http://SupremeMasterTV.com -- Unlocking the Dead Sea Scrolls - P1/2. Episode: 1746, Air Date: 26 June 2011.
Welcome, esteemed viewers, to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms.
Today, we will visit the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation in Jerusalem which takes care of the preservation, exhibition and publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Also called the Qumran Scrolls, these precious documents have even been regarded as the most important archeological finding of the 20th century. They are by far the oldest existing scrolls of biblical scriptures studied in three of the world's major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
My name is Pnina Shor and I'm a head of a new unit that the Israel Antiquities Authority established to take care of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the unit is called Dead Sea Scrolls Project, and what we do is we take care of the scrolls physically, meaning conservation and preservation of the scrolls. We do all the curatorial work. We are in charge of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions all over the world. And we are in charge of this big, huge digitalization project that we are about to begin.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of hundreds of documents from the Hebrew Bible as well as religious texts which are not part of the biblical canon.
My name is Emanuel Tov. I am a professor of Hebrew Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. I teach Bible and I teach Dead Sea Scrolls.
Some 20 years ago, I've been appointed as the editor-in-chief of the International Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Committee. Before that time, I studied the Dead Sea Scrolls in general and I also published some scrolls, but at that point 20 years ago, I was appointed to oversee some 50, 60, 70 people in the whole world that were involved with the publication of the scrolls.
It means that we look at the little fragments and we try to read them. We call that "to decipher" what is written on each small fragment, and we try to combine the fragments to a larger picture. And we then try to understand. And since the scrolls are fragmentary, we have to reconstruct what is found in the places that have not been preserved, and we write a commentary on each scroll.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, that's the name we give to these fragments which have been found in 1947 in a cave, and then afterwards in several additional caves near the Dead Sea. That's the lowest point on Earth, a very hot area in Israel. And because it was a hot area, the fragments have been preserved very well. It's an enormous amount of material. We now reckon that they are more than 900 different scrolls, although sometimes only small pieces of a scroll have been preserved.
The scrolls were first discovered in 1947 at Khirban Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea by a Bedouin shepherd boy. From 1947 to 1956, many scrolls were unearthed in several locations, mostly along the western shore of the Dead Sea. In the 1960s, more scrolls were found during the excavation of the ancient fortress of Masada. And even in the last decade, there have still been a few new findings of scrolls.
They give us a very good life picture of literature that was used by the Jewish people 2,000 years ago. They are written in ancient Hebrew, and ancient Hebrew is the language of the Hebrew Bible. And a smaller group is in Aramaic. That's a language that is related to Hebrew, and some of the books in the Hebrew Bible like Ezra, Daniel are also in Aramaic.
And Aramaic was the language that was spoken by Jesus. So it's a very important language. Some scrolls were written in the Greek language, the language that was the language of the period. The proper conservation of these unique scrolls is an elaborate task and an enormous responsibility which requires a lot of dedication.
My name is Elena Libman. I am the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls conservation laboratory of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem. Shortly after the discovery, they were re-placed from the desert to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. And a team of eight scholars dealt with the scrolls and when deciphering and putting the right position to the million fragments, unfortunately they used tape.
Actually nobody wanted to do any harm to the scrolls, but the fact is that harm was done. Let me show you the sample of such a plate with more than 30 I think, tiny fragments written in Hebrew and put in between two sheets of plain glass, window glass. And you can see the tape glued on the back side of each fragment, sometimes several layers, one upon another. When two or three parts of same fragment were found, unfortunately they were joined in such an inappropriate way.
First thing which was done when we became conservators here -- it was almost 20 years ago -- was to replace the fragment from glass plates to acid-free cardboards. Most of them are now in acid-free cardboards but there are some, about 10 or 15 plates, like this one, remained in glas
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Unlocking the Dead Sea Scrollby Quansan523,877 views
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