Word: lamech
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story, reported one of its translators, Soldier-Scholar Yigael Yadin of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, was written on goatskin in Aramaic in "a very pleasant hand." It tells how Noah's father Lamech (son of Methuselah) was married to his own sister-a custom necessitated in earliest times by the shortage of women. Lamech, according to the scroll, began to suspect that Baby Noah was not his own child-apparently with good reason. At birth the child "rose up in the hands of the midwife and conversed with the Lord of Righteousness." His body was "white as snow...
Still worried, Lamech asked his father Methuselah (who died at the age of 969) to apply to his grandfather Enoch, who had disappeared at the age of 365 and won his "dwelling-place among the angels.'' But what immortal Enoch told Lamech about the future arkitect is unknown. The rest of the story is missing...
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...
...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...
Scholars identified among the manuscripts a full text of Isaiah, a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk, a collection of hymns, a scroll tentatively thought to be the Book of Lamech, a heretofore unknown work called the War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness. The manuscripts apparently dated back to the second or third century B.C. and antedated the oldest existing Hebrew Biblical manuscript (Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus, A.D. 916) by more than a thousand years...