The Oldest Words Ever Found

In 1979, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was excavating a series of burial caves along the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem when a thirteen-year-old volunteer made an accidental discovery. The boy broke through the floor of a chamber into a hidden repository untouched for twenty-six centuries. Among the artifacts were two tiny scrolls of hammered silver, each smaller than a cigarette. When technicians at the Israel Museum painstakingly unrolled them three years later, they found the oldest surviving text of Scripture ever discovered — older than the Dead Sea Scrolls by four hundred years.…