book_r72.jpe

The coolest news of the day…….

Ireland’s archeologists heralded as a miracle Tuesday the accidental discovery of an ancient book of psalms _ discovered last week when an exceptionally alert construction worker spotted something as he drove the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to 800 A.D. to 1000 A.D. and, according to Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan, is the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries. Never before has such a fragile, old document been discovered buried in the soggy earth of Ireland.

“This is really a miracle find,” said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before it is put on public display.

“There’s two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out,” Wallace said in an interview. “First of all, it’s unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing.”

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There’s more here….

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations’ attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

Wallace said several experts spent Tuesday analyzing only that page — the number of letters on each line, lines on each page, size of page — and the book’s binding and cover, which he described as “leather velum, very thick wallet in appearance.”

It could take months of study, he said, just to identify the safest way to pry open the pages without damaging or destroying them. He ruled out the use of X-rays to investigate without moving the pages.

Ireland already has several other holy books from the early medieval period, including the ornately illustrated Book of Kells, which has been on display at Trinity College in Dublin since the 19th century.

Psalm 83 deals with the confederacy of hate against Israel. The haters not only want to wipe out Israel but also every remembrance of the nation. Of all the verses in the book of Psalms it’s extremely interesting and timely that the book would be opened to Psalm 83.

I’m taking How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill back off the shelf again.

I love how God uses the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

Hang Right Politics has more.

Read even more here.

The Irish Times has more information.

This is an interesting link found in the comments at Hot Air.

Welcome to The Anchoress readers!

Welcome to Gina Cobb readers!

UPDATE: The verse was actually about the “vale of tears.”

An ancient Irish manuscript found in a bog last week does not refer to “wiping out Israel”, the National Museum of Ireland said on Thursday, after a flood of enquiries wondering at the timing of the discovery.

The confusion arose because the manuscript uses an old Latin translation of the Bible known at the Vulgate, which numbers the psalms differently from the later King James version, the 1611 English translation from which many modern texts derive.

“The Director of the National Museum of Ireland … would like to highlight that the text visible on the manuscript does not refer to wiping out Israel but to the ‘vale of tears’,” the museum said.

The vale of tears is in Psalm 84 in the King James version.

“It is hoped that this clarification will serve comfort to anyone worried by earlier reports of the content of the text,” the museum said.