Dead Sea Scrolls Essay

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been called the greatest manuscript find of all time. Discovered between 1947 and 1956, the Dead Sea Scrolls comprise some 800 documents but in many tens of thousands of fragments. The Scrolls date from somewhere between 250 B.C. to 68 A.D. and were written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; they contain Biblical works, prayers and legal texts and sectarian documents.This priceless collection of ancient manuscripts is invaluable to our understanding of the history of Judaism, the development of the Hebrew Bible, and the beginnings of Christianity. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, it not only demolished Pompeii, but also the nearby Roman settlement of Herculaneum. Centuries later, hundreds of scrolls were uncovered in the area 1752, but many were too damaged by age and burns to risk unrolling. Thanks to one of the world’s most sensitive

In 2009, a computer scientist studying the scrolls at the University of Kentucky in Lexington found traces of lead in the ink. However, researchers were cautious, due to the extent of the scrolls damage and the fact that most historians believed that lead-based ink wasn’t invented until about 400 years after the scrolls were written, van Gilder Cooke reports.Previously, the sayings of the wise and the ideas of our ancestors were in danger. For how could you quickly record words which the resistant hardness of bark made it almost impossible to set down? No wonder that the heat of the mind suffered pointless delays, and genius was forced to cool as its words were retarded. Hence, antiquity gave the name of liber to the books of the ancients; for even today we call the bark of green wood liber. It was, I admit, unfitting to entrust learned discourse to