News Brief

A rare manuscript of a famous biblical passage is on display for the first time in Jerusalem. The 1,300-year-old manuscript, which contains the Song of the Sea section in the book of Exodus, dates from a period scholars call the “silent era” — a span of 600 years from the third to the eight centuries from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts survive — The Associated Press reported. “It comes from a period of almost darkness in terms of Hebrew manuscripts,” said Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem. The parchment is believed to have been left in a vast depository of medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in the late 1800s in a secret room at Cairo’s ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue. It was in private hands until the late 1970s, when its Lebanese-born American owner turned it over to the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. The manuscript, which is now on extended loan to the Israeli Museum, is housed near the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.