Artifacts to go digital
Decades after a Bedouin shepherd stumbled upon the famed Dead Sea Scrolls, technological advancements have uncovered additional text never before decipherable on the ancient biblical manuscripts. Using infrared technology, the Israel Antiquities Authority had recently begun digitally photographing the scrolls in order to monitor their condition. But when the first scans came back, officials noticed that formerly illegible portions were now clearly readable. Israel Antiquities Authority head of conservation Pnina Shor told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation it was “like letters coming back to life.” Once the digital scans of the scrolls are completed, the Israel Antiquities Authority plans to make the images available on the Internet where anyone can view them.




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back to top8 Comments to “Artifacts to go digital”
This is indeed wonderful news.
I do hope that the material is indeed made readily available, perhaps in digital form, to allow widespread review and research.
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Some Dead Sea documents, notably the Allepo Codex is now online:
http://www.aleppocodex.org/
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Well that’s super cool.
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That’s is cool, but how many people can read these ancient languages?
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KBells,
Not many. But in my understanding, it is still good for them to be digitized and publicly available because the actual documents are considered to be too fragile to be regularly handled even by a small number of scholars. Now the whole community of people who can read them will be able to.
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Kbells,
The Hebrew language has not changed over time like English has. TJ took Hebrew in seminary, as many ordained pastors do, so potentially the texts would be open to any who spoke or studied Hebrew, including modern Jews.
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Cool stuff!
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are mostly in Biblical Hebrew, which millions of people can read. Some of them have different scripts or are in Aramaic, but the vast majority can be read by Christian seminarians with a couple of semesters of Hebrew and a good dictionary. They can also be read by a Jewish person, if that person actually learned Hebrew as a kid.
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