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Friday, July 16, 2004

THE INDIANAPOLIS DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBIT is the subject of a brief article on the WISHTV website:
Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit Takes You Back 5,000 Years

By Pam Elliot

Would you like to step back 5,000 years in time? There are actually fragments of history that date back that far and are temporarily on display in Indianapolis. The Dead Sea scrolls are in town.

Lee Biondi says his life changed two years ago because of the Dead Sea scrolls: words from Psalms and Genesis discovered in the 1940's but thousands of years old. He calls it the earliest scripture in the world. �It absolutely changed my life. I reassessed what I was doing professionally," he said.

[...]

Unfortunately, both the headline and the opening paragraph give the false impression that the Scrolls are 5000 years old, and the rest of the article does nothing to correct this misapprehension. For the record, they are about 2000 years old. I don't see why this sort of thing should be so hard to get right. The piece does have some nice Scroll images though.

By the way, Blogger is suffering from some malfunctions this morning, such at the Preview button being missing. Apologies if this causes any problems with the postings.

UPDATE: WTHR, another Indiana TV station, gives a clearer account:
Indianapolis, July 15 - It is a collection that brings to life 5,000 years of history. Co-curator Lee Biondi calls it "an entire history of Scripture that goes way back to the very earliest writings."

The exhibit featuring the Dead Sea Scrolls captures the origins of the Bible with fragile pieces of the Old Testament, the earliest known to man, ancient manuscripts and time-worn treasures.

[...]

Along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the collection offers pictographic clay tablets from 3,000 BC, early Biblical manuscripts in Hebrew, Coptic, Greek and Latin and every major Bible printed in English.

[...]

That is, the exhibit has some Dead Sea Scrolls in it (which are about 2000 years old, although neither article says this), plus there are some cuneiform tablets that, evidently are about 5000 years old (which is pretty old, even for cuneiform tablets).

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