U.S. Scholar Deciphers and Translates Newly Discovered Hebrew Psalm

The first English translation of one of the five psalms recently found in a Dead Sea Scroll, an Ode to Zion, was made public yesterday by the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jordan. The psalm had been previously unknown.

The delicate task of unrolling, studying and deciphering the scroll, found with other parchments in a cave in 1956, was handled by Dr. J.A. Sanders, Professor of Old Testament at the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y.

The five psalms are among 44 psalms in Hebrew preserved on a goatskin scroll, dating back to the first century. The rest of the psalms are well known. The scroll is considered the most significant discovery of the ancient Hebrew manuscripts since the initial finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. The goatskin scroll is well preserved except for some slight decay caused by dampness.

Both the 1947 and 1956 finds were made by Bedouins in a cave in the cliffs near the Dead Sea. The cave in which the scroll of psalms was found also yielded fragments of Hebrew texts of Ezekiel and Leviticus and a translation of parts of the Book of Job into Aramaic, a Semitic language used in ancient Israel some 1,900 years ago.

Another of the five psalms, according to Dr. Sanders, is a personal confession of faith. Two are in praise of God. The fifth is in prose and tells about the compositions of David, reporting that he wrote 2,050 psalms. The fifth item also describes the type of temple service for which David’s compositions were meant.

Dr. Sanders said the date of the scroll was 30 to 50 C. E., a time he established through the handwriting styles of the scrolls. The American Schools of Oriental Research at Yale University will publish this spring a detailed article on the work by Dr. Sanders and a complete study will be published in two years by the Oxford University Press in its series on “Discoveries in the Judean Desert of Jordan.”