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A notorious forgery vindicated at last? Plus, fresh fragments from Israel’s ‘Cave of Horror’
THE SHAPIRA SCRIPTS
In 1883, Jerusalem antiquities collector and dealer Moses Willhelm Shapira announced to the world that 15 leather strips bearing an ancient text had been discovered somewhere in a cave near the Dead Sea, which, he claimed, contained fragments of the Book of Deuteronomy. Shapira was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Russian-annexed Poland in 1830. He later converted to Christianity and applied for German citizenship, opening a shop in Jerusalem and becoming a pre-eminent antiquities dealer, selling some genuine and some faked pieces to European collectors and national museums.
The palaeo-Hebrew script on the leather manuscripts was nearly illegible as they had been blackened with a pitch-like substance, but Shapira claimed they constituted the ‘original’ book of Deuteronomy – and even suggested that it might have been the copy owned by Moses. He sold the 15 pieces to the British Museum for the then-enormous sum of £1 million; two of them went on display and attracted large numbers of visitors, including Prime Minister William
Shapira claimed it might have been the copy owned by Moses
Gladstone. But French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau, a long-time nemesis of Shapira’s, was briefly permitted to examine several of the fragments. He promptly declared them to be forgeries, the British Museum’s expert agreed, and a distraught Shapira fled London, committing suicide six months later in a Netherlands hotel room. Two years later, the museum sold the fragments for just £25 to a private collector.
However, Shapira may have been vindicated at last. A new study (and accompanying book) by Israeli-American scholar Idan Dershowitz, of Germany’s University of Potsdam, has analysed archival, linguistic and literary evidence and concludes that the pieces were a genuinely ancient artefact. Dershowitz reconstructed the text from the original 19th century transcriptions and drawings, and claims the text dates back to around 957 BC. This was the time of the First Temple, built during King Solomon’s reign, and pre-dates the Babylonian Exile, which would make the Shapira scripts the oldest known biblical artefacts ever discovered.
The text follows Deuteronomy, but with a few differences; there are no laws apart from the Ten Commandments and more of a historical narrative with Moses talking to the Israelites. University of Texas linguist Dr Na’ama Pat-El has studied the text and is working on a lexicon and syntax with Dershowitz. She said it is pretty standard biblical Hebrew, similar to the seventh or sixth century texts, with some features similar to those seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Shimon Gesundheit of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has also examined the text, and said the Shapira version reads “smoother” and looks more original than the Book of Deuteronomy itself, adding that the laws in Deuteronomy “interrupt the narrative flow between the beginning and the end”. The Ten Commandments in the Shapira version differ, as they are declared in the first person – as if from God – rather than the third person. He also pointed out that because the Shapira text doesn’t contain the divine laws, then it would, if genuine, probably be older than Deuteronomy, since it’s “hard to believe somebody would delete them.”
Although the current location of the manuscript is unknown, Dershowitz is hopeful that some fragments may have survived and could one day resurface, allowing scholars to read a true biblical fragment. He believes the dismissal of the manuscripts as a fake 140 years ago was a tragedy for both Shapira and for the “entire existence of the discipline of Bible studies”. In a New York Times interview, he described travelling the world investigating the validity of the scroll, including reading through Shapira’s manuscripts in Berlin, where he discovered handwritten sheets that showed how the collector had attempted to decipher the fragments. “If he forged them, or was part of a conspiracy, it makes no sense that he’d be sitting there trying to guess what the text is, and making mistakes while he did it.”
Dershowitz added: “It’s mindboggling that for almost the entire existence of the discipline of Bible studies this text hasn’t been part of the conversation.” Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls after WWII, which date to about the second century BC, the earliest bible manuscript was from the 10th century AD. New York Times, D. Mail, 10 Mar 2021. ‘The Valediction of Moses: New Evidence on the Shapira
Deuteronomy Fragments’ by Idan Dershowitz, in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 133(1): 1–22 (2021).
CAVE OF HORROR
New texts believed to be related to the Dead Sea Scrolls have been unearthed by Israeli archaeologists in the so-called ‘Cave of Horror’ at Nahal Hever in the occupied West Bank. More than 20 fragments of 2,000-yearold biblical texts have been discovered. They are believed to have been hidden during the Bar Kochba revolt, an armed Jewish uprising against Rome during the reign of Emperor Hadrian between AD 132 and 136. The fragments bear Greek translations from the Old Testament Books of Zechariah and Nahum, with only the name of God written in Hebrew. The pieces have been carbon dated to the 2nd century AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in desert caves in the West Bank near Qumran, not far from Nahal Hever. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has been trying to salvage artefacts from the Judaean Desert since 2017 because of looting that began when the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouin shepherds in the 1940s.
“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 Hasson, the IAA’s director. The ‘Cave of Horror’ is “flanked by gorges and can only be reached by rappelling precariously down the sheer cliff.” The cave’s name is derived from the 40 human skeletons found there during excavations in the 1960s. Alongside the manuscript fragments, the archaeologists also found the 6,000-year-old skeleton of a child mummified in a piece of cloth and a large woven basket, dated to 9,500 BC. Experts believe it could be the oldest complete basket in the world. A CT scan conducted on the skeleton by the Tel Aviv University School of Medicine established the child to have been between six and 12 years old when it died. “Due to the arid conditions in the cave, the child was naturally mummified. The cloth and other organic materials, including hair and even skin and tendons, were likewise preserved,” an IAA spokesperson said. D.Telegraph, 16 Mar 2021.
‘The Valediction of Moses: New Evidence on the Shapira Deuteronomy Fragments’ by Idan Dershowitz, in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 133(1): 1–22 (2021).