A new website makes the ‘ultimate puzzle’ of biblical scholarship accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
An
Israel Antiquities Authority worker points to a spectral image
photograph of fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls, at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem on Wednesday, December 18 (photo credit: Miriam
Alster/Flash90).
Thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls
went online Tuesday with the launch of a new website by Google and the
Israel Antiquities Authority, part of a move to make the famed
manuscripts easily available to scholars and casual web surfers.
The website
provides access to high-resolution images of the famous scrolls, which
were written 2,000 years ago and first discovered at Qumran, on the Dead
Sea shore, in the 1940s.
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) is in
the process of photographing the thousands of fragments in its
possession — pieces of an estimated 900 different manuscripts — using
special imaging equipment first developed for NASA. The hi-tech cameras
have rendered visible sections of parchment that were previously
indecipherable.
A team at Tel Aviv University is using the new
images to try to piece together fragments into larger sections which
might yield new information about the content of some of the scrolls.
For scholars, the fragments are “the ultimate puzzle,” Pnina Shor, head
of the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls project, said Tuesday.
The scrolls, thought to have been written or
collected by Jews who left Jerusalem for the desert in the time of the
Second Temple two millennia ago, were one of the great archaeological
discoveries of the 20th century. They shed important light on ancient
Judaism, the birth of Christianity, and the evolution of the Bible...Continue reading...
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