THE STORY BEHIND the upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition in Minnesota:

St. Paul Science Museum Of Minnesota / Exhibit: $4 million. Bringing Dead Sea Scrolls to Minnesota? Priceless
By Devin Henry (TwinCities.com)
dhenry@pioneerpress.com
Updated: 10/04/2009 11:39:59 AM CDT

Science Museum archaeology curator, Dr. Ed Fleming, left, and Science Museum Senior Vice President, Mike Day, at the Science Museum. Day brought the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit here; Fleming helped develop the content. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

It took nearly two millennia to find the Dead Sea Scrolls hidden in a cave in eastern Israel. It took the Science Museum of Minnesota just five years to arrange to bring them to St. Paul.

When the scrolls go on display March 12, the event will cap off a multiyear, intercontinental endeavor undertaken by the Science Museum that involved trips to Israel and around the country to see how other museums had exhibited the famous sacred Jewish texts.

"It's the biggest exhibit we've ever done in terms of storyline," Science Museum Vice President Mike Day said. "In terms of artifacts, there aren't many as precious as the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Day's interest in a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition was piqued in 2004 when he attended his first
This is a model that is currently being worked on of the dead sea scroll exhibit that will be at the Science Museum next year.
meeting as a member of the Association of Midwest Museums in Michigan: A museum there was hosting the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In 2005, the Science Museum first contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority, which catalogs and conserves the scrolls, about a possible exhibit. It would take three years of site visits and careful negotiations to get the scrolls to Minnesota.

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This cloak-and-dagger tidbit is particularly interesting:

The antiquities authority continues to play a major role in the exhibit, finalizing exhibit outlines and planning another trip to Minnesota in November. To protect the scrolls, the authority is delivering each one by private courier to St. Paul, unannounced until the last minute. Once here, the scrolls will be set up in special climate controlled cases.

Even specifics about which scrolls will be coming are closely guarded. Science Museum archaeology curator Ed Fleming said the museum knows only which scrolls are "probably" coming, but he couldn't reveal them.

There's more to the exhibition's story, not quoted here, if you're interested.

The background at the end of the article is a little muddled. The Scrolls are not "older translations of books in today's Bible," they are exceptionally old manuscripts in the original Hebrew. And as for this:

For example, one common copy of the book of Jeremiah was written in Hebrew. Another version was shorter and written in Greek, another language used by the Jews of the day. The Dead Sea Scrolls feature texts of both editions in the same language, making the texts easier to compare.

It would have been clearer to note that the "same language" is Hebrew. The point is that we now know that the short edition of Jeremiah, which survives complete only in the Greek translation of the Septuagint (LXX) was translated from a Hebrew original, not abbreviated by the Greek translator. That means that, in principle, it has just as much claim to orginality as the long edition that survives in Hebrew in the Masoretic Text.

More on the exhibition here.