Even those who don’t read Hebrew know that, like Arabic, it is read from right to left. But not so the Hebrew in an unusual Dead Sea Scroll, which scholars believe belonged to members of a long-vanished Jewish sect. Israel Hayom reports:

Written in Hebrew from left to right, an unusual direction, the scroll includes Greek, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew scripts, along with coded messages. Oren Ableman, a curator-researcher with the Judaean Desert Scrolls Unit [of the Israel Antiquities Authority], suggests that the scroll’s writing style was intended for a select audience, likely the sect’s leadership.

The scroll presents a worldview in which a person’s birth date influences his physical traits and the balance of light and darkness in his soul. Each date is associated with specific levels of these qualities, affecting individuals born on those dates. According to Ableman, the scroll might have been used as part of an initiation process for new members of the community, who referred to themselves as “sons of light.” Prospective members were evaluated based on their birth date and physical characteristics, such as head shape, to determine their suitability.

Jim Davila, a scholar of this era, describes the scroll as “a physiognomic tractate, a work that claims to deduce what a person is like on the basis of . . . physical characteristics (length of fingers and toes, eye color, height, voice, etc.),” and notes that similar works “circulated in Hebrew in the Middle Ages.”

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.