The Jerusalem Post:
A lost biblical manuscript discovered in 1878 long believed to be a forgery was authentic and likely predated the Dead Sea Scrolls by hundreds of years, making it the most ancient biblical scroll ever known in the modern era, Israeli scholar Prof. Idan Dershowitz has suggested.
“The text is very reminiscent of the book of Deuteronomy, and anyone who is familiar with it would feel it. But there are also some differences,” Dershowitz said.
In his book, The Valediction of Moses, Dershowitz, chair of Hebrew Bible and Its Exegesis at the University of Potsdam in Germany, looked into the story known as “the Shapira affair” and revealed how it might offer unprecedented insights into the genesis of the Bible.
In 1878, an antique dealer named Moses Wilhelm Shapira laid his hands on a bunch of artifacts that he considered very promising; some members of a Bedouin tribe had uncovered what appeared to be linen-wrapped ancient parchments in a cave in the desert by the Dead Sea. Shapira, a Russian Jew who had converted to Christianity before moving to Jerusalem and opening a souvenir and antique store in the Old City, had the reputation of someone who could offer authentic and valuable artifacts as well as well-crafted forgeries.“
He sold objects made out of olive wood, postcards and so on, but he also dealt in manuscripts that he sold to many different institutions, including the British Museum, which still has a huge collection of Jewish texts obtained from Shapira,”
Shapira did not know how ancient the manuscript was, but he understood that it looked somewhat similar to the Book of Deuteronomy. The finding was offered to the British Museum, which exhibited it, attracting huge crowds.
At the time, the most ancient biblical texts ever found only dated back to the Middle Ages. The museum expressed interest in buying the Shapira manuscripts, as long as scholars the institution trusted confirmed their authenticity.
As they were still working however, another scholar, French Orientalist and diplomat Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau briefly examined the artifacts and immediately announced publicly that the documents were forgeries.
Clermont-Ganneau was a longtime nemesis of Shapira. Years before, he had exposed him for forging some allegedly ancient pottery figurines. After his statements, other experts followed suit. A few months later a disgraced Shapira would commit suicide.
The manuscripts were auctioned by Sotheby’s and bought by a bookseller, Bernard Quaritch, who in turn sold them to a scientist, Philip Brookes Mason, at the turn of the century. From that moment, their location remains unknown.“I heard stories about the Shapira affairs, and I found them interesting,” Dershowitz, who received his doctorate in biblical studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained. “After a couple of years, I became curious to see the text of the manuscripts.”
The scholar pointed out that for all the attention that the dramatic events have received through the decades, the content of the manuscript itself did not seem to be considered important. For this reason, he started to work on the partial transcriptions of the manuscripts by two of the 19th century scholars who examined them, and he eventually also uncovered the full transcriptions by Shapira himself.
“I immediately felt it could not be forgery,” Dershowitz said.
One of the reasons experts believed Shapira had manufactured the texts was that they thought the idea of Bedouin finding scrolls in a cave ludicrous. Little did they know that only seventy years later, some 25,000 fragments would be uncovered in caves near the Dead Sea, in what is considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all times.
“The transcription by Shapira, which I found in an archive in Berlin, also offers important proof that he did not forge the manuscripts. You can see that he was studying them hard, trying to figure out all sorts of things, writing questions in the margin. If he had created them, he would have not needed to do something like this,” Dershowitz pointed out.
However, some of the more crucial elements the scholar identified entered in the content of the text itself.“The text is very reminiscent of the book of Deuteronomy, and anyone who is familiar with it would feel it. But there are also some differences,” he said.
……
“What is interesting is that in 2002, an Israeli scholar named David Frankel, suggested that the story of the spies was a later addition to Deuteronomy, based on a close reading of the text, and he offered an alternative story similar to the one that is actually featured in the manuscript. How could Shapira have known, some 120 years earlier?” Dershowitz pointed out.
