Armchair Historians, Rejoice!

It looks as though amateurs such as myself will soon have an easier time accessing one of the most interesting collections of documents from the Second Temple period: The Dead Sea Scrolls. As the New York Times reports :

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet . . . .

Jonathan Ben-Dov, a professor of biblical studies at the University of Haifa, is taking part in the digitalization project. Watching the technicians gingerly move a fragment into place for a photograph, he said that it has long been very difficult for senior scholars to get access to DEHE these scrolls because of great demand and risk to the documents.

Once this project is completed, he said with wonder, “every undergraduate will be able to have a detailed look at them from numerous angles.”

The discovery of the first of these documents in the middle of the Israeli desert back in 1947 was a great event—and now amateurs can examine them, too, in the desert of the Internet.