Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  08.28.08 | 5:43 PM ET

imagePhoto of Dead Sea caves by LollyKnit via Flickr (Creative Commons)

A team of expert preservationists is hard at work in Jerusalem this week, aiming to make the Dead Sea Scrolls—all 15,000 fragments of them—available online as digital images. “The project began as a conservation necessity,” one interviewee told the New York Times. “We wanted to monitor the deterioration of the scrolls and realized we needed to take precise photographs to watch the process ... 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.”

That’s good news for scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike—although viewing the scrolls online is, I’m sure, no match for visiting the originals in Israel’s Shrine of the Book.

Tags: Middle East, Israel, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is a contributor to the World Hum blog. She is also a contributing editor at the Matador Network and at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, and a regular contributor to the Ottawa Citizen. Based in Ottawa, Canada, she loves to write about travel, history, sports, and culture high or low.


1 Comment for Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital

Torah 10.20.08 | 7:17 AM ET

This is very fascinating to me. I want to read these Dead Sea Scrolls in English, but it’ll probably be a while before they release a complete, inexpensive translation of all of them. As soon as they are released, however, I’ll buy them.

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