For the past few years, Dennis Mizzi and a group of other scholars have been tracking down and examining various objects from the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Among these objects are fragments of scrolls that appeared to be blank, which the team subjected to high-tech analysis. Megan Gannon explains what they found:

Upon examining a supposedly blank fragment in that collection, Joan Taylor, a researcher at King’s College, London thought she saw faint traces of a lamed—the Hebrew letter “L.” Following this hint, 51 seemingly blank fragments bigger than one centimeter were submitted to be photographed. The library team used multispectral imaging, a technique that captures different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum including some invisible to the naked eye. Taylor, Mizzi, and their third collaborator, Marcello Fidanzio, were surprised when they got the results and saw obvious lines of text on four of the fragments.

“There are only a few on each fragment, but they are like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle you find under a sofa,” Taylor said in a statement announcing the discovery.

“Some words are easily recognizable, like Shabbat,” Mizzi says. That word appears in a fragment with four lines of text, [which] may be related to the biblical book of Ezekiel, Mizzi says. However, he and his colleagues are only beginning to interpret the fragments, and he says it is too early to speculate on their meaning. “We’re still working to figure out the letters that are visible on the fragments,” he says. The team wants to perform further tests to elucidate the physical aspects of the artifacts, including the composition of the ink and the production of the parchment.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.