The Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls: The Oldest Words of Scripture

In 1979, on a slope overlooking Jerusalem's Hinnom Valley, a thirteen-year-old volunteer on Gabriel Barkay's excavation was clearing a burial cave. A collapsed ceiling had sealed its lowest chamber, and it had escaped the looting that emptied the rest. Among the finds, with pottery, jewellery and arrowheads, were two tiny rolled strips of silver. The larger was under 10 centimetres long when unrolled, and the smaller about 4. They were amulets, meant to be worn on a cord. Unrolling them without destroying them took three years. Inside, scratched into the silver in the old Hebrew script, was the divine name YHWH and words that anyone who knows the Hebrew Bible recognises: "May YHWH bless you and keep you."

The objects

• Two silver amulets, known as KH1 and KH2, from Cave 25 at Ketef Hinnom ("shoulder of Hinnom").
• Letters were incised in palaeo-Hebrew script. The writing is faint and damaged, and parts of both texts are reconstructed.
• Dating. Barkay first dated them on palaeographic grounds to the late seventh century BCE, then revised this towards the early sixth, just before the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE. A new edition using advanced imaging (Barkay, Vaughn, Lundberg and Zuckerman, BASOR, 2004) supported a pre-exilic date. A few scholars have argued for a later, Hellenistic date. Most specialists accept the late Iron Age.

The text

Both amulets carry a form of the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6:24–26. The biblical text, in the Masoretic tradition:

יברכך יהוה וישמרך
May YHWH bless you and keep you;

יאר יהוה פניו אליך ויחנך
may YHWH make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;

ישא יהוה פניו אליך וישם לך שלום
may YHWH lift up his face to you and give you peace.

The amulets' own wording is shorter and not identical. KH2, for example, preserves a version that moves from the blessing of the first line to "and give you peace". The difference matters. It shows the blessing circulating in a slightly different form from the later standard text.

Why they matter

These are the oldest known artefacts carrying a text also found in the Hebrew Bible, about four centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02). They show that this blessing, and the use of YHWH in personal protection, was current in Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile. They do not show that the Book of Numbers as a whole existed then. That wider question is open.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Words as protection. Rolled up and worn on the body, the blessing becomes an apotropaic object, one that guards against harm. The amulets also contain phrases about rebuking evil. This is an early physical case of what later Judaism formalised in the tefillin and mezuzah: scripture worn and fixed in place for protection.

The old script. Palaeo-Hebrew is the script later reserved for the divine name in some Dead Sea Scrolls (V02). Here it is simply the ordinary writing of its time. The script's later role as a sacred marker grew out of this everyday use.

Connections

Pre-exilic Israel (ch07), the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02), the Ark of the Covenant (V07), and the Priestly Blessing's continuing use in synagogue and church liturgy (ch19, ch16).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/ketef-hinnom-scrolls.html