Two
thousand years after they were written and decades after they were
found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls can now
be examined by anyone with a computer. Israel’s national museum and
Google have put five scrolls online including the Bible’s Book of
Isaiah, and Google’s technology allows them to be searched for specific
passages and translated into English. The originals are kept in a
secured vault in a Jerusalem building constructed specifically to house
the scrolls. Access requires at least three different keys, a magnetic
card and a secret code. The five scrolls viewable online are among those
purchased by Israeli researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities
dealers, having first been found by Bedouin shepherds in the Judean
Desert. You can see them at http://dss.collections.imj.org.il.
