Israel Displays Rare Religious Manuscript
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JERUSALEM — A rare Hebrew Bible manuscript, which is about 1,300 years old, is on display for the first time after making its way from a secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American collector.
The manuscript, containing the “Song of the Sea” section of the Book of Exodus and dating to around the seventh century of the common era, comes from what scholars call the “silent era” — a span of 600 years between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts survive.
It is now on public display for the first time at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
“It comes from a period of almost darkness in terms of Hebrew manuscripts,” a textual scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, Stephen Pfann, said.
Scholars have long noted the lack of original biblical manuscripts written between the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the latest of which come from the third century, and texts written in the ninth and 10th centuries, Mr. Pfann said.
Scholars can only piece together scraps of information on the period using translations into Greek and other languages, he said, “so to have a piece of the original text from this period is quite remarkable.”
