Israel Museum Displays Rare Manuscript
Pastor Dale Morgan
Jun 4, 4:21 PM EDT
*Israel Museum Displays Rare Manuscript*
By BEN HUBBARD
Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM (AP) -- A rare Old Testament manuscript some 1,300 years old
is finally on display for the first time, after making its way from a
secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American collector.
The manuscript, containing the "Song of the Sea" section of the Old
Testament's Book of Exodus and dating to around the 7th century A.D.,
comes from what scholars call the "silent era" - a span of 600 years
between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebrew
manuscripts survive.
It is now on public display for the first time, at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem.
"It comes from a period of almost darkness in terms of Hebrew
manuscripts," said Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar at the University of
the Holy Land in Jerusalem. Scholars have long noted the lack of
original biblical manuscripts written between the time of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, the latest of which come from the third century, to texts
written in the ninth and 10th centuries, Pfann said.
Scholars can only piece together scraps of information on the period
using translations into Greek and other languages, he said, "so to have
a piece of the original text from this period is quite remarkable."
The parchment is believed to have been left in the Cairo Genizah, a vast
depository of medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in the late 1800s
in a previously unknown room at Cairo's ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue. It
was in private hands until the late 1970s, when its Lebanese-born
American owner turned it over to the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and
Special Collections Library at Duke University.
The manuscript is now on extended loan to the Israel Museum and is on
display in the museum's Shrine of the Book, which also houses the Dead
Sea Scrolls.