ChristianIsrael will display the entire Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The scrolls are made up of thousands of fragments and digitally photographing all of them is a task of Herculean proportions.
They are also uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, and these discoveries might have significant scholarly impact.
The 2,000-year-old scrolls were found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, and 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, mostly inscribed on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century BCE to the first century CE.
