A rare Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Museum of the Bible offers the public an opportunity to experience ancient manuscripts that have strengthened confidence in the reliability of Scripture, says a member of the museum’s team.
The exhibit, which runs through September, features biblical texts and scrolls from the Qumran community, along with hundreds of artifacts that shed light on daily life and Judaism during the Second Temple period. The exhibit is presented in partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority and Running Subway and is part of the 75th anniversary tour of the scrolls.
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Uncovered in the late 1940s in Qumran in what is now modern Israel, the Dead Sea Scrolls contained partial or complete copies of every book in the Old Testament except the book of Esther.
Robert “Bobby” Duke, chief curatorial officer, said the find was a watershed moment for biblical scholarship.
“Before the scrolls were found, our earliest [Old Testament] biblical texts were what are called the Masoretic texts from right around 1,000 A.D., give or take 50 or 100 years – whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of them are dated back to the second or even third century B.C. – so more than 1,000 years earlier than our best text before 1947,” Duke told Crosswalk Headlines.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, biblical skeptics around the world posited that the texts would expose major errors in the Bible, Duke said.
“The thought was: What kind of new revelations and/or just shocking scandals are we going to find when we look into these texts?”
Incredibly, though, the opposite turned out to be true, Duke said.
“In general, there was a lot of fidelity between what we have from 2,000 years ago and what we can compare it to with the Masoretic text from 1,000 years ago,” he said. “There are some variants. Any good modern English study Bible you’ll see in the margins, it’ll say, ‘Dead Sea Scrolls read’ or ‘Qumran reads.’ But … you’re going to realize that most of them are incredibly minor. So yes, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a