Page 5 - TORCH #18 - May 2021

cliff, adding additional challenges to the excavations.
to preserve them.
A testament to how effective the Dead
“The desert team showed exceptional courage, dedication and devotion to purpose, rappelling down to caves located between heaven and earth, digging and sifting through them, enduring thick and suffocating dust, and returning with gifts of immeasurable worth for mankind,” said Israel Antiquities Authority’s director Israel Hasson.
The cave is believed to be the site where Jewish insurgents hid during the Bar Kochba Revolt, a Jewish uprising against the Roman empire in AD 133-136. Based on archaeological digs above the cave,
it is understood there was a temporary Roman encampment located there that the Romans set up upon discovering
the location where the Jews were hiding. They eventually managed to get soldiers into the caves to
slaughter those inside.
It is possible, as was
the case in other caves,
that after killing those
inside, the soldiers then
searched through their
belongings and ripped
up the religious scrolls
in an apparent attempt
to erase the heritage
of those they had
slaughtered.
Little could those Roman soldiers have known that their attempts to destroy the Jews and their history would instead help preserve it.
You see, had the Romans never found the scrolls, they would have eventually been moved from the cave, degraded and then destroyed through the passage of time. Instead, the fragments remained inside the cave whose arid environment acted as a protective storage
Sea Scrolls were preserved is that they were 1,000 years older than any other known copies of Biblical text when they were discovered. Even now they remain the oldest Biblical texts on parchment in existence. Only two items containing Biblical text are known to be older.
Two metal canisters were unearthed in Jerusalem in the 1980s containing the priestly Benediction from Number 6:24-26 engraved on pieces of silver. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are full manuscripts and written on them are accurate translations to our Bibles today. Their existence revolutionised the understanding of our Judeo-Christian roots.
The latest parchment fragments discovered earlier this year contain segments from two Bible books, the minor
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