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Soon on the Web: Dead Sea Scrolls
In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a
cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking:
digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea
Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file - among the most sought-after
and examined documents on earth - available to all on the Internet.
Equipped with highly powerful cameras with resolution and
clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights
that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are
uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls,
discoveries that could have real scholarly impact.
The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves
near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every
book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as
apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of
Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the
third century B.C. to the first century A.D.
Only a handful of the scrolls exist in large pieces, with
several on permanent exhibit at the Israel Museum here in its dimly lighted
Shrine of the Book. Most of what was found is separated into 15,000 fragments
that make up about 900 documents, fueling a longstanding debate on how to order
the fragments as well as the origin and meaning of what is written on them. The
scrolls' contemporary history has been something of a tortured one because they
are among the most important sources of information on Jewish and early
Christian life. After their initial discovery they were tightly held by a small
circle of scholars. In the last 20 years access has improved significantly, and
in 2001 they were published in their entirety. But debate over them seems only
to grow.
Scholars continually ask the Israel Antiquities Authority,
custodians of the scrolls, for access to them and museums around the world seek
to display them. Next month, for example, the Jewish Museum of New York will
begin an exhibition of six of the scrolls.
The keepers of the scrolls, people like Pnina Shor, head of
the conservation department of the Israel Antiquities Authority, are delighted
by the intense interest but say that each time a scroll is exposed to light,
humidity and heat, it deteriorates.
In fact, she says, even without such exposure there is
deterioration because of the ink used on some of the scrolls as well as the
residue from the Scotch tape used by the 1950s scholars in piecing together
fragments.
The entire collection was photographed only once before - in
the 1950s using infrared and those photographs are stored in a
climate-controlled room since they show things already lost from some of the
scrolls. The old infrared pictures will also be scanned in the new digital
effort.
"The project began as a conservation necessity,"
Shor explained. "We wanted to monitor the deterioration of the scrolls and
realized we needed to take precise photographs to watch the process. That's
when we decided to do a comprehensive set of photos, both in color and
infrared, to monitor selectively what is happening. We realized then that we
could make the entire set of pictures available online to everyone, meaning
that anyone will be able to see the scrolls in the kind of detail that no one
has until now."
The process will probably take one to two years - more
before it is available online - and is being led by Greg Bearman, who retired
from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Data collection is headed by Simon
Tanner of Kings College London. Bearman is also using a specially made $75,000
spectral camera that can produce a photographic image of previously illegible
sections.
Jonathan Ben-Dov, a professor of biblical studies at the
University of Haifa, is taking part in the digitalization project. Watching the
technicians gingerly move a fragment into place for a photograph, he said that
it had long been very difficult for senior scholars to get access to these
scrolls because of great demand and risk to the documents. Once this project is
completed, he said, "every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed
look at them from numerous angles."
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