THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBIT IN MOBILE is covered yet again, this time in an article in the Times Picayune (New Orleans): "Dead Sea Scrolls come to Mobile museum". It's a good piece; well researched and with some interesting reflections for a popular audience on the importance of the Scrolls for our understanding of the development of the biblical canon and the biblical text. Excerpt:

Although the Exploreum's marketers have accurately pitched the exhibit to their Bible Belt audience as "The oldest surviving texts of the Bible," the scrolls actually reflect the Bible's complicated, organic development, [James] Bowley [of Millsaps College] said. It is a story far removed from the image of a collection of books that appeared long ago and never varied from their original forms.

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible -- the Christian Old Testament -- did not exist when the scrolls were produced. Not until about the second century would a consensus emerge on which books would be discarded and which should be included in an authoritative collection of this sacred literature, Bowley said.

One scroll, the Book of Jubilees, seems to have been terribly important to the Essenes, he said. By contrast, there's only a tiny scrap of the Book of Chronicles, reflecting their own theological emphasis. Yet today Jubilees is out of the Bible and Chronicles is in.

"Different Jewish communities had different collections of scrolls," he said. "The Essenes would have had many that other communities would have, plus some others."

Biblical evolution

Moreover, the scrolls deeply underscore a point scholars had already known: There was no standard version of biblical texts in play. Instead, individual biblical compositions and other Jewish writings developed through time and went through various stages and editions before arriving at the form we have today, Bowley said.

"People writing different versions of Jeremiah are Jews of the same period, with the same concept of God. While the versions might have some differences in terms of order or arrangement, does that change our basic concept of God? No. It doesn't change the theology."

UPDATE: And here's a nice backgrounder about the genesis of the exhibition in the Gulf Coast Exploreum, also in the Times Picayune. When their state funding was cut,

Marketing Director Eleanor Kulin had a thought. "I sat at my computer one day, and I literally Googled 'Dead Sea Scrolls.' "

She got a hit, in more ways than one.

What Kulin found was that the famous scrolls were in the United States and had just closed at the Public Museum of Grand Rapids, Mich., where administrators had been floored by the success of the exhibition.

Officials at the Exploreum talked it over, then resolved to make a serious run at grabbing the scrolls for Mobile.

It seemed like a natural. Even then, Kulin said, she could see the headlines that now grace the advertising aimed at Alabama's heavily evangelical populace: "Featuring the oldest surviving texts of the Bible."