Parashat Naso

Bamidbar 6:22-27

So Shall You Bless

The fifteen words the priests were given to say over Israel, and the oldest biblical verses ever found.

For children, teens and adults

In 1979 archaeologists digging a burial cave on a slope above the Hinnom valley in Jerusalem found two tiny rolled-up sheets of silver. Scratched into them, in letters from before the Babylonian exile, were the words of this blessing. They are the oldest verses of the Bible anyone has ever dug up, about four centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, and somebody wore them round their neck. Which suggests these three lines were already the ones people reached for when they were frightened. Read them and the obvious question arrives fast: what is a blessing actually doing? The last verse of the passage says plainly that Hashem does the blessing, not the priests. So what are the priests for?

The whole passage, verse by verse