Looks like we'll finally have free access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you're able to read Hebrew or Aramaic, that is.
Five scrolls have been put online now, and if I'm not mistaking they're aiming to digitize everything by 2016. Too late of course, I highly doubt that this spectacular act of wisdom-sharing will appeal to the sweaty masses running their weekly laps of gluttonous consumerism at the local Ikea. Which is too bad, because the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls constitutes one of the most important archaeological finds of the previous century, seeing as how the Scrolls shed light on the origins of Christianity and its connection to Judaism, and contain valuable information on the religious and everyday climate of the first century CE.
The caves where the scrolls were found.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered over a period of 9 years between 1947 and 1956 from a cluster of eleven caves lying along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, about 13 miles from Jerusalem. All in all, some 972 texts have been found, divided into thousands of fragments. They are taken to be written by the Essenes, a Jewish religious sect dedicated to abstinence, poverty and all those crackbrained denunciations of the physical world endemic to deranged group movements, but they were also dedicated to the belief of the messiah, or rigtheous teacher, arriving at the end of times, which we (and now also you) call "eschatology". Furthermore, like almost all Jewish orders, they were heavily engaged in the critical interpretation and explanation of the Old Testament which we (and now also you) call "exegesis".
Still not all of the texts have been published (nor even translated for that matter), and there was some deliciously shady stuff going on with this process in the 50's and 60's of the previous century, but I will leave that dangling in front of your noses until next time.
See you soon!
Here you can check out the digitized versions of the Scrolls. Bring a dictionary.
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