http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/middleeast/06stone.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print&
A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Yeshua, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
Based on the stance and form of the letters, the distinguished decipherers of the inscription (Ada Yardeni and Binyamin Elizur) date it to the late first century B.C.E. or early first century C.E. Dr. Ada Yardeni is one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient Semitic languages, paleography, and epigraphy—she has published over a dozen books on these subjects. Dr. Yardeni was the first scholar to study and translate the text now known as “Gabriel’s Revelation.” Her research and translation were published as an article titled “A New Dead Sea Scroll in Stone?”
http://www.bib-arch.org/archive.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=34&Issue=1&ArticleID=16&extraID=14
The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone. The tablet has been named by scholars as “Gabriel’s Revelation” because it suggests that the angel Gabriel was instructed by God to direct that the Messiah be raised from the dead on the third day.
The stone tablet was discovered and is owned by a Israeli-Swiss Jewish man by the name of David Jeselsohn who didn’t understand its significance when he purchased it.
Dr. Knohl published a book about all this in 2009 entitled, Messiahs and Resurrection in “The Gabriel Revelation.” and "The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls" (first published in Hebrew in 2000 and then in English in 2002).A respected Israeli scholar and professor at Hebrew University is making an intriguing and compelling case that it is a distinctly Jewish notion to expect the Messiah to come, die as a “suffering servant” as an atonement for sins and the redemption of Israel, and then to rise from the dead on the third day. In the book, Dr. Knohl explains the various Jewish theories about the Messiah, including the idea of a “Messiah son of David” who will be a reigning king on the earth like King David was, and a “Messiah son of Joseph” who will be rejected by his brothers, mistreated, left for dead but will eventually reappear and save not only the nation of Israel but the world like Joseph did in the book of Genesis.
One of the biggest arguments given for a Jew not to believe in Yeshua is that there is no evidence that the Jewish people, prophets, rabbis ever taught a suffering servant. Well, this is evidence to the contrary. In response to the Pharisees as recorded in
Luke 19:40, Yeshua recited the prophecy of Habakkuk who wrote: "For out of [the] wall a stone itself will cry out..." by saying, "I tell you, if these remained silent, the STONES would cry out."