The Associated Press is carrying an article on a recent biblical manuscript discovery. It appears to be the second half of the Ashkar manuscript, which dates to the 7th century. These 1300 year old manuscript halves have been reunited in Jerusalem. The significance of this discovery are at least two-fold.
Significance of the Find
- It completes an early form of the “Song of the Sea” from Exodus (13:19-16:1).
- It confirms a remarkable level of quality in bible translation throughout the ages.
The text includes a song of victory over the Egyptians when the Jews were liberated from slavery to make their way to Canaan, the Promised Land. Despite modern protests of the miraculous event of the Red Sea crossing, extant manuscripts continue to confirm this redemptive event, without protest from other documents from the same time period.
An excerpt: “The Lord is my strength and my song and he as become my salvation…You blew with your wind, the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters. Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods…”
What People Are Saying About It
The Song of the Sea manuscript demonstrates the tremendous fidelity with which the tremendous fidelity with which the Masoretic version of the Bible was transmitted over the centuries. – Dr. Adolfo Roitman
The reunification of the two pieces adds an important link in the chain, showing how the writing of the Hebrew Bible evolved through the so-called “silent” period — between the third and 10th centuries — from which nearly no Biblical texts survived. While in the Dead Sea Scrolls the song is arranged like prose, for example, in the newly reunited manuscript it is written like a poem, the same way it appears in the Hebrew Bible today. – AP article