Another Psalm?

The Old Testament contains 150 psalms that both Christians and Jews accept as divinely inspired. But the unknown compilers of the Psalter had hundreds of songs, most of them long ago lost, to choose from. Last week the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem released the first translation of a newly discovered Hebrew poem that at one time may have been included among the canonical psalms.

The psalm comes from the most important of recent Dead Sea Scroll discoveries: a blackened, decaying goatskin Psalter that was dug up near Wadi Qumran by a Bedouin in 1956. After long and careful treatment, the scroll was unrolled by James A. Sanders, professor of Old Testament at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. "All it required." said Dr. Sanders, who took ten days for the delicate job, "was a penknife, a humidifier and guts." Written down between A.D. 30 and 50, the Psalter scroll was presumably used for worship by the Essenes--a community of Jewish ascetics who were wiped out by Roman legions about 30 years after Christ's death. The new scroll, partly damaged by water, contains 39 hymns found in the Biblical Psalter and three noncanonical psalms that scholars had previously seen in Greek, Syriac or Aramaic, but not in Hebrew. Two others are entirely new; the one that Sanders has translated is "an apostrophe to Zion." Sample lines, from his English version: Hope for thee does not perish, O Zion, nor is hope for thee forgotten.

Who has ever perished in righteousness or who has ever survived in his iniquity? Man is tested according to his way. Every man is requited according to his deeds.

All about are thine enemies cut off, O Zion, and all who hate thee are scattered.

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