The Silver Scrolls That Took Three Years to Unroll — and Turned Out to Be Scripture

In 1979, archaeologists led by Gabriel Barkay of Tel Aviv University were excavating a burial complex at Ketef Hinnom, just southwest of Jerusalem’s Old City, near the valley later remembered in the Bible as Gehenna. In Chamber 25 of Cave 24, a repository sealed off centuries earlier by a collapsed ceiling had gone undisturbed. While clearing it, a teenage volunteer on the team turned up two small strips of metal. They didn’t look like much — corroded, tightly rolled, barely the size of a fingertip. It would take years before anyone could say for certain what was written on them.

Three years just to open them

The two objects, now catalogued as KH1 (27 x 97 mm) and KH2 (11 x 39 mm), were silver sheets that had originally been inscribed, then rolled up tightly enough to be worn — almost certainly as protective amulets. After roughly 2,600 years underground, the silver had corroded to the point that unrolling it by force would likely have shattered it.

Conservators at the Israel Museum spent close to three years working out a method to open the scrolls without destroying them. The smaller of the two, KH2, was successfully unrolled first, around 1983; KH1 followed. What emerged, under magnification, was a surface covered in minute Paleo-Hebrew script.

A text that echoes Numbers 6

When scholars worked through the inscriptions, KH2 in particular turned out to closely parallel the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26 — “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you…” The divine name YHWH appears clearly on the scrolls, and the core sequence of blessing language tracks the biblical wording, though not as an exact quotation: some phrases are abbreviated or reordered compared to the text as it appears in the Hebrew Bible today. KH1 preserves additional language echoing covenantal and mercy formulas found elsewhere in the Torah.

Barkay published a full report in the journal Tel Aviv in 1992. Then, in 2004, Barkay teamed up with Marilyn J. Lundberg, Andrew G. Vaughn, and Bruce Zuckerman — using advanced photographic and digital-imaging techniques developed through the West Semitic Research Project at USC — to re-examine the inscriptions in detail. Their study, published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR 334), confirmed most of the earlier readings and strengthened the case for dating the scrolls to the very end of the First Temple period, shortly before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586/7 BCE.

Why the dating matters

The dating hasn’t been uncontested. Barkay initially proposed the late seventh century BCE, then revised that to the early sixth century on paleographic grounds; a handful of scholars have argued, based on script style or excavation context, for a somewhat later date. But the 2004 re-analysis reinforced the consensus view: these amulets belong to the very end of the First Temple era, just before the Babylonian conquest.

That matters because of what it implies about the timeline of the biblical text itself. The oldest Dead Sea Scroll fragments date to roughly the third century BCE. If the Ketef Hinnom scrolls really do belong to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, they predate the Dead Sea Scrolls by several hundred years. In other words: wording strikingly close to the priestly blessing wasn’t just composed at some point and later attributed an early date by biblical authors — it was already being inscribed on precious metal and worn on the body in Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile. For anyone inclined to treat the biblical text as a late literary construction with no roots earlier than the Persian or Hellenistic periods, this is a hard physical fact to explain away.

None of this means the scrolls are a verbatim copy of the Numbers passage as we read it today — they aren’t. Word order differs, and some phrases from the biblical version are missing. But the presence of the divine name and the recognizable blessing structure, on an artifact this old, tells us that the core of this text had deep roots well before the exile.

Both scrolls are now held in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Scan of the Ketef Hinnom KH2 silver scroll, widely regarded as the oldest surviving artifact bearing text also found in the Hebrew Bible · Public Domain (PD-Art). A photograph of the actual excavated artifact.

References

• Gabriel Barkay, “The Priestly Benediction on Silver Plaques from Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem,” Tel Aviv 19.2 (1992): 139–192
• Gabriel Barkay, Marilyn J. Lundberg, Andrew G. Vaughn, and Bruce Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 334 (2004): 41–71
• Jeremy D. Smoak, “The Ketef Hinnom Amulets: Wearing the Priestly Blessing for Protection,” TheTorah.com

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