THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 28, 2004
Solving a Riddle Written in Silver
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

The words are among the most familiar and ecumenical in the liturgies of
Judaism and Christianity. At the close of a worship service, the rabbi,
priest or pastor delivers, with only slight variations, the comforting and
fortifying benediction:

"May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine
upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon
you and grant you peace."

An archaeological discovery in 1979 revealed that the Priestly Benediction,
as the verse from Numbers 6:24-26 is called, appeared to be the earliest
biblical passage ever found in ancient artifacts. Two tiny strips of
silver, each wound tightly like a miniature scroll and bearing the
inscribed words, were uncovered in a tomb outside Jerusalem and initially
dated from the late seventh or early sixth century B.C. - some 400 years
before the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

But doubts persisted. The silver was cracked and corroded, and many words
and not a few whole lines in the faintly scratched inscriptions were
unreadable. Some critics contended that the artifacts were from the third
or second century B.C., and thus of less importance in establishing the
antiquity of religious concepts and language that became part of the Hebrew
Bible.

So researchers at the University of Southern California have now
re-examined the inscriptions using new photographic and computer imaging
techniques. The words still do not exactly leap off the silver. But the
researchers said they could finally be "read fully and analyzed with far
greater precision," and that they were indeed the earliest.

In a scholarly report published this month, the research team concluded
that the improved reading of the inscriptions confirmed their greater
antiquity. The script, the team wrote, is indeed from the period just
before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar and the
subsequent exile of Israelites in Babylonia.

The researchers further reaffirmed that the scrolls "preserve the earliest
known citations of texts also found in the Hebrew Bible and that they
provide us with the earliest examples of confessional statements concerning
Yahweh."

Some of the previously unreadable lines seemed to remove any doubt about
the purpose of the silver scrolls: they were amulets. Unrolled, one amulet
is nearly four inches long and an inch wide and the other an inch and a
half long and about half an inch wide. The inscribed words, the researchers
said, were "intended to provide a blessing that will be used to protect the
wearer from some manner of evil forces."

The report in The Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research was
written by Dr. Gabriel Barkay, the archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University in
Israel who discovered the artifacts, and collaborators associated with
Southern California's West Semitic Research Project. The project leader is
Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, a professor of Semitic languages at U.S.C., who worked
with Dr. Marilyn J. Lundberg, a Hebrew Bible specialist with the project,
and Dr. Andrew G. Vaughn, a biblical historian at Gustavus Adolphus College
in St. Peter, Minn.

A companion article for next month's issue of the magazine Near Eastern
Archaeology describes the new technology used in the research. The article
is by the same authors, as well as Kenneth Zuckerman, Dr. Zuckerman's
brother and a specialist in photographing ancient documents.

Other scholars not affiliated with the research but familiar with it agreed
with the group's conclusions.

They said it was a relief to have the antiquity and authenticity of the
artifacts confirmed, considering that other inscriptions from biblical
times have suffered from their uncertain provenance.

Scholars also noted that early Hebrew inscriptions were a rarity, and
called the work on the amulets a significant contribution to an
understanding of the history of religion in ancient Israel, particularly
the time of the Judean Monarchy 2,600 years ago.

"These photographs are far superior to what you can see looking at the
inscriptions with the naked eye," said Dr. Wayne Pitard, professor of the
Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions at the University of
Illinois.

Dr. Pitard said the evidence for the antiquity of the benediction was now
compelling, although this did not necessarily mean that the Book of Numbers
already existed at that time. Possibly it did, he added, but if not, at
least some elements of the book were current before the Babylonian exile.

A part of the sacred Torah of Judaism (the first five books of the Bible),
Numbers includes a narrative of the Israelite wanderings from Mount Sinai
to the east side of the Jordan River. Some scholars think the Torah was
compiled in the time of the exile. A number of other scholars, the
so-called minimalists, who are influential mainly in Europe, argue that the
Bible was a relatively recent invention by those who took control of Judea
in the late fourth century B.C. In this view, the early books of the Bible
were largely fictional to give the new rulers a place in the country's
history and thus a claim to the land.

"The new research on the inscriptions suggests that that's not true," Dr.
Pitard said. In fact, the research team noted in its journal report that
the improved images showed the seventh-century lines of the benediction to
be "actually closer to the biblical parallels than previously recognized."

Dr. P. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in ancient
Semitic scripts, said the research should "settle any controversy over
these inscriptions."

A close study, Dr. McCarter said, showed that the handwriting is an early
style of Hebrew script and the letters are from an old Hebrew alphabet,
which had all but ceased to be used after the destruction of Jerusalem.
Later Hebrew writing usually adopted the Aramaic alphabet.

There was an exception in the time of Roman rule, around the first
centuries B.C. and A.D. The archaic Hebrew script and letters were revived
and used widely in documents. But Dr. McCarter noted telling attributes of
the strokes of the letters and the spelling on the amulets that, he said,
ruled out the more recent date for the inscriptions. Words in the revived
Hebrew writing would have included letters indicating vowel sounds. The
benediction, the scholar said, was written in words spelled entirely with
consonants, the authentic archaic way.

The two silver scrolls were found in 1979 deep inside a burial cave in a
hillside known as Ketef Hinnom, west of the Old City of Jerusalem. Dr.
Barkay, documenting the context of the discovery, noted that the artifacts
were at the back of the tomb embedded in pottery and other material from
the seventh or sixth centuries B.C. Such caves were reused for burials over
many centuries. Near this tomb's entrance were artifacts from the fourth
century, but nothing so recent remains in the undisturbed recesses.

It took Dr. Barkay another seven years before he felt sure enough of what
he had to announce details of the discovery. Even then, for all their
microscopic examination of the inscriptions at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem, scholars remained frustrated by the many unreadable words and
lines.

About a decade ago, Dr. Barkay enlisted the help of Dr. Zuckerman, whose
team had earned a reputation for achieving the near-impossible in
photographing illegible ancient documents.

Working with scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr.
Zuckerman's group used advanced infrared imagining systems enhanced by
electronic cameras and computer image-processing technology to draw out
previously invisible writing on a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The
researchers also pioneered electronic techniques for reproducing missing
pieces of letters on documents. By examining similar letters elsewhere in
the text, they were able to recognize half of a letter and reconstruct the
rest of it in a scribe's own peculiar style.

"We learned a lot from work on the Dead Sea Scrolls," Dr. Zuckerman said.
"But at first a processing job like this would send your computers into
cardiac arrest. We had to wait for computer technology to catch up with our
needs."

As the researchers said in their magazine article, the only reasonably
clear aspect of the inscriptions was the Priestly Benediction. Other lines
preceding or following the prayer "could barely be seen."

To get higher-definition photographs of the inscriptions, Ken Zuckerman
applied an old photographer's technique called "light painting," brought up
to date by the use of fiber-optic technology. He used a hand-held light in
an otherwise dark room to illuminate a spot on the artifact during a time
exposure. In addition, he photographed the artifact at different angles,
which made the scratched letters shine in stark relief.

The next step was to convert the pictures to digital form, making possible
computer processing that brought out "the subtleties of the surface almost
at the micron level." This analysis was particularly successful in joining
a partial letter stroke on one side of a crack with the rest of the stroke
on the other side. It also enabled the researchers to restore fragments of
letters to full legibility by matching them with clear letters from
elsewhere in the text.

In this way, the researchers filled in more of the letters and words of the
benediction itself and for the first time deciphered meaningful words and
phrases in the lines preceding the benediction.

Scholars were particularly intrigued by a statement on the smaller
artifact. It reads: "May h[e]/sh[e] be blessed by YHWH, the warrior/helper,
and the rebuker of Evil."

Referring to God, Yahweh, as the "rebuker of Evil" is similar to language
used in the Bible and in various Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars said. The
phraseology is also found in later incantations and amulets associated with
Israel, evidence that these artifacts were also amulets, researchers
concluded.

"In the ancient world, amulets were taken quite seriously," Dr. Zuckerman
said. "There's evil out there, demons, and you need protection. Having this
around your neck, you are involving God's presence and protection against
harm."

Dr. Esther Eshel, a professor of the Bible at Bar-Ilan and an authority on
Hebrew inscriptions, said this was the earliest example of amulets from
Israel. But she noted that the language of the benediction was similar to a
blessing ("May he bless you and keep you") found on a jar from the eighth
century B.C.

If the new findings are correct, the people who wore these amulets may have
died before they had to face the limitations of their efficacy. They might
then have asked in uncomprehending despair, "Where was Yahweh when the
Babylonians swooped down on Jerusalem?"

Other scholars, including those previously skeptical, will soon be
analyzing the improved images. In a departure from usual practices, the
researchers not only published their findings in a standard print version
in a journal but also as an accompanying "digital article," a CD version of
the article and the images to allow scholars to examine and manipulate the
data themselves.

The research group said, "As far as we are aware, this is the first article
to be done in this fashion, but it certainly will not be the last."