MORE ON THE ALABAMA DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION:

Unscrolling the Commandments (The Birmingham News)
Thursday, January 06, 2005
GREG GARRISON
News staff writer

If Alabamians got excited about former Chief Justice Roy Moore's granite monument of the Ten Commandments, imagine how they'll react when the world's oldest known copy of the Ten Commandments arrives in Alabama for display.

The parchment from the Dead Sea Scrolls contains a complete handwritten Hebrew text of the commandments dated to within 30 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. It will be part of a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit that starts Jan. 20 and ends April 24 at the Gulf Coast Exploreum in downtown Mobile. The exhibit will feature 12 scrolls from the Israel Antiquities Authority, seven of them biblical books.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit opened at the Public Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., in spring of 2003 and drew more than 237,000 visitors in a little more than three months. Mobile will be the third stop. The museums that have hosted the exhibit have been required by Israeli officials to have very strict security and environmental controls for the scrolls. The scrolls are considered so delicate that they are rotated out of public display and go back into dark storage at their home museum, the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. "They rotate them in there as well," [Renee] Davis [Houston's director of community programs and planning] said. No fragment is displayed more than about three months a year. So the opportunity to see these particular scrolls in person is rare indeed, she said.

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