Google bringing (exact photographic copies of) Dead Sea Scrolls online (for free, within months)

[eShirl]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39742729/ns/technology_and_science-science/

JERUSALEM — Israel's Antiquities Authority and Google announced Tuesday that they are joining forces to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls online, allowing both scholars and the general public widespread access to the ancient manuscripts for the first time.

The project will grant free, global access to the 2,000-year-old text — considered one of the greatest archaeological finds of the last century — by uploading high-resolution images that are exact copies of the originals. The first photographs are slated to be online within months.

The scrolls will be available in their original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and at first an English translation. Eventually other translations will be added, and Google's translation feature may also be incorporated. They will also be searchable.

Antiquities official Pnina Shor said the project will ensure the original 30,000 fragments that make up the scrolls are preserved while broadening access. The scrolls, which includes parts of the Hebrew Bible and treatises on communal living and apocalyptic war, have shed important light on Judaism and the origins of Christianity.

-snip-

[aquart]

1. Ooh. Not, of course, easy to read. But still...ooooh.

[Goblinmonger]

2. That's some cool shit.

Aren't the intertubes great.

And it's searchable.

[onager]

3. Fascinating, but we non-believers better brace ourselves.

Xians have been mangling, twisting and torturing the King James Bible since 1611 to prove it means whatever some dumbass over in East Nowhere thinks it means. So I can't wait to see what they will "prove" with the translated Dead Sea Scrolls.

Dr. James F. Welles said it better than I ever could, in "The Story of Stupidity:"

As theologians, the Protestant reformers replaced the authority of the Catholic Church with the authority of the Bible, which they opened to the public.

The inevitable but unforeseen result was that every individual who could read thought God could communicate directly with him.

Unfortunately, as recorded in the Bible, the voice of God often rambles incoherently like that of a slightly schizoid manic-depressive with delusions of grandeur.

Worse yet, his Protestant readers promptly splintered into numerous sects which agreed only on one point — they wanted to be separate. By 1650, there were 180 sects, all based on the Bible and each more dogmatically intolerant than the next.

http://stupidity.com/story1final/index.htm

[dimbear]

4. Tragically, the key document, the Brontologion, is in a poor

state of conservation. As you all probably know, a brontologion explains how to predict the future by observing thunderstorms.

Other documents explain how to predict personality from physical characteristics, and the like. All useful science.

[cleanhippie]

5. Do any of the current translations of the scrolls confirm or refute any biblical claims?

I know very, very little about the scrolls.

Did they confirm or refute any biblical claims?

[onager]

8. Not that I know of. Think we'd have heard.

Maybe Jesus' toe-tag from the Jerusalem morgue is in there, and the Xians will finally shut about him.

Sorry, couldn't help myself...

Recently the History Channel managed to put down the Woo Crack Pipe and run a decent documentary on the Scrolls.

One of the more interesting - and infuriating - things about them is that they contain many duplicate copies of the same books. This makes it even harder to match up all those torn and faded fragments.

The experts seem to agree that the Scrolls came from an Essene community, which was probably trying to compile "standard versions" of their scriptures. That's the reason for all the multiple copies.

Usual Irrelevant Trivia: This is exactly the same job done at the famous Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt in ancient times. Experts compared multiple versions of, say, Aristotle, and threw out anything that appeared to be added later, flat wrong, etc. That was the main function of the Great Library. Not - as some modern woos claim - collecting ancient books of magic spells, astrology or whatever. Or wooever...

[Odin2005]

6. I saw the actual scrolls at the Minnesota Science Museum this spring.

That was very cool, being able to see such an historical treasure up close.

[Fire Walk With Me]

7. All of them? Some were supposed to have pissed off certain dogmatists, and may be "lost".

I'd like to see that all of them are freed.

[dimbear]

9. People who are supposedly in the know say

that at a minimum four of the Dead Sea Scrolls are in private hands, i.e. were purchased on the illegal antiquities market, and have never been made public.

The archaeologist who stated this had seen one of them, a very nicely preserved copy of Isaiah. What the others may be is conjectural.

There is also an interesting legend that some of them were used to start fires by the Bedouins before they realized they had cash value. Again conjectural.

[struggle4progress]

10. The legend may be a garbled history: some of the Nag Hammadi scrolls

were burned as cooking fuel, and I'd guess the legend confounds the Dead Sea scrolls with the Nag Hammadi ones

[struggle4progress]

11. Good. These were long unavailable to anyone outside a small circle