SOME DEAD SEA SCROLLS are coming to Houston, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama in 2004-05:

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit coming (Mobile Register)

01/25/04
By THOMAS B. HARRISON and KRISTEN CAMPBELL
Staff Reporters

In a city where the past and present share living quarters, history will become a religious experience in 2005.
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Visitors to the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center in Mobile will have an opportunity to examine their Judeo-Christian heritage when an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls opens Jan. 20, 2005.

The exhibit will remain on view through April 24 and is expected to eclipse attendance for the museum, according to executive director W. Michael Sullivan.

It will be the most ambitious project that the Exploreum has undertaken since the museum reopened in its $21 million building in 1998.

"Once we heard it was available, how could we not have gone after it?" Sullivan said.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, written more than 2,000 years ago, include some of the oldest surviving texts of the books of the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, and of Hebrew community laws.

The rare manuscripts, penned by unknown scribes working in the religious community of Qumran in the Judean desert, were discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd who found them stored in jars in a cave near Bethlehem. Thousands of scroll fragments, representing every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, were transcribed onto scrolls of parchment and papyrus. Their discovery is considered one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th century.

The Exploreum will feature fragments of 12 scrolls, including pieces from the books of Genesis-Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Others relate to sectarian documents such as community laws reflecting the lives and convictions of the Hebrew sect believed to have written the manuscripts.

Visitors also will see jars, coins, clothing and other artifacts that tell the story of the people who lived near the caves. A final section of the exhibit explains the efforts of international scholars to conserve and translate the scrolls.

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Before it travels to Mobile, the exhibit will show at the Houston Museum of Natural History from October 2004 until Jan. 2, 2005.

The Houston and Mobile exhibits will be identical except for the specific fragments on view, Sullivan said. Because of the fragility of the pieces, the IAA limits the display of each fragment to three months in any 12-month period.

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