of the first century BCE) which is attributed to it by Torrey.
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It is obvious from these remarks that the new find will revolutionize our knowledge of the development of Jewish cultural and religious history during the Second Temple. The Age of the Maccabees, in particular, is likely to come into its own as one of the really creative periods of Jewish literary history. There has not been such an exciting time in Jewish studies since the first decades of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, over a century ago, before the importance of archaeology could have been realized by anyone.
In these days of crisis there is more need for a stabilizing intellectual life than ever, and this fact would seem to entail closer attention to what one can learn from the age-old experience of man. Only the thinker who knows both past and present and can interpret each in the light of the other can cope as thinker with the recurrent problems of mankind. Today more than ever the archaeologist seems warranted in believing that his branch of the humanities has an increasingly great role to play.
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