Major funding for "The Bible's Buried Secrets" is provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the Righteous Persons Foundation.





Additional funding for this program is provided by the Skirball Foundation and by The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation.

Not seeing video enhancements such as chapter navigation and caption controls? Visit this iTunes support page from Apple for a solution.

The Bible's Buried Secrets homepage | NOVA homepage

Transcript

NARRATOR: The experience of the exile transforms ancient Israelite cult into a modern religion. By compiling the stories of their past—originally written by the scribes J, E and D—the exodus from slavery to freedom, Moses and the Ten Commandments, Abraham's journey to the promised land, P creates what we know today as the first five books of the Bible.

Though this theory is widely accepted, physical evidence of any biblical text from the exile or earlier is hard to come by.

The most celebrated surviving biblical texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls. First discovered by accident, in 1947, the scrolls represent nearly all 39 books of the Hebrew Bible, at least in fragments. They survived because they were deposited in the perfect environment for preservation, the hot, dry desert. Archaeologists suspect there were at least hundreds more scrolls throughout Israel, but because they were written on papyrus or animal skins, they have long since decomposed.

JODI MAGNESS (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): Even though the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls date to the third and second centuries B.C., that doesn't mean that they're the first copies or examples of this work that were ever written. It means they already stand in a line of tradition that had been established by the time the scrolls were written.

NARRATOR: Still, the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls dates to at least 300 years after the Babylonian exile. In the absence of proof of earlier text, some scholars claim the entire Bible is pious fiction and even doubt whether Israel and the Israelites ever existed.

WILLIAM DEVER: For many of the revisionists, these extreme skeptics, there was no ancient Israel, Israel is an intellectual construct. In other words, these people were not rethinking their past, they were inventing their past. They had no past, so the Bible is a myth, a foundation myth, told to legitimate a people who had no legitimacy.

NARRATOR: The legitimacy of the Israelite past hinges on finding a piece of evidence to prove the ancient origins of the Bible.

What would be the discovery of a lifetime, starts outside the walls of Jerusalem, in an old cemetery.

GABRIEL BARKAY: We came here and excavated seven of these burial caves. The burial caves date back to the seventh century B.C., somewhere around the time of King Josiah. But the caves were found looted, so we didn't anticipate too much.

NARRATOR: Gabriel Barkay instructed a 13-year-old volunteer to clean up a tomb for photographs.

GABRIEL BARKAY: Instead of that, he was bored, he was alone, and he had a hammer, and he began banging on the floor.

NARRATOR: But the floor turned out to be a fallen ceiling, and beneath it were some artifacts that had escaped the looters.

Among the hundreds of grave goods, one artifact stood out.

GABRIEL BARKAY: It looked like a cigarette butt. It was cylindrical, about an inch in size, about half an inch in diameter, and it was very clear it is made of silver. It was some kind of a tiny scroll.

NARRATOR: A second, slightly smaller scroll was also found and both were taken to the labs at the Israel Museum. But unraveling the scrolls to see if they contain a readable inscription could risk destroying them completely.

Andy Vaughn was one of the epigraphers on the project.

ANDREW G. VAUGHN (American Schools of Oriental Research): Archaeology is basically a destructive science. In order to learn anything, you have to destroy what's there. Gabriel Barkay and his team had to make a decision: does one unroll these amulets or does one preserve them? They decided that it was worth the risk, and hindsight would tell us that they could not have been more correct.

NARRATOR: Through painstaking conservation, technicians devised a special method for unrolling the scrolls and revealing their contents.

GABRIEL BARKAY: I went over there, and I was amazed to see the whole thing full of very delicately scratched, very shallow characters.

The first word that I could decipher already, on the spot, was YHWH, which is the four-letter, unpronounceable name of God.

NARRATOR: Further investigation revealed more text and a surprisingly familiar prayer, still said in synagogues and churches to this day.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Numbers 6:24–26): May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

ANDY VAUGHN: There is no doubt at all that these two amulets contain the Priestly Benediction found in Numbers, 6. These inscriptions are thus very important because they are the earliest references we have to the written biblical narratives.

GABRIEL BARKAY: The archaeological context was very clear, because it was found together with pottery dating back to the seventh century B.C. Also, the paleography, the shape of letters, points towards somewhere in the seventh century B.C., beyond any doubt.

NARRATOR: The silver scrolls with the Priestly Benediction predate the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls by 400 years. It is an amazing find, proving that at least some verses of the Bible were written in ancient times, during the reign of King David's descendents.

By giving us text from before the Babylonian exile, the silver scrolls confirm that the Hebrew Bible is created from poetry, oral traditions and prayers that go back to the time of Josiah's D writer and likely beyond, to writers E and J.

As modern scholars suspect, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, takes its final form during the Babylonian exile. But dwarfed by the mighty temples and giant statues of Babylonian gods, the Israelites must also confront the fundamental question: why did their God, Yahweh, forsake them?