A New Genesis

When scholars got a look at a small fragment of the seventh and last of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Jordan in 1947, they discovered the name of Lamech, the father of Noah. They concluded that the seventh scroll was an apocryphal Book of Lamech. There the matter stood, for the seventh scroll seemed too brittle to be unrolled.

In 1954 Israel bought the seventh scroll (and three others) from Jerusalem's Syrian Metropolitan Mar Athanasius Samuel, and experts at Hebrew University tackled the problem of unrolling it. Slowly softened by humid air, the leather scroll finally opened. Its center yielded four complete and legible pages and several fragments. Last week the secret of the seventh scroll was revealed. It proved to be a warning against jumping to conclusions about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Far from being part of the Book of Lamech, the pages were an Aramaic version of Chapters 12 to 15 of Genesis, interwoven with stories and legends about the Patriarchs. As scholars examined the scroll further, it became clear that all of it deals with the Book of Genesis in the same order as the accepted text. The fragment mentioning Lamech that had misled the scholars was evidently part of Chapter 5 of Genesis.

Precise details of the text will not be published until the four pages have been completely deciphered, but some interesting differences between the seventh scroll and the Book of Genesis have already come to light. Items:

P: The text is written in a style unlike that of Genesis, and is partly in the first person, recalling the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Jubilees.

P: In Chapter 12, in which Abraham's wife Sarah is taken by the Pharaoh in Egypt, the scroll adds a detailed account of Sarah's beauty, describing her feet, legs, face and hair.

P: In Chapter 13, where God instructs Abraham to walk "through the land in the length, and in the breadth thereof,'' the scroll adds a first-person account by Abraham of his journey.

P: Chapter 14, which describes the Battle of the Kings, details names and places that differ from Genesis or clarify known translations.

P: The scroll reports, in Chapter 15, a colloquial discussion between Abraham and his wife after God promised them a son. Genesis makes no mention of such a conversation.

The deciphering will take months, but, said Archeologist Yigael Yadin: "We hope that by summer the world will know just exactly how beautiful Sarah was."

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