A BIBLICAL MUSEUM is planned in Virginia:

LU professor has plans for biblical museum

By Christa Desrets

Published: January 31, 2009 (Lynchburg News and Advance)

Randall Price has big plans for what is now a small space in DeMoss Hall at Liberty University.

Price, an archaeologist and Liberty professor, is executive director of LU’s Center for Judaic Studies, which opened in fall 2008.

Price plans to implement academic coursework and degree programs in Jewish studies. He also is working with school officials to establish a Biblical Museum at the university that would house antiquities from the biblical period.

Preliminary plans for a 10,000-square-foot museum already have been drawn, and Price hopes that within a couple of years it will be built.

His own collection of antiquities, as well as those that he could get on loan from dig sites, would be housed at the museum to provide the school and Lynchburg a window to the past.

“We felt there was a need to have a program in Jewish Studies because we want our Christian students to understand the issues,” said Price, who over the past 30 years has traveled to Israel more than 90 times.

With that goal in mind, in December, Price led 12 students, four from Liberty, in the school’s first archaeology program. They traveled to Qumran in eastern Israel, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered about 60 years ago in nearby caves.

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