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The oldest Bible words we possess are a blessing on silver
Did you know the oldest surviving words also found in the Bible are not in a book at all, but on two tiny silver scrolls?
In 1979, an archaeologist named Gabriel Barkay was excavating burial caves at Ketef Hinnom, on a slope southwest of Jerusalem's Old City, when his team found two rolled strips of silver, each small enough to hide in a closed hand. They had been worn as amulets. Unrolled, painstakingly, they revealed scratched Hebrew letters — and words almost any reader would recognize: "Yahweh bless you, and keep you. Yahweh make his face to shine on you."
It is the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26. Most scholars date the amulets to around 600 BCE, just before Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, which makes them centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. A minority argues for a later date, and the scholars who study them are careful to say what the amulets are and are not: not a Bible manuscript, but the Bible's words, worn against the skin by someone who died wanting a blessing to travel with them.
Every later copy of these words was made by scribes preserving a book. These two were made for one person, for one grave, for keeps.
Where to see it: the Ketef Hinnom amulets are displayed in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Read Numbers 6:24-26, then imagine the words at one-tenth the size, in silver, rolled tight.
Sources
- The Ketef Hinnom amuletsIsrael Museum; the ~600 BCE dating is the majority view, with a minority arguing later
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