Spring 2007 | Volume 65, No. 3

Respected archaeologist recounts discovery of oldest Bible text

More than 200 people packed the Williamsburg Banquet Room on a chilly Monday evening to hear a lecture by world renown biblical archaeologist Gabriel “Gaby” Barkay Feb. 5. Barkay’s lecture was sponsored by the seminary’s Charles C. Tandy Archaeological Museum. He was introduced by Steven Ortiz, associate professor of archaeology and biblical backgrounds and the museum’s director.
Barkay took the audience on a journey beginning in Jerusalem in the 1970s. He showed slides of St. Andrews Church of Scotland, built on a rocky knoll on the Valley of Hinnom (Ketef Hinnom) within view of Old Jerusalem. It was on the grounds of that church, which was erected in 1927, where Barkay oversaw an archaeological dig in the mid- to late-1970s.

In his lecture, Barkay described how in 1979 a group of 12-year-olds from an archaeology club in Tel Aviv had come to the dig. Barkay thought the children were “pesky.” One in particular, a boy named Nathan, was always “tugging on my shirt and asking silly questions,” Barkay said.

Barkay assigned Nathan to a far-off, unimportant task: clearing out an ancient repository cave to prepare it for being photographed. Nathan took to the task with a hammer, and “expressed his frustration by hammering the floor of the repository.” Barkay recalled being quite perturbed when young Nathan, who had not been on task for much time at all, tugged on this shirt to tell the archaeologist that the hammer had broken throught he floor of the cave and there was something below.

Barkay realized that what he had thought was the floor of the chamber was, in fact, the ceiling of another ancient chamber underneath. Below was a repository containing a large quantity of intact vessels dating from the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries B.C., Barkay said. Among the artifacts from the newly-discovered repository was a small cylinder Barkay described as “the size of a cigarette butt.” It was an amulet designed to be worn on an arm or forehead in literal obedience to Deuteronomy 6:8, an ancient precursor to what are today known as phylacteries.

“Inside [the amulet] we found a tiny, silver scroll, which took us three years to unroll,” Barkay said. “The scroll yielded 19 lines of minuscule writing … in ancient Hebrew script.”

The tiny scrolls contained the earliest written example of the Aaronian benediction recorded in Numbers 6:24-26: “The LORD bless you, and keep you; the LORD make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up His countenance on you, and give you peace.”

“This text predates the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls by four centuries,” Barkay said in reference to the importance of the silver scrolls. “They are the oldest biblical verses identified in the world.”

“This was our first archaeology lecture and we were expecting a small crowd , so we were pleasantly surprised to be scrambling to add chairs to the overflowing lecture hall,” Ortiz said after the event. “I was pleased to see several in attendance from the Fort Worth community. It is my goal to develop a lecture series that brings in top archaeologists for our students and also serves the community of Fort Worth and the greater Metroplex area.”