SCROLLS

At right is a pic we took ourselves last month in Israel of the Qumran cave where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Today, we visited the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit showing in Milwaukee right now. It was fascinating.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in the present day West Bank.

The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, mostly on parchment, but some on papyrus. The manuscripts generally date between 150 BCE to 70 CE.

ALL or PORTIONS OF every book of the Bible except for Esther were found in the Qumran caves. In Jerusalem, the Shrine Of The Book holds many of these manuscripts, including the entire book of Isaiah on a single scroll - the largest of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

If you get a chance to get up there before they leave town, I highly recommend it.

And be blessed.