Past lives on
Dead Sea Scroll pieces with biblical text found in cave
JERUSALEM — Israeli archeologists announced Tuesday the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments bearing a biblical text found in a desert cave and believed hidden during a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly 1,900 years ago.
The fragments of parchment bear lines of Greek text from the books of Zechariah and Nahum and have been dated around the first century based on the writing style, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. They are the first new scrolls found in archeological excavations in the desert south of Jerusalem in 60 years.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish texts found in desert caves in the West Bank near Qumran in the 1940s and 1950s, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. They include the earliest known copies of biblical texts and documents outlining the beliefs of a little understood Jewish sect.
The roughly 80 new pieces are believed to belong to a set of parchment fragments found in a site in southern Israel known as the
“Cave of Horror” — named for the 40 human skeletons found there during excavations in the 1960s — that also bear a Greek rendition of the Twelve Minor Prophets, a book in the Hebrew Bible. The cave is located in a remote canyon around 25 miles south of Jerusalem.
The artifacts were found during an operation in Israel and the occupied West Bank conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority to find scrolls and other artifacts to prevent possible plundering. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, and international law prohibits the removal of cultural property from occupied territory. The authority held a news conference Tuesday to unveil the discovery.
The fragments are believed to have been part of a scroll stashed away in the cave during the Bar Kochba Revolt, an armed Jewish uprising against Rome during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, between A.D. 132 and 136. Coins struck by rebels and arrowheads found in other caves in the region also hail from that period.
“We found a textual difference that has no parallel with any other manuscript, either in Hebrew or in Greek,” said Oren Ableman, a Dead Sea Scroll researcher with the antiquities authority.
He referred to slight variations in the
Greek rendering of the Hebrew original compared to the Septuagint — a translation of the Hebrew Bible to Greek made in Egypt in the third and second centuries B.C.
“When we think about the biblical text, we think about something very static. It wasn’t static. There are slight differences, and some of those differences are important,” said Joe Uziel, head of the antiquities authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls unit. “Every little piece of information that we can add, we can understand a little bit better” how the biblical text came into its traditional Hebrew form.
Alongside the Roman-era artifacts, the exhibit included far older discoveries of no lesser importance found during its sweep of more than 500 caves in the desert: the 6,000-year-old mummified skeleton of a child, an immense, complete woven basket from the Neolithic period, estimated to be 10,500 years old, and scores of other delicate organic materials preserved in caves’ arid climate.
In 1961, Israeli archeologist Yohanan Aharoni excavated the “Cave of Horror” and his team found nine parchment fragments belonging to a scroll with texts from the Twelve Minor Prophets in Greek, and a scrap of Greek papyrus. Since then, no new texts have been found during archeological excavations, but many have turned up on the black market, apparently plundered from caves.
For the past four years, Israeli archeologists have launched a major campaign to scour caves nestled in the precipitous canyons of the Judean Desert in search of scrolls and other rare artifacts. The aim is to find them before plunderers disturb the remote sites, destroying archeological strata and data.
Twenty NYPD cops have substantiated misconduct accusations against them for their actions at protests following the death of George Floyd last year, the head of the Civilian Complain Review Board said at a City Council hearing Tuesday.
The CCRB recommended departmental charges in two cases and commanded discipline — the loss of up to 10 vacation days — in 12 other cases, agency Chairman Fred Davie testified.
The watchdog group upheld complaints against 20 officers — alleging everything from using or threatening excessive force, giving misleading statements to investigators, making offensive gestures to failing to identify themselves by name or shield number.
Twenty-three other cases were closed without punishment. Among those, five cops were exonerated and six others were unsubstantiated. The other 12 include nine where the officers could not be identified, two in which the allegations were unfounded and one for an unspecified reason.
The 185 open cases include 75 in which the accused officers have not yet been interviewed, Davie said.
Davie pinned the delays on the challenges of working remotely — and on the NYPD. In some cases, the department couldn’t quickly identify which officers were assigned where, he said. Other cops covered their shields, wore equipment marked with the names of other officers, didn’t turn on their body cameras properly or didn’t fully or correctly fill out their paperwork.
The NYPD has been widely criticized for how it handled the dozens of demonstrations.
State Attorney General Letitia James has sued the department, accusing its leadership over its “excessive, brutal and unlawful” handling of the protests. The city’s Department of Investigation reported that police brass were unprepared and that cops escalated tensions by using excessive force. Nearly 450 demonstrators are suing the NYPD.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea has agreed with some of the criticism and noted that a number of officers are being investigated by Internal Affairs. But he said police overwhelmingly conducted
themselves professionally and that several hundred cops were hurt, many attacked, and dozens of police cars were vandalized.
The new NYPD budget was the subject of the City Council hearing, but it was dominated by talk about various reforms being proposed as part of a mandate from Albany. Police Commissioner Dermot Shea sharply disagreed with a contention that cops staged a slowdown last summer in the wake of the calls to defund the police.
“Are we going to admit that today?” said City Council Public Safety Committee Chairwoman Adrienne Adams (D-Queens). “To me, it was very obvious. It was spoken of and mentioned of in the ranks...”
Adams also said that she heard from constituents that any complaints made to cops were often met with a sharp, “Call your Council member.”
Shea said the opposite was true, that even with up to 20% of the rank and file out sick with COVID-19, and the department’s resources further taxed by protest assignments, police never let up.
“The cops never, never, never stopped working,” he said. “They were shot at during that time period. They were making gun arrests during that period. There was no slowdown.”
Arrests did drop dramatically last year but police have said there were other factors — more people wearing masks, making them less recognizable on surveillance video; fewer people on the street, and sharp drops in some crimes.
Like the Kraken in “Clash of the Titans,” “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” has been released. It premieres March 18 on HBO Max, all four hours and two minutes of it.
I’d love to say it isn’t half-bad, but I can’t, because it is. It’s roughly 50% bad.
The other 50% is better than that, even with a running time that threatens to never stop. Director Snyder has managed to will into existence an improvement, and a crushingly solemn, occasionally moving expansion, on the 2017 “Justice League,” which had nowhere to go but up.
Score one for the rabid #ReleaseTheSnyderCut folks: They essentially bullied Warner Bros. into putting up $70 million for Snyder to return to his unused footage, reshoot a bit (Jared Leto as the Joker pops up, ineffectually, for the coda), rearrange the storylines and reedit the whole schmegegge as “Zack Snyder’s Justice League.”
The earlier, two-hour “Justice League” was rewritten and directed, uncredited, by Joss Whedon, after a sudden death in the family took Snyder and his wife, executive producer Deborah
Snyder, out of the project. This new version feels like a sincere, half-mad experiment, made by a director processing long-form grief. No longer does it play like a franchise movie made entirely by machine learning.
We begin in mourning and we stay there. Earth has lost its way after the death of Superman, an event depicted in Snyder’s 2016 “Batman v Superman: Dawn of
Justice.” Weighed down by guilt and Ben Affleck’s stubble, Bruce Wayne/Batman has a job to do. The villain du jour is Steppenwolf (voice by Ciaran Hinds, character design inspired by DC Comics, contemporary resonance thanks to Jacob Chansley, the man who stormed the U.S. Capitol in horns). If Steppenwolf manages to secure all three glowing “memory boxes,” the DC world’s answer to Marvel’s Infinity Stones or a cosmic amplifier that goes to 11, then he and his ilk acquire complete control over the universe. It’s basically a fight to see who gets to use the universal remote.
What to do? Batman must venture out of his protective emotional shell and find some pals, with the help of manservant Alfred (Jeremy Irons, whose superpower is the precise calibration of his … exquisitely timed … pauses). He must assemble a Justice League to vanquish the fiendish winged alien invaders reporting directly to Steppenwolf, who reports directly to Darkseid, clearly an alum of the same military boarding school attended by Thanos of “Avengers: Endgame.” Like his earthbound adversaries, Steppenwolf struggles with insecurity and a longing to prove himself, while periodically uttering such pearls as “I will bathe in your fear” and my favorite: “So begins the end,” spoken an hour and 11 minutes before the end.
Bruce’s boutique collection includes Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher), all of whom now receive a full complement of backstories and a fair share of semicoherent battle scenes. “Zack
Synder’s Justice League,” working from a screenplay (and lots of it) by Chris Terrio, still clunks from generic mayhem to generic mayhem, on land, under water, on the magical isle of Themyscira, and inside a radioactive Soviet-era power plant. But now, at least, the pacing feels intentional.
This movie doesn’t really care about story, which explains why “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” is a four-hour story about a guy looking for a box. Much of the action unfolds in wildly overindulged super-slow motion. The film is driven by what are intended to be trancelike states of wonder and awe. Yet the tonal swings, in both versions of “Justice League,” undercut the seriousness.
Anyone who’s been waiting for this “Justice League” do-over for literal years knew, roughly, what they’d be getting: an endurance test, of which die-hard DC fans will love every last eternal minute.