In the Light of Theosophy
- Details
- Published: Friday, 18 September 2020 17:59
[This article appeared in the August 2020 issue of The Theosophical Movement. For more articles published in this excellent magazine follow this link: http://www.ultindia.org/previous_issues.html]
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of about 1,000 ancient manuscripts. Which include various versions of books of the Hebrew Bible and various other religious, legal and philosophical documents. Most of these scrolls were found between 1947 and the 1960s, which were mainly found in eleven caves near Qumran, located in Judean desert. Molecular biologist Oded Rechavi of Tel Aviv University and his colleagues observe that since the scrolls made of sheepskin and cow skin retain DNA from those animals, analysis of that DNA could help to figure out which of the more than 25,000 scrolls came from the same animals, and therefore from the same documents. Thus, for instance, the researchers assumed that scroll fragments from closely related sheep were more likely to come from the same document than those from distantly related sheep or from cows.