c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) It is a prayer heard in almost every synagogue and church throughout the world: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace.” This beloved prayer even became part of a song in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”

While the English translation is quite elegant, the original Hebrew language of the Birkat Hacohanim, or Priestly Benediction, has a stately poetic quality that is both graceful and reassuring. The prayer appears in the biblical book of Numbers 6:24-26, but when rabbis, priests and ministers invoke this three-part blessing, they rarely give much thought to its age or origin.

However, a recent New York Times article described how a combination of brilliant scholarship and state-of-the-art computer technology has provided compelling evidence that the Hebrew text of the Birkat Hacohanim was etched on two silver amulets as long ago as 600 B.C.

An additional inscription on one of those amulets calls the God of Israel “the rebuker of evil.” It is a biblical phrase that appears centuries later in the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

The dating of the amulets places it nearly 20 years before King Nebuchadnezzar’s army destroyed the First Holy Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and exiled the defeated Jews to Babylonia (modern-day Iraq). In addition, it is 400 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered in 1947 in the Judean wilderness east of Israel’s capital.

In a breakthrough in biblical archaeology, a team of Israeli and American experts analyzed the pair of tiny silver amulets that were first found 25 years ago in a tomb near the Old City of Jerusalem. But it is only now, a quarter-century later, that modern imaging techniques, including advanced infrared systems, are available that can “see” the etched Hebrew writing on ancient artifacts far better than the human eye.

Dr. Gabriel Barkay of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, who discovered the amulets, has worked with a group of scholars from the University of Southern California. Adding to the academic talent were scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The public announcement that the Priestly Benediction was already in use on amulets as early as 600 B.C. has extraordinary academic and political implications.

During the 19th century many biblical scholars, primarily German academics, wrote lengthy treatises “proving” the Hebrew Bible was a relatively late invention of a group of Jewish priests writing centuries after the Babylonian Exile. Julius Wellhausen was the leader in this effort to demonstrate the so-called “Old Testament” was a mostly fictional account written to provide credibility and legitimacy for the ruling Jewish authorities.

The Wellhausen view, called “higher biblical criticism,” often contained a thinly disguised animus that derided Jewish assertions about the Bible’s historical authenticity and minimized the ancient Jewish link to the land of Israel. Sadly, Wellhausen’s theories remained the dominant school of biblical thought for many years. Only recently have the findings of modern archaeology begun to undermine that position.

It has been said, partly in jest but mostly in truth, that “higher biblical criticism” was actually a form of academic “higher anti-Semitism.”

Dr. Wayne Pitard, professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions at the University of Illinois, sees the early dating of the Birkat Hacohanim, around 600 B.C., as a repudiation of higher criticism: He said the Hebrew inscriptions on the amulets are “actually closer to the biblical parallels than previously recognized.”

The new findings are also one more negation of an obscene lie that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and some of his followers have repeated in recent years. They falsely allege that the two Jewish Holy Temples in Jerusalem never existed and they reject the historical fact that Jews were residing in the land of Israel 3,000 years ago. Arafat calls such claims Israeli propaganda, but unfortunately some people believe Arafat’s ugly lies. His aim is to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel.

The indisputable fact that the Hebrew-language Priestly Benediction was part of Jewish religious life more than 2,600 years ago in Jerusalem not only confirms the Bible’s authenticity, but provides new evidence of the inextricable bond between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

Being a biblical scholar was once considered a boring profession. But today it is an exciting field of study, and I can’t wait for the next archaeological breakthrough.

MO/PH END RNS