MORE ON THE SILVER AMULETS from Ketef Hinnom:

Archaeologist recounts 1979 discovery of tomb that held oldest fragments of the Bible (Salt Lake Tribune)

By Bruce Nolan
Religion News Service

��� NEW ORLEANS -- As often happens in other fields, the find of Gabriel Barkay's career as a biblical archaeologist rose at the intersection of careful calculation and happy accident -- provided in his case by a bored 12-year-old helper who whacked the stone floor of an Israelite burial vault with a heavy hammer.
��� His name was Nathan. Too scattered and mischievous to be of much help, he had been dispatched to clean a worked-over corner of Barkay's dig just outside the old city of Jerusalem, a largely overlooked archaeological site that Barkay thought might yield material for his dissertation.
��� But the stone floor turned out to be the ceiling of a concealed void beneath. And Nathan's hammer blow punched through to a repository containing hundreds of vessels of pottery, personal jewelry and other effects untouched for 2,600 years.
��� Among them was the find of finds -- two tiny, tightly rolled silver scrolls.
��� Carefully unpeeled over time, they revealed faint scratchings that took Barkay's breath away:
��� YHWH. The earliest appearance in Jerusalem of the unspeakable Hebrew word for God.
��� That find came in 1979 and still ranks on many scholars' lists as one of the most remarkable in modern biblical archaeological history.

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