2017-02-15

Dating DSS Awry #1 — Appendix

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

This post is an appendix to How Dating the Dead Sea Scrolls Went Awry — #1.

Solomon Birnbaum’s palaeographic dating of the DSS to the mid 1st C BCE was published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research No. 115 (Oct., 1949), pp. 20-22, “The Date of the Cave Scrolls“.

Birnbaum compared the Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1 with the Nash Papyrus. He set out key letters from each as follows:

The result of the comparison was then applied to the Covenant Scroll and the Habakkuk Commentary also from Cave 1:

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