Montana Resident Donates 2700-Year-Old Papyrus to Israel
The Israeli Antiquities Authorities Theft Prevention Unit was on the hunt for a rare 2,700-year-old Dead Sea scroll, a papyrus letter written in Hebrew from the First Temple period. You might think Israeli intel would be combing the Holy Land for clues, but all the evidence pointed them to the treasure state, Montana, where the owner of the rare papyri bought it during a Christian mission to Israel in 1965. The Dead Sea papyri was recently repatriated to Israel.
What I love about this story is that the Christian owner’s son who inherited the rare find was aware of the high value of the scroll fragment, but still chose to donate the papyrus to the state of Israel, first to memorialize his mother. But second, because he knew that it was the right thing to do as a Christian. And if that’s not amazing enough, any Dead Sea text that is found and archived in Israel is a historical piece of evidence, proving that the Jewish people have had a continual presence in the Holy Land for thousands of years.
(Source: timesofisrael.com)
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