President Izhak Ben-Zvi and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion attended today a gathering at which a formal report on the recent Dead Sea archaeological finds was presented to the members of the Cabinet and the Jewish Agency executive by the Hebrew University group which carried out the excavations. The report included the first showing of the more than 430 bronze, ivory and ebony relics dating back to the Chalcolithic period nearly 6,000 years ago.
The report disclosed the contents of ten of the 50 or 60 scrolls dating to the Bar Kochba period in the second century C. E., found in three bundles in the Dead Sea caves. All ten of the scrolls were legal documents concerning mainly the sale or lease of land. Three of the documents, written in elegant Mishnaic Hebrew, were lease contracts for land in the Ein Gedi area executed by Bar Kochba through an agent.
The legal expressions in the contracts shed important light on life in Mishnaic times and on the history of Jewish law. Names of some places, which were known but have never been geographically identified, were also mentioned in the contracts. The signature of a witness on one of the documents corresponded to the name of a person known from the Bar Kochba letters discovered last year. Other documents, written in Aramaic, also dealt with land transactions, while some concerned contracts relating to marriages or the guardianship of orphans.
The discovery may clarify discussions in the Talmud concerning the methods of tying and binding deeds and the validity of the witnesses’ signatures. Some of the scrolls were found tied with a number of strings with the signature of a different witness alongside each string.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
