Bible texts on silver amulets dated to First Temple period
By Amiram Barkat
U.S. and Israeli researchers claim to have discovered proof that the Five Books of Moses were in existence during the First Temple period.
The findings are based on new laboratory techniques used to date two small silver amulets, inscribed in ancient Hebrew and discovered in a burial cave in Jerusalem in 1979. Published last week in a scientific journal in the United States, the results were reported extensively in The New York Times yesterday.
The amulets contain the text of the Priestly Benediction, which appear in Chapter 6 of Numbers, and are still recited today in synagogue prayer by descendants of the Jewish priestly clan.
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This sounds like an overinterpretation of the evidence to me. My understanding is that the amulets contain the priestly benediction, also found in Numbers 6:24-26, and perhaps also material from Deuteronomy 7:9. The benediction is the sort of thing that would have been in wide circulation and proves nothing about whether the text of Numbers was assembled c. 600 B.C.E. in anything like the form we have today. The material from Deuteronomy is more interesting and, if upheld (all I've seen on it so far is a second-hand report in an e-mail message on the ANE list), indicates that D material was floating around before the exile, which I would have guessed anyway. It would have been more accurate to begin the article by saying that it is now established that some of the material found in the Five Books of Moses existed in the First Temple period.
I haven't seen the BASOR article yet; it hasn't arrived in our library. When it does, I may have more to say on the subject, but I think it's unlikely that anything I've said above will need to be changed.
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