Hebrew Voices #80 – Fake Dead Sea Scrolls Explained

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, Fake Dead Sea Scrolls Explained, find out what led the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. to announce this week that its “ancient” fragments were actually modern forgeries. Nehemia Gordon speaks with top Dead Sea Scroll expert Prof. Eibert Tigchelaar about how even specialists can easily be duped and some of the scientific methods used to determine whether a scroll is authentic. Gordon and Tigchelaar also discuss how a rogue scholar may have conspired with international smugglers to fabricate theology-changing Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments.

Eibert Tigchelaar is a leading authority and author on the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Tigchelaar formerly held the position of research associate at the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen, and was appointed to a professorship at Florida State University, before becoming a research professor at Katholieke University in Leuven Belgium.

I look forward to reading your comments!

Podcast Version:

Download Audio

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #80 – Fake Dead Sea Scrolls Explained

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Eibert: Because from that point on, we were quite confident that many of the fragments that came on the market have problems, and I’m stating it very cautiously, “having problems” means that most of us think that some or all of them – I don’t know whether all, but many of them – are forgeries.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkhot.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon with Hebrew Voices, and I am here today with one of the foremost experts on the paleography of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Professor Eibert Tigchelaar, who is a Research Professor in Biblical Studies within the Faculty of Religious Studies at Leuven University. Shalom, Professor Tigchelaar.

Eibert: Shalom.

Nehemia: Hey, so I heard about you a few weeks ago. I was in Helsinki, Finland at the International Society of Biblical Literature Conference, and there was a session there where they were talking about something they called “fishy fragments”, and your name kept coming up. And your article was the basis of everything they were talking about during this session on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I was kind of blown away. I almost felt like I was this innocent scholar whose innocence had been shattered when I found out that a lot of what we look to as the Dead Sea Scrolls are fake. Can you talk to us about this?

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then restore my confidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls at the end, please.

Eibert: Please don’t be upset. First of all, none of the fragments that we have known for tens and tens of years are fake. But what they were talking… I was not there, so I don’t know what they were talking about, but I think they were generally talking about several tens and tens of fragments, perhaps even almost 100, that came on the market all of a sudden from the early 2000s onwards.

Nehemia: The term they used was “post-2002 Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments”.

Eibert: Yes.

Nehemia: That was the specific term. I’m sorry, go on.

Eibert: Exactly. So, why 2002? Because from that point on, we are quite confident that many of the fragments that came on the market have problems. And I’m stating it very cautiously, having problems means that most of us think that that some or all of them – I don’t know whether all, but many of them – are forgeries. So, to my knowledge, no one has argued that any of the fragments that were known before 2002 were forgeries. So, that is 2002.

The Dead Sea Scrolls-like fragments means they are fragments, and to the outsider, or even to someone who doesn’t pay close attention but still is a specialist, they look like Dead Sea Scrolls, and one could easily think they are Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, of course one could do that, because if you look at the regular Dead Sea Scrolls and we actually have tens of thousands of them, and they have been published between the ‘50s and 2000s, they appear in many different forms. Some are written extremely neatly, some are written by a hand which some scholars have called vulgar or inexperienced, etc., and because of that range that we find in the, let’s say “authentic” scrolls, we were not at that point when they came on the market in the early 2000s, very focused on the possibility that even though they looked bad with regard to writing, that it could be forgeries. We just think they fitted somewhere in this wide range, from badly written, inexperiencedly written Dead Sea Scrolls up to beautifully calligraphic Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, there are Dead Sea Scrolls-like fragments. And initially, many experts just assumed they were from the Dead Sea Scrolls, belonged to the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially from Qumran, and only incidentally there were some scholars who said, “Well, I’m not sure whether they actually come from Qumran,” meaning those we know from Qumran actually look different from these here. But that was a minority. For example, Emile Puech wrote it once. He says, “I have my doubts about the provenance of this specific fragment.”

So, now you’re only running one year behind, because the avalanche of articles and conference meetings, etc., on these fragments only started a year ago, at the International SBL in Berlin. I was not there, either, but that was the place where other people decided to put it in the open, and where you were in Helsinki this year was a kind of follow-up on this conference. So, I think for the last five or six years, a couple of people, including me, have been talking in small groups about, are they forgeries? And if so, which of them are forgeries? And how do we decide which are forgeries? But it’s a quite recent phenomenon.

Nehemia: So, I want to talk about your article that’s published on acadamia.edu. And was this published anywhere else, the article where you talked about the fishy fragments?

Eibert: I think bits and pieces were taken somewhere else. I used part of the data in the review article which I wrote recently and other parts. But as such, I kept it on academia.edu just because everyone refers to it, so they still have access to that form. But in this form, the fishy fragments has not been published.

Nehemia: Well, so I want to make this point. You wrote this article, and it looks like you wrote it in… let’s see, I’m here on academia.edu and I’m looking at your article, and it’s called Post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls Fishy Fragments or Forgeries, On Providence and Authenticity. And I’m trying to find here where it says what the publication date is. It says, “A repost of a 2016 internet post on the likelihood of some… etc.”

It has 33 views, and I only bring that up to say, this is a ground-breaking piece of research, and at least the acadamia.edu version only has 33 views, which means virtually no one knows about it. And obviously, I think it has more than 33 citations, so I don’t know if people are passing it around as a PDF.

Eibert: Let me explain that. I had at some point about 60 articles on academia.edu, and then they started sending me all these mails, “If you want to do this, you have to pay. And if you want to do that, you have to pay. You can see, we can keep track of this.” And I was so annoyed with academia.edu that I took off everything. But then I realized people still wanted to look at this Fishy Fragments article, so I opened a new account and I re-entered it on academia. So, it had, I think, initially a few hundred views.

Nehemia: Even that…

Eibert: … with academia.edu since you never know that.

Nehemia: Right. Well, I have to say for something as important as this, even a few hundred or a few thousand views would be very shocking to me. I mean, this really is ground-breaking. And let me give a little bit of an overview, and you correct me where I’m wrong here. So, you published that around 2016, correct?

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: Only two years ago. And then, last year, there was the release of the… I don’t know how to pronounce it, the Schøyen Edition…?

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, tell us a little bit about the Martin Schøyen Collection, and then we can talk about more these details.

Eibert: Well, Martin Schøyen has, I would say, probably the greatest collection of ancient manuscripts all over the world, ranging from China to Greece, Arabic stuff, Mesopotamian things, etc. So, he’s a great collector. He has great collections, and people in many different areas are working with him and are publishing the things that he bought. Many of them are new, and so I know Assyriologists, I know other people who all have access to it, and they’re doing it.

The problem only is that initially, he started also collecting some of the fragments of the scrolls that actually were found in the ‘40s, probably in 1947 from Cave 1, some bits and pieces that were not in institutional hands. And he bought those, so he had a few scroll fragments.

Nehemia: And those were legitimate fragments, you’re saying.

Eibert: Those were legitimate. We know of them already from photographs from the ‘40s, but they belong to the Mar Samuel, who was the Syrian Orthodox priest who was at that time in Jerusalem, but later went to the States, and then he gave it to etc. So, it went from place to place. And I think the ones he first bought were actually not those of Mar Samuel, but which Mar Samuel gave to John Trevor.

So, John Trevor, also someone in the States, had a few small fragments, and at some point they were sold.

Nehemia: So, let me give a bit of a background for people. So, for those who don’t remember, we’re told that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by this Bedouin in 1947. Even some of the details of that are being questioned, as I understand. Was he really looking for his sheep, or was he looking to ransack the caves? In any event, they end up in the hands of these different people, and then most of them end up in the hands of either the State of Israel or some Israeli institution, or Jordanian institution, and then in 1967, the Jordanian Scrolls, with the exception of maybe a dozen in Amman, end up in Israeli hands.

And you’re saying some of those scrolls never ended up either in Israeli or Jordanian hands, they were in the hands of private people, and those end up in the Schøyen collection, some of them.

Eibert: Initially, a few of them. So, John Trevor is famous among scroll scholars, because he was the one who had made the first photographs in 1948. And he was on good terms with everyone involved, and especially Mar Samuel. And I’m not sure, I don’t know the details, but in any case, he received a few very small fragments as a token of friendship, or whatever. And 50 years later, more or less, those were bought by Schøyen, so he had the beginning of his collection.

And what happened afterwards is that Schøyen, he was probably dealing, for all his different collections, with many people all over the world, but he got in contact with William Kando, the son of the person who initially was the broker of the scrolls and asked whether there were perhaps more fragments which he could buy.

Nehemia: Let me explain to people. So, William Kando was the son of the Bethlehem shoemaker/antiquities dealer who initially bought some of the scrolls from the Bedouin. And so, his son, William, at some point, is now communicating with Schøyen. And the interesting thing I read in one of the articles is that they asked Kando himself, “Do you have any more scrolls” in the early 90s, and he says, “No. There’s nothing left.” And 10 years later, all of a sudden, his son has more fragments.

Eibert: Yeah, okay. So, how does his son explain that? First of all, I think the rule would be that with antiquities dealers, one should never entirely trust what they say. And that’s not only in the East, it’s also in the West and in the Netherlands. At some point, I was often visiting an antiquities dealer, and I learned at some point, he might not openly lie, but he would not tell the entire truth. So that is normal. So how did they explain later that there were still fragments?

Now, there are variations, and I think each of them might be true to some extent, but together they don’t explain everything. First of all, I think there are good grounds to believe that during the ‘50s and the ‘60s, some of the fragments of Kando were smuggled out of what was then Jordan and later Israel, through Lebanon to Zurich.

I assume that the very large fragment which still has not been sold, which is well-known because it also was exhibited a few years ago and used in a large fragment from the Book of Genesis, probably that one was already there for decades and decades and decades. And according to some people who have been there, it’s in a vault in a bank in Zurich.

Nehemia: Okay.

Eibert: Now, having a major fragment, perhaps this size, is something completely different than having tiny, small fragments of a quarter of a credit card, or whatever.

Nehemia: And that’s most of what we’re dealing with, they’re very small fragments.

Eibert: We are dealing with very small fragments to very large fragments. I mean, among the post-2002 ones. So, this is one. Apparently, several or more fragments found their way to the Lebanon and perhaps from Lebanon to Switzerland.

The second case, which can be demonstrated at least in a few cases, is that when Kando bought back or brokered for the heirs of those who had bought fragments in the ‘50s and ‘60s. That means all kinds of Europeans and Americans, and perhaps even other ones, bought fragments, mostly from Kando, during that time. And he probably kept a log book or whatever, and the young Kando, his son, says that he has contacted some of those people and asked whether he could buy back the fragments and re-trade them.

Now, there’s one clear case where this has happened, where we know, actually, that this person had a fragment for many years, and that his family sold the fragment back. And I can imagine that in a few other cases, that was also the case.

Nehemia: Can I interrupt for a second? So, one of the issues here – and correct me if I’m wrong – I believe one of the issues here is the legality of this international trade in antiquities. There is a UNESCO treaty, which as far as I understand, Israel’s not a signatory to, but Israel has the 1978 Antiquities Act, which says that… and this is hard for a lot of people to understand. If I go and dig in Israel and I find a coin, that coin belongs to the State of Israel, even though the State of Israel didn’t know it existed, and that’s actually the case in most countries.

And because of the international law, if that coin ends up in New York, the State of Israel can go to court and demand the coin be returned, even though they never knew it existed before I discovered it, if they can prove it came from Israel.

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, that’s part of the issue of the murkiness of where these fragments are coming from, am I right?

Eibert: Yes. One of the issues, of course, is that the State of Israel doesn’t claim that anything that has ever been found in what is now the State of Israel belongs to the State of Israel. So they put a time limit at some point. I forgot what that was…

Nehemia: It’s 1978, the 1978 Antiquities Law.

Eibert: The 1978... So, it means that anything that has been found after 1978 automatically belongs to the State of Israel.

Nehemia: Correct.

Eibert: Anything that has been found at exactly the same place before 1978, these rules would not apply.

Nehemia: Correct.

Eibert: So theoretically – I’m not saying that it’s the case – but this is another option. If you would find something, let’s say in 1998, you should not claim that you found this in 1998. You should claim, “This was actually already found in 1948, but we have just kept it somewhere hidden. We have kept it in Zurich,” or whatever, “and now we are going to bring it for sale.”

So, this could be an explanation of some of the fragments that have to end up… namely that they were found much later, but claimed to stem from Qumran and found in the ‘40s or early ’50s.

The fourth option is then, at some point, I pressed someone who was close to Kando and I said, “Why doesn’t he give disclosure where all of a sudden all these fragments come from?” And then he came back at some point with a kind of strange story, “Yes, Kando claimed that he had found some kind of box somewhere hidden in his father’ house, where these fragments were.”

So, it means that though some of the scenarios could explain some of the fragments, there is no openness on specific fragments or on the group as a whole, where they come from. So, this is what I call “post-discovery provenance”, that even if you know that they probably would be authentic, we don’t know what happened with them between 1947 and, let’s say, when they came on the market. And this has always been stated because of this murkiness of the trade, or of the privacy of those who owned it, etc.

Nehemia: And once again, this doesn’t apply to the over 10,000 fragments that are in the hands of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the dozen or so fragments in Amman, and I think there are some fragments legitimately in Paris, as well. Those are considered 100 percent legit, no question?

Eibert: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Eibert: So basically one could easily say that those who selected those fragments, bought them in the 1940s and 1950s, already had a keen eye for what would be authentic or not, because people sometimes came there with squiggles that didn’t even look like Hebrew, and they put them in-between, but they selected them out immediately. And I would say at that point there was not even the expertise to make these kinds of forgeries or texts as have come on the market now.

Nehemia: So that’s a really good point I want you to come back to. So tell me, when you published this article two years ago online, Post-2000 Dead Sea Scrolls, Fishy Fragments or Forgeries? And I read the article but explain it as far as you can in layman’s terms. You brought four examples. How did you decide that those four examples were representative of the problem of likely being forgeries?

Eibert: Yeah, I can’t even remember which ones I selected, but I’ll just give a few examples. I think what I’ve done and what other people have done, we have observed a series of strange phenomena, each of those being what one could call a red flag, not necessarily being full, sound evidence that they are forgeries, but taken together or individually, these are red flags. And everyone does that from his or her own expertise.

So what I’ve been looking at is my knowledge of the corpus, my knowledge of the script, even my knowledge of orthography, but even after this article, one of my colleagues who’s working actually on all kinds of different parchments said, “This doesn’t look right at all. This parchment,” and in this case, it’s this Deuteronomy fragment we’ll be talking about, “it is far too red. We don’t have those for Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Nehemia: The hue, the color, was far too red?

Eibert: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow.

Eibert: So, that is… Of course, now we use the word “red” in two senses. That also is a red flag. It doesn’t mean normally that you can’t say it immediately, “It is too red, this fragment. And hence, it is a forgery.” But it is something like, “Wait a moment. We don’t have red fragments like that. So, how is it possible? All of a sudden, a fragment like that turns up. Looks like a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment but has a wrong color.”

Nehemia: Okay. And can I raise a really interesting problem here? So, years ago I worked for Emanuel Tov on the publication of the DJD Series, and the scholars that we interacted with there were working with black-and-white photographs. I think it was very rare that anyone had direct access to the original fragment. And even if they did, it was harder to read than the photograph, because the photographs were taken in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s - I guess early ‘50s, some of them later, some of them infra-red, and a lot of the actual pages were now turned black and very difficult to read. But what you’re describing is someone that isn’t working with a photograph, they’re working with the actual fragment in that in the Schøyen collection, is that right?

Eibert: Or, since over the last 10 years or 50 years we have these great color photographs. And of course, you still have to check. I mean, a photograph can get the wrong color and not the kind of color... At the moment, also through the website of the IA, you can see many photographs, many fragments, both in color and in black-and-white, which gives scholars who have focused on identifying fragments and looking at them an extra means of comparing.

Yes, so going back to this Fishy Fragments article, what I wanted to do at that time was to raise a flag, was to state… and I had kept my mouth shut for several years, because I was not the official editor of any of those fragments, and I didn’t even have direct access, only through photographs, and many of them had been given to me in confidence, and not to use.

But at that point I thought - because I also got info that again, a lot of fragments were on sale - so at that point I said, “Someone just has to raise the question of authenticity,” meaning, I’m not stating with complete certainty that these are all forgeries, but we have to be very serious about the possibility of forgeries.

Nehemia: And let me bring up one of the examples that I found extremely fascinating, and this is the one that’s at the Azusa University Number 3, and it’s of Deuteronomy 27:4 through 6, and they refer to it as the “Har Gerizim”, or Mount Gerizim Fragment. And the reason it’s important – and I’ve studied this extensively before I found out about your article – the reason it’s important is there’s this passage where it talks about the “Israelites are commanded to build an altar on Mount Eval” in the Masoretic text and in the Septuagint, and in virtually every version except for one old Latin manuscript, all of them say it’s to be built on Mount Eval. There’s one Latin manuscript that says “Mount Gerizim” and of course, the Samaritans have their holy site on Mount Gerizim.

And lo and behold, this fragment shows up, and Professor Charlesworth publishes it and says, “Look, I tried to prove it was a forgery and I can’t, so we have to accept it.” And it’s a really interesting article, I have it right here, the article he wrote. James Charlesworth, announcing a Dead Sea Scroll fragment of Deuteronomy and it’s called, What is a Variant? From March 2010. And he makes the bold claim that what we have in the Masoretic text is the variant, and this is the original reading.

And I heard Emanuel Tov mention this fragment in passing during a lecture at the SBL last year in Boston, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said something about, “Well, it’s not clear if that’s authentic.” And I’m like, “What?” And I had other things going on, so I didn’t pursue it. And then this year they bring up your article, and that’s one of your four examples of this is likely a forgery, based primarily on the paleography, the letters don’t match the style of each other. So, talk about that a little bit, please.

Eibert: Yes. So, when Charlesworth published this, it was a shock for many people, because here we would have people who went in two different directions. They either thought, “Well, this could be one of those Samaritan text-like fragments,” that this was, at some point, sometimes it’s called “Sectarian Samaritans” - one of the very specific Samaritan issues, which one would not expect them at Qumran, for example.

Nehemia: Right. I believe there are four Samaritan-like fragments at Qumran out of thousands of fragments, and even those don’t have the specific issues related to Mount Gerizim, which is what you find in the Samaritan Torah.

In other words, the Samaritans, from a Jewish perspective, added in Mount Gerizim as the holy site, and from the Samaritan perspective, the Jews took it out.

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the Samaritans have a so-called 11th Commandment which mentions - you know, and they count the commandments differently, they still say there are 10 - but their last commandment is to worship on Mount Gerizim. And Jews say, “You guys added that,” and Samaritans say, “No, you guys took it out because you were devoted to Jerusalem.”

And here, we have a Dead Sea Scroll at Qumran which is not… I mean, why would there be a Samaritan manuscript at Qumran? Especially when it’s not written in the Samaritan script.

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: So this was earth-shattering at the time and still is, in some circles.

Eibert: Yeah. And it came very suddenly, that fragment, because especially, I think, in the early 2000s, this entire discussion, especially about Deuteronomy 27, not in general about the Har Gerizim references in the Samaritan Pentateuch, had been rediscussed with people like Adrian Schenker and Thomas Wren, a lot of these European scholars, who actually made exactly the argument that you explained here - that in this specific case it is possible that the reference to Mount Eval in, let’s call it the “Jewish Bible” or the Masoretic text, was actually a substitution for what was in more original text than Mount Gerizim.

If you’ve dealt with it at length, you can explain it to your readers, to your listeners etc., but basically this was a very interesting article, their work, because it said it is not black and white, that every single time where we’ve found a Gerizim in the Samaritan Pentateuch, it is secondary. Yes, it probably is secondary in many cases, except for this one case in Deuteronomy 27.

So, what Charlesworth had in his hands, according to critical scholars of the early 2000s, was actually the original text of Deuteronomy 27. Now, how to assess a fragment like this? First of all, I didn’t do this only with this fragment, but I went through all the fragments that I knew and I still keep doing it. My first question is, if you find a loose fragment like this, can we assign it on the basis of its appearance and on the basis of its writing to any of the manuscripts we already know?

Normally, if it would come from Qumran, one would expect a large likelihood that it would be the umpteenth fragment of a manuscript we already know.

Nehemia: Just so people understand, this fragment - I’m looking at it right now in the Charlesworth article - it’s three-and-a-half lines, maybe call it four lines, and it’s the size of a credit card or smaller. So what you’re saying is, maybe this belongs to a different manuscript which we know is legitimate. And one of the things I deal with these days is Medieval Bible manuscripts, and it’s very common that I’ll find some fragment in St. Petersburg in the Antonin Collection, which is the genizah, and you’ll find another page of the same manuscript - and you can tell by the handwriting - in the JTS in New York, or someplace like that.

So this is the best thing you could hope for to verify one of these so-called fishy post-2002 fragments, is if you find that it belongs to an existing manuscript or existing legitimate scroll, then you know it’s legit. So have there been any like that, that you were able to connect…

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, great. Wow, okay.

Eibert: So, what happened basically is, of course, occasionally you can find a stand-alone fragment, the only remnant of a manuscript. But in the case of the scrolls where we have tens of thousands of fragments, which already by scholars in the past have been organized or arranged in about, let’s say, 1,000 manuscripts or 600 manuscripts from Cave 4, the chances are that one normally would be able to assign it to one of those known manuscripts, and certainly, if you would have 10 or 20 or 30 or in this case 60 different fishy fragments, I would say that a lot of them, at least, should fit with what we already know. In this case, if you look at all those fragments that turned up after 2002, there’s only one.

Nehemia: Only one!

Eibert: Only one that neatly fits with a manuscript we already know. We can even place it and say, “Okay, this fragment we already knew was here, and then we put this one, which was bought by Schøyen there, and they don’t fit entirely materially, but everything fits.” Now, we would expect much more like this, so this is one of the small red flags. The red flag is, “Okay, here we have something that is claimed to be from Cave 4, but it doesn’t fit anything that we have from Cave 4.” That could happen, but if this happens every single time, then something strange is going on.

The second thing is the following - and this was a real problem, because we know we have experienced writers, but we also have even writers who perhaps copied scrolls for public distribution, perhaps they sold them, I don’t know. But very beautiful scrolls, often Biblical and sometimes non-Biblical scrolls. But we also have series of manuscripts of fragments from Qumran that clearly were not meant for public distribution but written by individuals for their own intentions. Whether they wanted to keep the text, or whether it was an aid to memorize the text, we don’t know, but it was written in a different, less calligraphic hand.

Nehemia: That’s in some of the legitimate scrolls.

Eibert: Yes.

Nehemia: And do we have… and I don’t remember - do we have writing exercises? Like, I know in the genizah in the Lewis-Gibson Collection, you have hundreds of pages that were literally writing exercises.

Eibert: No, we don’t have them like those. Actually, this is a side tangential remark, but actually you should distinguish between when people do writing exercises just to learn the forms of the letters, and what’s sometimes also called “writing exercises” is that you test out your pen. You have to cut it, you have to sharpen it, you write letters, etc. So sometimes these are confused. The letter, we do have.

Nehemia: Okay, we do have it.

Eibert: You see it’s a very nice hand, but they were using this scrap of paper to practice their pen. So we do not have the writing exercises that we know from the genizah, or that we know from Oxyrynchus, the Greek writing exercises from school, practices, etc. Unfortunately, we don’t have those. So what we have is this wide scale of unpracticed versus almost calligraphic hands at Qumran.

Now, we look at this fragment. You have it in front of you, I looked at it half an hour ago, so I’ll just do it from the top of my head. So, I am used to… There are some very important Dead Sea Scrolls that are written in, let’s call it, in less practiced hands. And some of the scholars from the 1950s called them “vulgar” or whatever, citing these.

Nehemia: What’s the word?

Eibert: Vulgar.

Nehemia: Vulgar, okay. And so people understand, “vulgar” in the Latin sense “of the people”. And I remember Professor Kutcher of the Hebrew University, he gave the example of, “In your church you read the King James Version. But at home, you read the Revised Standard Version, which is less formal,” and he called that “a vulgar version versus the formal version” like the King James. And so you’re saying in ancient times they had a similar sort of thing?

Eibert: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Eibert: Well, I’m now not talking about the content, but about the writing.

Nehemia: Right, it was an analogy. It’s not a perfect analogy.

Eibert: Yeah, and that analogy is good. And you take the analogy also to other areas, like spelling, for example - orthography. But even if you look at those vulgar letters, you will see that the forms of the letters are often irregular, but if you look at these fragments that you have in front of you, you will see that sometimes the forms of the strokes are irregular, meaning that even if you are inexperienced…

Let’s take an English example. If you write a capital T, you know that basically you have two strokes. If you’re a calligraphist, you may make more strokes of them, but a normal person would just have a down stroke and a top stroke, and you would do it in one stroke, one stroke down, one stroke horizontal.

However, if you look at several of the letters here, you will see that even this down stroke is written in bits and pieces – meaning, this is not a writer, a copyist that may… And if you have vulgar writing, they may have done it slightly in the wrong direction, or too long, or too short, but they still would normally do it in one stroke. Many of the letters that we find in these fragments are not written like that.

Now, another colleague of mine who is even more a specialist in paleography, realized it very soon, but he was hesitant, initially, to say these are forgeries. So, all the time he was talking about “a hesitant hand” – meaning, this was not someone who just made a stroke. This was someone who thought, “Oh, yeah, and then this bit, and then that bit,” etc. So, this is not natural. It’s not natural for…

Nehemia: So, let me bring a modern example, and I don’t know if the kids these days deal with this, but when I was in high school – not that I’m confessing anything – and I decided to ditch the morning class, and I would come in with a note from my mother, and what would I do? I would put a piece of paper over my mother’s signature and trace it. And so, they’re not fluid strokes. I’m stopping in the middle because I’m trying to copy her signature. Not that, in retrospect, the office people didn’t even know or care in high school.

So you’re saying that basically somebody was trying to reproduce the lines, and hesitantly didn’t do it the way an ancient person would do it. Let me read that quote here from the article of Charlesworth. And you refer to this in your Fishy Fragments article. “The scribal hand represents archaic forms that can be dated perhaps to 175 BCE, and later forms that date from around 50.” What? So, how is that even possible?

Eibert: In theory it’s possible, but not the way he presents it. I mean, there are hands, there are old forms that are continued, but not all of them.

Nehemia: There’s definitely a red flag.

Eibert: It is a red flag. Now, the problem, of course… let’s assume that this a forgery. If you are a forger, clearly this is a good forger. This is not someone who makes a mess of it. There are fragments which are much less developed. The lines are almost straight, the letters have more or less the size, they more or less have a good form. The problem is, if you would do that with a pen on this small credit card size, or smaller than credit card size, you have to be a specialist, even if you are working with a microscope in between your eyes and your pen. Now, we have these beautiful photographs. We look at the results and we blow them up, and then we see all kinds of things that you barely would see with your naked eye. And of course, we can compare to all kinds of other fragments that also are blown up in photographs.

So I don’t entirely blame my colleagues who just saw the original in small size, or had small photos and who didn’t immediately see that there was something wrong. But if you blow it up, it makes it very… I mean, if you have the photograph in front of you - I’m not sure whether you have that one.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, I have the Nine Dubious… This is an article which I’m going to put a link to on the website, it’s called Nine Dubious Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments From the 21st Century by Kipp Davis et al. They, essentially, definitely prove what you suggested two years ago. In fact, one of the fragments they discussed is one of the fragments in your Fishy Fragments article. In other words, they talked about nine fragments, but only one of those overlaps, and now they’ve definitely proven that some of these are a forgery.

My favorite example here in the Nine Dubious Fragments article - I’ll just give some examples of how they proved this, right? And you came as a paleographer, they used paleography and what we might call like natural science methods. So one thing they found was that one of these fake fragments was sprinkled with table salt - apparently modern table salt - and there was ink both below the table salt and covering the table salt, which is as definitive as you could ever possibly hope for to prove it’s fake. I have to wonder why the forger put the table salt on, if that was part of the process of making it look older? Or maybe he was eating a sandwich.

There is ink on the damaged edge. And what that means is, when the fragment broke over time, there was an edge that was exposed and that under layer has ink on it. How was that possible unless somebody added the ink to an already existing scroll? There’s ink covering sediment. And then there’s one example of shiny ink.

So, my takeaway - and I want to hear your view on this - my takeaway from the Nine Dubious Fragments article – and that was, by the way, as I understand it, funded by Martin Schøyen, which is incredible, right? The man has these fake fragments in his collection, and he says, “I want to know,” and he actually funds the research to find out. I’ve got to give that guy a lot of credit, because I’ve got to wonder - and this was actually raised, I should say, at the SBL meeting, is they were asking the question, “Do some of the private institutions that own these fragments really want to know if they’re fake or not?” Because they, you know, are very prestigious that they own one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are not a lot of Dead Sea Scrolls in private hands, or in non-institutional hands, put it that way.

So, Martin Schøyen clearly wants to know, because he funded the people that debunked at least some of the scrolls, nine of the scrolls. So yeah, it’s an incredible piece of research, of detective work. What I would like to see is them put the accepted scrolls to the same level of scrutiny by comparison, right? In science, you always have a control. And I don’t think they’ll find that any of those fragments are fake, but let’s look at them and just make sure that the phenomenon that you’re…

Like, I don’t know. This might sound really stupid, but maybe they had table salt in ancient times. It is the Dead Sea, which in Hebrew is Yam Hamelach, the Salt Sea, right? I mean, I don’t think that’s the case, that this would… because they were very small fragments, very small particles. But I think further research needs to be done on the legitimate scrolls just to drive home the point.

Not to mention, for example, the Deuteronomy Scroll, the Har Gerizim Scroll hasn’t been tested. That’s at Azusa University in California, where they have five fragments, and they haven’t done these tests, as far as I know.

Eibert: No, and I know this is a lot of questions, I’ll just go through some of them. I know that Azusa is taking things seriously, and that they have had at least one of these fishy fragments C14 tested, indicating, as far as I remember, that it would come from antiquity, from the period one would expect, which of course then raises a new set of questions - are we all wrong in our claim that this is a forgery, because the parchment is old? Or is it possible that old parchment was used?

Nehemia: I want to stop you there, because that’s actually the claim of the Nine Dubious Fragments article that came out last year, 2017, by Kipp Davis and others. The claim, as I understand it, is that there were fragments of scrolls that had no writing on them - and some of the listeners are thinking, “Why would there be a fragment with no writing?” Look at any of the intact Dead Sea Scrolls, look at 1Q Isaiah A, and the top and bottom margins have no writing, right?

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, if somebody got a hold of a bunch of those and said, “Hey, I could get maybe a few thousand dollars for this,” or, “If I add a textual variant from the Bible or 1 Enoch, I could get a half a million dollars for this.” Yeah.

Eibert: I understand the argument. The only thing is that I don’t know how one could just stumble upon a series of ancient materials.

Nehemia: Maybe Kando had them.

Eibert: Yeah, they could be found somewhere, and a few years ago they found what was temporarily called Cave 12, where they actually didn’t find a scroll. They found something which initially was stated to be the ending of the scroll, the unwritten part. So it is possible that one would find either an unwritten, ancient parchment somewhere, but it is not – I think I should stress this – this is not the same as that one finds a lot of unwritten, ancient papyrus in Egypt, where we have so many of this material, where it apparently is not that difficult to find ancient papyrus. It would be very difficult to find enough ancient parchment.

Now, I want to go back to your previous statement, that we have done a lot of textual and even paleographic etc. study of those fragments, but very little material, physical, chemical, all this kind of ink, how they were preserved, material analysis. Now, what has been done with the Schøyen fragments is that they have been tested almost, in a sense, randomly, as, “Let’s test them on certain things and see what we find.” Which you would actually want, also not only to detect forgeries but just to increase our knowledge of the preparation of parchment, or a different kind of preparation of parchment.

What we would actually want – and I think this is a great research project for the next 10 years – whoever can get the funding for that, is to have a large-scale, non-destructive analysis of many of the materials that we have at the IA. And you could also take Amman and Paris, but the IA has most of it. And this would help in so many respects. It would give us much more data for all kinds of questions we’ve been dealing with - the provenance of the kind of parchment, differences of parchment, etc.

So yes, you are right, a lot of things have turned up, and on purpose they have not published everything they’ve found. And this was on a conference last year in Boston, where Ira Rabin, who had been doing the testing, said, “We should not put in the open all our findings, because if we do that, the next step is that they will anticipate this kind of testing and do things differently. He said, “In principle it’s open. If you get the permission of those who ask us to do it, then you can get a lab report. But we won’t just publish it in a journal so that everyone can see it.”

Nehemia: In other words, it’ll be a guide. If they publish how they determine these were fakes, next time the forgers will be better and use it as a guideline of how not to get caught.

Eibert: Yeah, in principle. So, there are many different things. So I am not privy to a lot. I know what is here. I’ve heard one or two other things, but they may have tested other things I’m not even aware of.

Nehemia: Okay.

Eibert: So yes, you are right. The interesting thing was, when we started in 2012 or ’13 discussing these things and considering the possibility of forgery, then the question is, how do we prove it? Because in the humanities, we have a history of disputes among scholars whether something is or is not a forgery, and often these are senses of those who look at those and say, “Given my experience, I think this is not correct.” Or, “Given, this is.” But then someone else comes and makes a different argument.

Actually, though, I am happy with my own expertise. My own expertise is not shared by that of others who may have different expertise and come to a different conclusion, philologically meaning. So, it is extremely helpful that from a material point of view, some of our doubts have been confirmed.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Eibert: Not all of them have been checked, and in many cases, it is not conclusive. You gave a few of the most telling examples. The question is, what kind of scenario can we imagine? Can we imagine that there would be salt where one would write over? And what I understood, it’s not just salt, like one would find perhaps anywhere in Israel, but it is this processed salt…

Nehemia: Yeah, table salt.

Eibert: All exactly the same size that we now have on the tables.

Nehemia: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s pretty conclusive. So this is really an incredible piece of scholarship that you did - that you suggested these manuscripts were fake. And at least one of them, of your four, has now definitively, I think, been proven as fake with this scientific or natural sciences, physical sciences approach. So that’s pretty incredible.

Because like you said, there are a lot of documents, as you say, in the history of - I know in Jewish studies - that have been questioned about whether they’re forgeries or not. Probably the most famous forgery in Jewish studies was the Jerusalem Talmud, I think it was the tractate of Nashim, in the early 20th century, and when they went through it they realized every single word there is a quote from somewhere else. There were no original words there that aren’t a quote, and so they determined, “Okay, this is a forgery.”

And then, there was of course… another famous example, this is in the Firkovitch Collection, some of the colophons of the manuscript - to this day, there are people who at the drop of a hat say that’s a forgery, because they have a gut feeling. And there are other people who say it’s not. And as far as I know, there’s no real way to tell, and it’s very frustrating. I deal with those Medieval manuscripts, and one person gives it a date of 847, and the other says, “No, it’s 1020.” How do you know? And in those cases, they’re not, so far, willing to do some of these natural science experiments.

I’ve actually asked for one of the manuscripts for infra-red photographs to be taken, and they wouldn’t do it.

Eibert: So, I think we have a series of comparable and different problems when it comes to forgeries. On the one hand, we know, and the complaints were already around 1,700 when they became aware of this issue of forgery, and started trying to give criteria by which one could see whether something is a forgery. Of course, those were completely different, and that was… by the way, also the origin of the studies of codicology and paleography as kind of help disciplines for deciding whether something was authentic or not.

Nehemia: Wow, I didn’t know that.

Eibert: That was about 300 years ago. And of course, one did not do the kind of material tests that we do now. Now, with the scrolls there’s a very interesting discussion going on now, and I think only part of the people who were in Helsinki, and other people who think, “Well, yes,” whatever. That is, let’s call it, what is our starting point? Do we assume things are, even if they just come on the market, 60, 70 years later - do we assume they are authentic unless it is proven that they are forgeries? Which is still the opinion of some of my colleagues - the benefit of the doubt. And if we can’t prove it, even if we have to doubt, we will still treat them as authentic.

And the other side, where some of my other colleagues stand, is that they assume that everything that now is being thrown on the market and which has no provenance and no history of where it comes from, etc., we assume that these are forgeries. The only thing is, how do we prove it?

I stand somewhere in the middle, but I tend to go more to the side of the forgery, in the sense that I would not be amazed at all, that because there are some really beautifully-written texts among them… I mean, if these are all forgeries, then we clearly have different forgers, some who are very expert in writing the Hebrew as it should be done, and other ones who just manage to write in such a sense that not everyone notices immediately. So, we do not have one forger.

I would not be amazed if some of the more beautiful ones are actually authentic. But then, let them be tested. Actually, among the nine that have been published, at least one of those really beautiful ones is included, and the data they give do not convince me. It’s also because they haven’t given everything. They kept some things under the hat, and whatever.

So, where do we start? My position would be, if even the traders themselves had said… if everything from a historical point of view indicates that it was a complete surprise, even for the ones who traded in them, that they had a new set of material and they don’t tell where it’s from, and they come up with all kinds of explanations, and we have to have suspicion in advance. And let them be open.

Nehemia: So, one of the ideas I heard floated was that there’s no way that some of these fragments were produced without the cooperation and assistance of someone within the academic world with some pretty advanced knowledge, at least of a master’s level in Dead Sea Scroll Studies. And one of the examples that I read, I think it’s in the Nine Dubious Fragments article, is the Aramaic of 1 Enoch, and it’s based on one scholar’s reconstruction. And then the other scholar comes along and says, “No, it should read this other way.” And then, the third scholar says, “Actually, those two fragments don’t even belong together, and this forgery was apparently based on that second phase.” So somebody is reading the DJD volumes and coming up with the text for the forgery. This isn’t some illiterate Bedouin. I mean. What do you say about that?

Eibert: Yeah. Yes and no. Perhaps this example that you give is maybe too far-fetched from my perspective. What to say about this? Here, the way you present it and the way they presented it, you have to have - and this happens more often with forgeries - we have to think of very intricate scenarios of very smart scholars combining material and expertise. And of course, in the past we know that in all kinds of fields of scholarship, there were scholars who, either just to challenge their colleagues or for whatever reason, were involved in forgeries. So, why not?

Many of the other fragments do not require any expertise. You just need a basic text. I actually made a similar kind of argument, but not as intricate as you said, is look at those two fragments, the one that I think is a forgery, and the other one, which is indeed DJD. They even have almost the same form, and the lines are written exactly the same way, almost as if you were flipping through DJD, and thought, “Wow, this fragment looks quite a lot like my fragment. Let me copy that one.”

But that one is now dated to C 14 to be from antiquity, so I’m not quite sure whether I was wrong or I was right. But in this case, one could really imagine them using a sample from DJD, but it goes much further if you would argue, as for example also would be implied with the Har Gerizim fragment, that there would be scholars who have knowledge of the discussions, the theological discussions or the philological discussions, and tried to have a fragment fabricated or did it themselves.

Now, this is one thing. And then we say, “Oh, yes. Why not?” All over the world, we know from mass of students who failed to get their grades, to professors who just out of spite, or whatever, were involved. And yes, it’s possible. I’m not going where a lot of my colleagues are going when they are drinking coffee and speculating who this could be. I’m not going there.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough, okay. Although you could understand why somebody would do that – in other words, you’d say, “Well, why would somebody put Mount Gerizim in there?” Well, if it says Mount Eval, maybe it’s worth $50,000 and if it says Mount Gerizim, maybe it’s worth half a million, right?

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: And a lot of these in the Nine Dubious Fragments article, they bring out that a lot of these are textual variants that were proposed by other scholars in the past. Some of them are based on BHS. My favorite example is – and I want to hear if you remember this one – and my name is Nehemia, right? So, my favorite example is in the Book of Nehemiah where there is a little symbol in the BHS that looks like it was copied by accident, a little like Alpha or something, into this fishy fragment.

Eibert: Yeah. It looks like it, yes. And normally we don’t have things like that. So, yeah.

Nehemia: That wasn’t done by someone with great expertise, let’s put it that way.

Eibert: No, exactly. So, let me put it in general terms. All these things that we see are warnings what could have happened. But scholars are also very good in building up large scenarios about what exactly happened, what the forger thought, which specific book he used, etc. And then we are going to and fro between the very smart, informed forger who combines scholarship of different scholars, and then we have another who was so stupid that he even didn’t know that this specific thing in BHS was not part of the text.

So, I was going to say, “Yes, it is possible we have those, but also be careful with giving ad hoc from case to case explanations what happened, even though they are contradictory.” But it’s a nice story. Indeed, it looks like one of those small Alefs which is used super-linearly in the text to refer to what is in the Biblical apparatus. And if it’s not this Alef, then we don’t know what it is. It’s just a squiggle.

Nehemia: Yeah. It could be colossal coincidence, that’s possible. So, what is the future of the Dead Sea Scrolls research and of these fishy fragments? What do you see, going forward?

Eibert: Well, first of all, I would say we have these tens of thousands of fragments, or even if we have joined them, the ones which were found in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and we have major texts that are being studied by people for their dissertations or in further research. We have thousands of small fragments that gradually, one by one, people identified and say, “Wait. This actually fits here in this manuscript,” and then we get that. It doesn’t go fast, but there are 10 to 20 a year.

And from that perspective – and these are all authentic, these are all accessible – and from that perspective, these 60 fragments that have turned up, of which I would say, perhaps 45 out of these 60 are not of any interest scholarly, these are academically not important. At the very best - and this would be important in principle - at the very best, they affect our statistics.

For example, if finally, you find a fragment of Nehemiah, then if you never had had one, then it’s important to know. But if you find the umpteenth fragment with six words from the Book of Psalms, in a sense, I would say, “Who cares?” From an academic point of view.

Now, among those fishy fragments, there are a range that also could affect scholarship, and therefore are important. The one is certainly the Har Gerizim fragment, because it would show that what scholars have thought actually is attested by a Judean fragment. It would even mean that we have 1st century evidence of something that we think was already changed in a later… in an earlier time. So, still, some manuscripts preserving Har Gerizim instead of Mount Eval.

Another case which would really be important for discussions that are going on, is this large Jeremiah fragment, which goes along with the Septuagint text, but not entirely. It also sometimes has Septuagint readings, and sometimes has MT readings. And this is important for the entire discussion about the relationship between these two versions, and how they fit exactly.

However, if this is a forgery, then we can just put it aside. So, in this case, it will affect mainstream scholarship on Jeremiah.

Nehemia: So, what you’re saying is there are a number of fragments, that maybe the study from the natural sciences perspective is quite urgent?

Eibert: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, hopefully, those will be studied soon.

Eibert: I would say that at very least, we should keep those aside and be aware if we are working on those, that we cannot use them as solid evidence, as factual evidence, as witnesses from the 1st century BC until we have final knowledge about it.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough. Yeah, wow. Any final words or thoughts?

Eibert: On the one hand, I would just wish we could put these forgeries aside and just move on with scroll scholarship, which actually develops into many very interesting directions. And this issue is actually a financial issue. It’s not an academic problem. It is not like for example, the Gospel of Jesus’ wife, which would force scholars to think about forms of Christianity in the 2nd or 3rd century. Most of these fragments are only of interest to people who want to make money or people who want to collect, and not for academics. So, for academics, I would say, we have enough work to do with the material that we already have, and know that is authentic.

Nehemia: Okay. With the exception of, like you said, maybe 25 percent that are important, like the Mount Gerizim and the Jeremiah, and there are a few others, I think that really could change the picture of scholarship in those specific areas.

Eibert: Yeah. That’s a few, yes. These are the two I think of off the top of my head, and I think probably these would be from a traditional, from a biblical scholarship point of view, the two most urgent fragments to decide upon.

Nehemia: Gotcha. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you joining us.

Eibert: I enjoyed it.

Nehemia: And have a good day. Shalom.

Eibert: Thank you.

Announcer: You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at nehemiaswall.com.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!


SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS!
Makor Hebrew Foundation is a 501c3 tax-deductible not for profit organization.

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | 
Amazon Music
 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
 | Pandora

Share this Teaching on Social Media

Related Posts:
The Rebirth of Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Most Important Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Pesher in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Studies
Nehemia Gordon's Teachings on the Name of God

Articles Mentioned:
- Post-2002 Dead Sea Scrolls Fishy Fragments — or Forgeries? On Provenance and Authenticity: Some Cases
- What is a Variant? Announcing a Dead Sea Scrolls Fragment of Deuteronomy
- Nine Dubious “Dead Sea Scrolls” Fragments from the Twenty-First Century
- Eibert Tigchelaar on Aacdemia.edu
- The Schøyen Collection
- Spotting a Fake: The Flourishing Industry of Jewish Manuscript Forgeries

  • Mark says:

    It was suspicious when one fragment talking about wine read: “ מנישביץ “.

  • Ralph Miller says:

    Did Americans honestly think we (Israel) would send y’all the real ones? Almost all are hidden in a special climate and temperature controlled safe (place) and nobody gets to see them (with very rare exception).

  • Fred says:

    Are These fake fragments writings trying to confirm Christianity ?

  • Joost says:

    I would say the copper-scroll is “fishy”.

    Are there additional fragments found/available for the missing text in the war (1QM) scroll? Can anyone share links to either websites or books (if available)?

  • Margo Moore says:

    This discussion was very interesting. I guess I’m impatient for a new cache to be found, perhaps in a better state of preservation. So many theological questions could be solved if earlier, older scrolls would turn up. I also find it hard to believe that at least a few originals of the Epistles are not extant—but I suspect they would have been concealed in the bowels of the Vatican Library, never to see the light of day, much less be published.
    One of my own interests (since I am a singer) would be in finding some sort of musical notation that would give us the original tunes used to perform the Psalms, i.e., “According to Lilies” and “According to Do Not Destroy.” I devoutly hope you—as one who has access to the original scrolls—will keep your eyes open for anything that could be indications of how they were performed.
    I also have my own idea of the meaning of “Selah” in the Psalms. I do NOT think it indicates a pause. If you write back to me I will tell you my own idea concerning what it does mean.
    Thanks for your ministry; it is intellectually stimulating as well as supportive of belief in the truth of the Bible.

  • Sheila Price says:

    I just find it quite interesting that this came to my e-mail this week, and not having TV media availability,, (by choice), I had not heard this before… but my BFF and I are studying a book, “Understanding The Difficult Words Of Jesus” with new Insights from Hebraic Perspective, by David Bivin and Roy Blizzard, Jr.
    We are on chapter 3 this week and it starts out talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

    I have to admit, until watching or listening to your postings and reading books such as the one mentioned above, I never realized how much is paid attention to the details of such findings as the DSS’s, how many departments research and examine, etc. are needed to authenticate items. But to me it all points to the intelligence of the minds, the gifts and talents Yehovah has created.

    I do not believe in co-incidences… but I do believe in God-incidences and I always am fascinated by the things found in archaeology digs or cave findings, or the bottom of the Red Sea findings, etc… which continue to verify that The Word Of Yehovah is true and not made up stories to entertain the children, or to manipulate the masses into rules obedience…. but that Yehovah IS and has always been active in the world, in the lives of those who WANT to have a relationship with Him and not settling for mere ‘religion’… it’s there for those who are willing to have eyes to see and ears to hear and experience it in the heart. .

    I am appreciative of sources such as NW and BFA International for up to date information.

    • Ilse Fogelgren says:

      Agreed, but that desire or ‘WANT’ you speak of is initiated by the Father, who shows no partiality. We can only respond according to understanding given to us by His spirit.
      1John 4:19 We love Him because He first loved us.
      Prov 20:12 The hearing ear and the seeing eye, Yehovah has made them both.
      Ex 4:11 … “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, Yehovah?”
      Matt 13:16-18 “But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear… many prophets and righteous men have desired to see and did not, and hear and did not… Therefore hear the parable of the sower:…