ABSTRACT
The only one of the scrolls from Cave One which had not been read and published when these had all been acquired by the Israeli government was originally referred to, on the basis of two detached fragments, as the Book of Lamech, a work mentioned in an ancient list of apocrypha. It was in much worse condition than the others of this group. The layers were so stuck together by some gluey substance exuded during the decomposition of the leather that it was difficult to unroll it, and the leather was now so dry that it was difficult to keep it from crumbling. The ink in which the scroll was written, which seemed different from that of the other scrolls and sometimes either ate away the leather or gave the effect of ink on blotting paper, made it also very hard to read, so that recourse had to be made to infra-red rays. The lower parts of the columns were covered by a sheet of some thin white material, and this had to be removed. Part of the scroll has been rotted away, so that the tops or bottoms of columns are missing. The Hebrew University published in 1956 five more or less legible columns of this document, edited by Professors Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad, and announced that work was going forward on the rest. It now turns out that only at the beginning is this apocryphon concerned with Lamech; it is an Aramaic version of Genesis. In patches, it follows Genesis quite closely, and in 254others it corresponds with the intertestamental books of Enoch and Jubilees, which were perhaps partly derived from this text. The tentative date assigned to this copy is the end of the first century b.c. or the first half of the first century a.d.
