The oldest copies of the Bible are about to go online.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are about to be digitally preserved and scanned for all to see. These scrolls are the Biblical documents discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd who wandered into a cave in the Judean Desert looking for a lost sheep. Instead of “Wooly” the sheep, he found the greatest theological find in history.
CNN posted the details yesterday:
More than 2,000 years after they were written, the Dead Sea Scrolls are going digital as part of an effort to better preserve the ancient texts and let more people see them than ever before.
The high-tech initiative, announced Wednesday, will also reveal text that was not visible to the naked eye.
Over the next two years, the Israel Antiquities Authority will digitally photograph and scan every bit of crumbling parchment and papyrus that makes up the scrolls, which include the oldest written record of the Bible’s Old Testament.
The images eventually will be posted on the Internet for anyone to see.
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Hey this is great!! Very cool…the only problem now is that I will need to learn ancient Hebrew and Aramaic so that I can read them when they do come out. I had a couple of professors in school who will probably be VERY excited about this possibility!!