Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Dead Sea Scrolls....Digitally?


Indeed.

From a brief piece in the New York Times...

The digitization project, the result of two years of scanning using technology developed by NASA, allows users to zoom in on details of the often highly fragmentary scrolls, which contain versions of every book of the Hebrew Bible (except the Book of Esther), including one of the oldest known copies of Genesis and a copy of Psalms containing one of the oldest known references to King David.
The scrolls, believed to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that settled in the desert at Qumran in the Judean desert after fleeing Jerusalem sometime around the second and first centuries B.C., also include a number of non-biblical books that provide insight into the origins of Christianity. Five scrolls were previously digitized, and posted online by the Israel Museum last year.

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