An Italian scholar had said Wednesday that he had discovered the oldest known Torah scroll, which is complete and dates back to the 12th to the 13th century.
The scroll, which contains the Pentateuch, or five books of Moses, was stored in the library at the University of Bologna and was mistakenly catalogued as a document from the 17th century. Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew, said that the scroll was written and that its segments of sheepskin was sewed together between 1155 and 1225.
When Perani re-examined the scroll, he realized that it used a script of the oriental Babylonian tradition, suggesting that it must have been extremely old.
He said that it was not the oldest known biblical text, but it was the oldest scroll of the Pentateuch found so far. Two independent studies corroborated the scroll’s age through carbon-dating tests. Perani said:
This was a scroll for liturgical use in the synagogue, with just consonants spelled out.
