A DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION IN SAN FRANCISCO:

Dead Sea Scrolls on display at S.F. museum
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 02/19/2008 03:22:06 PM PST

A precisely legible, 42-inch-wide Dead Sea Scroll in Hebrew from the Book of Psalms should be enough to dominate a modest-size gallery at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. But add 6,000-year-old burial containers, ritual objects from the Iron Age, a Byzantine mosaic and Islamic gold jewelry and you truly have a museum exhibit that can be called "5,000 years of treasures."

This collection is merely the first in a series produced in conjunction with the Israel Antiquities Authority, which was involved . The big draw, of course, is the brown parchment fragment of Psalm 119, one of the longest and best preserved of the biblical scrolls discovered in the last half-century in caves along the western side of the Dead Sea. It is from the most famous site, Qumran. Whatever a museum visitor's religious beliefs, it is hypnotic to inspect the precise handwriting that dates from the first century A.D., accompanied by an English translation mounted above.

As curator Renee Dreyfus points out, the lines from Psalm 119 are not in the same order that has become standard in versions of the Old Testament. Another distinction: "The name of God, because it was so sacred, is written in Paleo-Hebrew, an older form of the writing."

The Psalm scroll is carefully displayed under a thick transparent panel, lighted intermittently to protect it from fading. Even so, it will be replaced in May by other scrolls, one from the Book of Genesis and another from the apocryphal Book of Enoch, "which was not included in the Bible, for whatever reason," Dreyfus says.

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