One of the last Dead Sea Scrolls has been reassembled and deciphered by researchers in Israel.
The scroll, which is about 2,100 years old, contains details of the religious and social life of the Jewish sect that is believed to have written the historic manuscripts that were discovered in 1947 in a cave network near the western shore of the Dead Sea. Among the nearly 900 scrolls were the earliest existing texts in Hebrew, as well as scrolls in Aramaic and Greek and many copies of the books of the Old Testament. The scrolls also contained previously unknown ancient Jewish texts that were not included in the biblical canon.
Researchers at Haifa University identified more than sixty fragments that belonged to a single scroll and worked to reassemble and translate it. They believe they have fragments of only one more scroll that has yet to be reconstructed and decoded.
While the scrolls have a lot in common with the foundational texts of Jewish law, there are also significant differences. Some of these appear in the latest scroll, which also revealed that the secretive sect that produced the scrolls differed from more dominant Jewish groups. They used a solar calendar, for example, unlike other Jews who use a lunar calendar, and they observed annual festivals, unknown to Jews today, for the changing of the seasons and the first pressings of olive oil and wine.