Biblical Treasure Found in Desert

[CyberGuy]

Biblical Treasure Found in Desert

It has all the makings of a movie: A secret desert encounter. A robber. The black market. An ancient Biblical scroll. But it's real.

Archaeologist Chanan Eshel, who works as a professor at Tel Aviv's Bar Ilan University in Israel, had a secret encounter with a Bedouin in 2004 in an abandoned police station a desert valley near the Dead Sea. The Bedouin showed Eshel a 2,000-year-old treasure: An inscription from the Old Testament Book of Leviticus on two small pieces of brown animal skin.

The parchment was from one of the caves in a canyon near the Dead Sea called Nachal Arugot where Jews hid from the Romans in the second century, report The Associated Press and The Jerusalem Post. This is the first such find since 1965 when the last of the Dead Sea Scrolls--some 1,000 ancient texts in all--was discovered and the first ever found from Leviticus.

Written by a monastic sect called the Essenes, the Dead Sea Scrolls are viewed by some as a link between Judaism and early Christianity. Could there be even more such treasures in the Judean Desert? "No scrolls have been found in the Judean Desert" in decades, Eshel explained to AP in an interview. "The common belief has been that there is nothing left to find there. I was jealous he had found it, not me. I was also very excited."

The Bedouin had been offered $20,000 on the black market for his treasure, and before selling it, he wanted an evaluation from Eshel. Fearing he would never see the precious pieces again, Eshel took photographs. He assumed the ancient treasure would soon be smuggled out of Israel.

Eshel was wrong. In March 2005, Eshel and the Bedouin met again. The Bedouin still had the scroll fragments. Using $3,000 provided by Bar Ilan University, Eshel bought them and immediately handed them over to Israel's Antiquities Authority. "Scholars do not buy antiquities. I did it because I could not see it fall apart," Eshel confessed to AP.

The scrolls are currently being tested by the Israel Antiquities Authority.