1700yr old Biblical Scrolls charred by fire. But new technology has revealed the writings!

[Beggar for the Spirit]

AND there is something even more amazing than the new technology that was able to scan and accurately read the burned scrolls!

What was discovered when they compared these scrolls to such famous Bible manuscripts like the Masoretic Text?

 

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The En-Gedi scroll was a lump of crumbling coal for over 1,700 years, but a new technique "unwrapped" it.

 

When the En-Gedi scrolls were excavated from an ancient synagogue's Holy Ark in the 1970s, it was a bittersweet discovery for archaeologists. Though the texts provided further evidence for an ancient Jewish community in this oasis near the Dead Sea, the scrolls had been reduced to charred lumps by fire. Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to "unwrap" a parchment that's more than 1,700 years old.

 

Historical significance

Once Seales and his team had this visualization, they still weren't sure what they had. None of them read Hebrew, so they waited with some excitement while Shor and her colleagues analyzed the text. It turned out that the scroll contained the first two chapters of Leviticus, which coincidentally deal with burnt offerings. What's incredible about these chapters, according to archaeologist Emanuel Tov, is that they are virtually identical to medieval Masoretic Text, written hundreds of years later. The En-Gedi scroll even duplicates the exact paragraph breaks seen later in the medieval Hebrew. The only difference between the two is that ancient Hebrew had no vowels, so these were added in the Middle Ages.

 

Tov called it "100 percent identical with the medieval texts, both in its consonants and in its paragraph divisions." He added, "The same central stream of Judaism that used this Levitical scroll in one of the early centuries of our era was to continue using it until the late Middle Ages when printing was invented... the scroll brings the good news that the ancient source of the medieval text did not change for 2,000 years." In other words, the Jewish community managed to retain some of the exact wording in passages from their biblical texts over centuries, despite massive cultural upheavals and changes to their languages.

 

Archaeologist Michael Segal said the En-Gedi scroll "teaches us that the [biblical] text that we have that is used today as the traditional text is a very ancient text in all of its details." He cautioned that of course only the consonants are the same, and we have yet to read the rest of the En-Gedi scrolls. Still, this scroll provides strong evidence that today's Tanakh "already existed in a standardized form in the first century C.E."

 

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/scholars-use-x-rays-to-read-ancient-biblical-text-for-the-first-time/

 

Edited September 22, 2016 by Beggar for the Spirit

[Semer]

Thank you, really interesting stuff.

[GStorrs46]

Neil,

 

    It is a pleasure to respond to one of your posts after so long a time.

How are you doing? Are you well ? That was a very interesting piece

on these 1700 year old scrolls found at En-Gedi. Where is that in re-

lation to where they found the original Dead Sea Scrolls ? While ap-

parently about 500 years younger than the Dead Sea Scrolls (circa

300 c.e. ) They demonstrate the same point we have often used the

Dead Sea Scrolls to prove.That Jehovah has preserved the accuracy

of his Word. What other book can make such a claim ? Thank you

for sharing some of this research into the textual accuracy of the

Bible,

 

P.S. When you get some time give me a shout so we can get caught

up.

 

GStorr46