Scroll On Down!

In 1947, a young Beduin boy in Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, discovered a desert cave in which were hidden a collection of documents, hand written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, but with some written on papyrus.

 

These documents and others discovered a little later, which together became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, sparked huge interest among religious scholars, historians and archaeologists – partly because of their historical significance and partly because of their possible relevance to existing biblical texts.   However, the task of deciphering them presented considerable technical problems because of the age and fragility of the material on which they were written.

Sixty years on, after much painstaking work, the contents of the scrolls have finally been revealed and translated.  And with specialist technical assistance and funding, provided notably by Google, the scrolls have also been digitised and are available online for access by a worldwide readership.

And so, as Dr Johnson might have said, (but probably didn’t!), “What has all that got to do with the price of fish?”  Well, you may, or may not, be surprised to learn that the WebWatch2000 ‘ Reference’category (http://www.webwatch2000.com/portal/reference/) contains a convenient link to the scrolls in the Israel Museum and also to additional background information on their provenance, as provided by Wikipedia.