Ancient Torah Scroll Sheet Becomes Public Treasure, Thanks to Rutgers Historian
Parchment contains passage from Book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah
The oldest legible, intact Torah scroll sheet known to exist – a vital link to the founding documents of Judaism – was recently purchased by the Library of Congress for the public’s benefit, with help from Rutgers-New Brunswick scholar Gary Rendsburg.
The story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is contained on the sheet, which was written in Hebrew on vellum – calfskin parchment – in the Middle East during the 10th or 11th centuries C.E. It is about a millennium younger than the Dead Sea Scrolls, but those are fragments, while the copy that Rendsburg helped identify is a nearly complete scroll sheet.
The sheet, which measures 23 by 23.5 inches, originally would have been sewn to other sheets, each with five columns of text, to make a scroll. The parchment contains portions, whole or in part, of seven chapters of the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah. It commences in the middle of chapter 10 and ends in the middle of chapter 16.
“While the United States is a country built on the separation of church and state, religion has always played a major role in this country,” said Rendsburg, who holds the Blanche and Irving Laurie Chair of Jewish History in the Department of Jewish Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences. “The Bible has had a major influence, not just on American religious practice, but on the country’s literature, philosophy and politics.”
Rendsburg’s connection to the scroll sheet came via his connection to a former student, Ann Brener, who heads the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress’s African and Middle Eastern Division. Rendsburg recalled that Brener sent him an email with a link to an entry in a private catalog describing the scroll sheet – no photograph, just the description.
Was this a 1,000-year-old Torah scroll sheet? she wanted to know. Should the Library of Congress buy it?
“I knew immediately what it was,” Rendsburg recalled. “It had been sold at a Christie’s auction in 2001, and Jordan Penkower, a scholar at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, had written a scholarly paper about it in 2002.”
The description Brener sent Rendsburg was very similar to Penkower’s description. Rendsburg told his former student that the item was indeed highly valuable and would be an important addition to the Library’s collection.
The Hebrew manuscript begins with Exodus 10, in which God sends Moses and Aaron to the Egyptian ruler with the demand, “Let my people go.” It contains chapter 15, the Song of the Sea, which praises God for freeing the people of Israel from slavery: “I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalt-ed. Both horse and rider he has hurled into the sea.”
The song, in the sheet’s upper left section, stands out visually from the rest of the text. Its words are laid out like bricks on a wall – “brick over half-brick, half-brick over brick,” as Rendsburg describes it – rather than flush right like the page’s ordinary prose.