Obscure Dead Sea Scroll Fragments Deciphered
Posted: Tue Jan 23, 2018 10:10 am
The article didn't mention the name of the manuscript, which is 4Q324d. There was an article on this in the Journal of Biblical Literature (JBL) late in 2017, which you can read here.
It's a calendar, and one of the last remaining unpublished scrolls. One interesting thing about it: it's in a secret code, using a simple substitution cipher. That's one of the reasons it's taken so long to transcribe. There are other encrypted texts, but we don't really know why they did that. Why would you use a secret code to encrypt a calendar? The other texts like this aren't particularly secret stuff either.