Dead Sea Scrolls

Okay, when I told one guy I was going to this, he responded that it was 'all fake.'

Right when I started to think he was about to launch some conspiracy theory about how the Dead Sea Scrolls were a hoax, probably with some Cold War angle, some take on the founding of Israel and so on, he said, 'I mean replicas.'

Then he said, well, what they had that wasn't a replica was just little bits.

Okay, um, hello? They're 2,000 years old.

So anyway, don't go expecting full rolls of parchment no more yellowed and tattered than the Constitution. But do go. It's amazing stuff.

I mean, for one, it's just flat hard to figure how anyone could live there to begin with. Self denial by Essenes is all well and good, but as far as I can tell nothing much grows around there; you can't drink the water from the Dead Sea, and you can't even fish it because it's actually dead in terms of anything that you could catch in a net.

Even the springs that feed the occasional oasis are described as brackish and hard to drink.

I was also pretty gorked out over the Bibles they had on display. Last room, after all the scroll material (which is extensive, it took about 2-1/2 hours for me to make my way through it), they had some relatively recent antique books. A page from a Gutenberg Bible, for instance; a Luther Bible (and you can see how much more polished it is, and they're not that far apart chronologically).

For that matter, I'd never realized Gutenberg only made 180 Bibles. And he did the Fifteenth Century version of inventing the internet.

On a side note, here's how big a geek I am: I'm listening to the little ear wand thingy they give you. You punch in the number for whatever you're checking out and the sound plays. So everyone walks around like they're on hold. And I suddenly realize, it's Richard Poe.

Who's Richard Poe? I hear you ask. Well, he's tied with Frank Muller in my mind as the best audiobook narrator on earth. See, told ya I'm a geek.