The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., has unveiled the oldest Jewish book ever discovered, just in time for Rosh Hashanah, “The Times of Israel” reported. The Jewish holiday began on Wednesday and continues through Friday.
“This is the most exciting find that has appeared in a millennium,” Sharon Liberman Mintz, curator of Jewish art at the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, told JNS.org.
According to the museum, the tiny book is a relic of an 8th-century civilization on the ancient trading route known as the Silk Road, created by Jews living as a minority among Buddhists who ruled the Bamiyan Valley in modern-day Afghanistan. Measuring five inches by five inches, the book combines a variety of texts written by different hands, including prayers, poems and what the museum says is the oldest known version of the Haggadah, the central text of the Passover seder.
The museum’s findings regarding the book are based on years of work by a team of researchers, but the exhibit is opening before those scholars have been able to publish their findings. The research is slated for release by Brill, a prominent Dutch academic publisher, in the form of 10 essays in April.
The exhibit’s co-curator, Sharon Mintz, acknowledged that until the scholarship comes out, it will be difficult for those working in the wider field of Jewish manuscripts to fully accept the museum’s story. But she projected confidence. “The Brill book will lay all doubts to rest,” Mintz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. By then, the exhibit will travel to New York City, where it will be on view at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Anchoring the scholarly discussion surrounding the book is a 2019 laboratory test that used carbon dating to estimate the book’s age at 1,300 years, astonishing researchers at the museum. Far more ancient written Hebrew texts had been discovered, but only on scrolls, most famously the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls that are displayed prominently in Israel. The carbon dating indicated that this was the earliest intact Hebrew codex by more than a century.
Before the lab’s result, the book had garnered little interest in the decades since it was first found in Afghanistan. A member of the country’s Hazara ethnic minority discovered the manuscript in 1997 in a cave near one of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas that were carved into a mountain in ancient times and deliberately destroyed in an explosion by the Taliban in 2001,
“Were it not for the extraordinary efforts of the Museum of the Bible, the age and even the origins of the world’s oldest Jewish book would have been forever lost,” the American Sephardi Federation said in a statement.
–Alan Goforth