The new discoveries from the caves in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, which were revealed to the public on Tuesday, have been residing in the research labs of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), tucked away behind the children’s wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, for nearly a year now.

The IAA has an excellent PR operation, with never a week going by without it pushing out news of yet another tantalising archaeological discovery somewhere in Israel. But in this case, they held their fire. After all, a new Dead Sea Scroll doesn’t come along every day and they wanted the Israeli and international media to get a good look.

But hosting reporters and camera crews in the small crowded labs was not possible during the Covid-19 lockdowns. A press conference was scheduled in the short lull between the second and third coronavirus waves in December, but the Netanyahu-Gantz government fell and elections were called for that week and it was postponed yet again. As Israel finally began emerging this month from social distancing restrictions, they decided to go ahead with the big reveal a week before the election, in the hope that the headlines would not yet be totally consumed by politics.

It turned out to be excellent timing. Israeli news organisations, tired of incessant election campaigns and ravenous for anything else, descended on the labs in force. Dozens of journalists jostled outside the narrow entrance throughout the day, eager for their turn to get up close with ancient history. For a few hours, the politicians didn’t dominate the headlines. And it wasn’t just the Israelis. The Dead Sea Scrolls featured on news channels all across the world, from Canada to Indonesia.

The oldest biblical texts ever found are a source of worldwide fascination and intense scholarly debate. It’s unclear as yet whether the newly-discovered fragments of parchment with the words of the “minor” prophets Zecharia and Nahum, written in Greek except for God’s name in Hebrew, will have much of an effect on the controversies over the Tanakh’s provenance, its most original and accurate version, and whether it and the 900 other scrolls found so far by the Dead Sea were written by one of the “sects” living there, or originated in Jerusalem and were spirited away from Jerusalem for safekeeping during the Roman conquest.

But there is one very special feature of the new scroll.

Unlike nearly all the other Dead Sea scrolls, which reached the researchers only after passing through other hands, Bedouin shepherds, antique dealers, grave-robbers and shady middle-men, this is one of the very few which scholars had the opportunity to see first in the cave where they were originally found, before they were removed from the place in which they had been hidden nearly 2,000 years ago.

“For archaeologists, knowing the wider context in which the scrolls were found has immense value,” says Amir Ganor, head of the IAA’s Anti-Theft Unit, who led the massive survey of 80 kilometers of cliff-face and over 500 caves. The survey began four years ago, when it became clear to the IAA that sophisticated crime gangs were going to major lengths to pillage the caves and sell valuable scrolls on the black market.

This was the first time in six decades that Israeli archaeologists had studied not only scrolls from the Dead Sea but also taken a wider look at the human beings who lived in those caves. “One thing we’ve realised is that the Dead Sea caves, going back millennia, were a place people came to hide and often die,” says Dr Joe Uziel, head of the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls research unit. The discovery of the skeleton of a girl who had been laid to rest under a blanket in one of the caves 6,000 years ago, and of a perfectly preserved large storage basket woven from reads 10,500 years ago in the pre-pottery Neolithic period, are the first intriguing clues to a much older human presence nestling within that unforgiving terrain.

Back to the new scroll. It was found in a cave among artefacts, coins and arrow heads from the Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman occupiers in 132-136 CE. Why were a group of fugitive rebels, about to make their last stand against their Roman pursuers, carrying among their weapons and meagre supplies a scroll of biblical prophecies? Did the words of the prophets inspire them in their last hours?

On one of the larger fragments, an entire verse has been preserved. It’s from Zecharia (8:16): “Speak the truth to one another, administer sound and true justice in your courts.” Perhaps a message across time from another Jewish civilisation, resonating in today’s Israel, where prominent politicians called this week for the firing of Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit and the cancellation of the “travesty of justice” which are the bribery and fraud charges he has brought against the prime minister, a certain Benjamin Netanyahu.

Boost for Bibi

l In interviews this week, Mr Netanyahu refused to answer whether he intends to fire the attorney general if he is re-elected next week. He also denied, strenuously, that he will try to pass a law granting him immunity – as a serving prime minister – from prosecution. “Why should I? The case against me will collapse on its own. In fact, it’s already collapsing.”

Whether or not it’s collapsing, the first prosecution witnesses in his case are now scheduled to take the stand on 5 April, just thirteen days after the election. No matter the result next week, Mr Netanyahu cannot avoid his next day in court. The question is whether he can prevent there being many more such days.

In his stump speeches on the campaign trail over the last two weeks, he never mentions his case or the attorney general by name. But he does refer to him, in every speech, when he speaks of “legal advisers, frustrated politicians” who are preventing him from passing a stimulus package for businesses hurt by the pandemic.

“They say it’s ‘election economy’ [government funding which is forbidden on the eve of elections],” Mr Netanyahu sneers at Mendelblit in every speech. “But when I brought millions of vaccines to save lives, they didn’t say it’s ‘election medicine.’ I’m trying now to save businesses in which people invested their whole lives.

“They’re the ones who are doing cynical ‘election economy’.”

With only a week to go, there was finally good news for his campaign on Tuesday, as two polls put Likud on thirty seats, a small advance for the party which for months has been languishing on an average of 28 seats and no prospective majority for the Netanyahu bloc. Were these the harbingers of a last-minute Likud surge?

Two polls are insufficient to predict a trend (in other polls, Likud is still down), but there was other encouraging news for him in the underlying data. According to a poll commissioned for Channel 12, for the first time in 10 months a majority of the Israeli public, 57 percent, think the government is handling the pandemic well.

In other words, Israel’s successful vaccination roll-out is finally having an effect not only on levels of infection and illness but on public opinion as well. Will that translate into the votes Mr Netanyahu still needs? Or has this new-found feeling of satisfaction among Israelis come too late to rescue his campaign?

We’ll find out next week.