The "Power" of the Priestly Blessing - Torah portion Naso
Ketef Hinnom "Priestly Blessing" amulet, c. 600 BCE In 1979, a pair of silver amulets were found in Ketef Hinom, a series of burial chambers southwest of Jerusalem's Old City. On them is etched, in Paleo-Hebrew script, a version of the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6:23-27. Putting aside the textual discrepancies between the amulets and the Masoretic Text, these etchings represent the oldest surviving Torah verses ever discovered, dating to roughly 600 BCE, before the Babylonian exile. Which is significant, being that we have hundreds of examples of pre-exilic writing, most of them ostraca (potsherds with ink inscriptions) and none, other than these amulets, contain verses from the Torah. It's also significant that the blessing was used as an amulet, and that it was found in a burial chamber. Biblical scholar Baruch Levine writes about this in his commentary on Numbers: It was a widespread ancient custom to bury valuable or useful possessions with the dead, on ...