FIVE DIGITAL DEAD SEA SCROLLS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

Five of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls are now available online. Thanks to Israel’s national museum and search giant Google‘s Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, public or scholars in this field will have access to any scroll fragment or any manuscript for free. At this stage, five complete scrolls from the Israel Museum have been digitized for the project.

Dead sea scrolls were written at least 200 years before Jesus was born. Discovered in the late 1940s in caves in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, they are considered by many to be the single most important archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. It is the oldest known surviving biblical and extra-biblical texts in the world.

The 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls were photographed using a high-tech infrared camera which NASA uses for space imaging. The new pictures which are clearer than the originals allow researchers to detect words not visible to the naked eye.

By clicking on the Hebrew verses, users can automatically see an English translation.

The five Dead Sea Scrolls that have been digitized thus far include the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, the Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll, the Temple Scroll, and the War Scroll.

Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls and how they got there? No one knows, the mysteries of the scrolls are still the subject of intense debates.

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