TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

To See The Historic Dead Sea Documents, Just Scroll Down

ADVERTISEMENT

New York Times News Service

Published: August 29, 2008

JERUSALEM - In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file - among the most sought-after and examined documents on Earth - available to all on the Internet.

Equipped with high-powered cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

Only a handful of the scrolls exist in large pieces, with several on permanent exhibit at the Israel Museum here in its dimly lighted Shrine of the Book.

Most of what was found is separated into 15,000 fragments that make up about 900 documents, fueling a longstanding debate on how to order the fragments as well as the origin and meaning of what is written on them.

The scrolls' contemporary history has been something of a tortured one because they are among the most important sources of information on Jewish and early Christian life.

After their initial discovery they were tightly held by a small circle of scholars. In the past 20 years, access has improved significantly, and in 2001 they were published in their entirety.

Scholars continually ask the Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the scrolls, for access to them, and museums around the world seek to display them. Next month, the Jewish Museum of New York will begin an exhibition of six of the scrolls.

The keepers of the scrolls, people such as Pnina Shor, head of the conservation department of the antiquities authority, are delighted by the intense interest but say that each time a scroll is exposed to light, humidity and heat, it deteriorates.

The entire collection was photographed only once before - in the 1950s using infrared - and those photographs are stored in a climate-controlled room because they show things already lost from some of the scrolls. The old infrared pictures also will be scanned in the new digital effort.

The process will probably take one to two years - more before it is available online.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT