Google Launched Dead Sea Scrolls Online Library in Partnership with Israel Antiquities Authority

Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), in partnership with Google on 18 December 2012 put 5000 images of the ancient biblical artifacts online in form of Digital library.

The online availability of Dead Sea scrolls came after more than six decades since the discovery of it and thousands of years after they were written.

The digital library comprises Book of Deuteronomy, which basically includes the second listing of the Ten Commandments, and a portion of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, dated to the first century B.C.

The authority owns between 15000 and 30000 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that make up around 900 manuscripts.

That collection is separate from the eight Dead Sea scrolls owned by the Israel Museum, which also has a partnership with Google to digitalize its holdings. The museum used an extremely high-definition camera, while the authority used a high-resolution scanner.

It is a part of an attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts - often criticized for allowing them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars - to make them broadly available.

The online, searchable archive was launched after the authority spent two years scanning thousands of ancient fragments of parchment. The Dead Sea scrolls were found in 11 caves at Qumran in the Judean Desert in 1947.

One can find in the library the oldest existing copies of the Hebrew Bible. Fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible were found in the Qumran caves, the most famous of the Dead Sea Scrolls sites.

 In addition, the library features passages of Tefillin from the Second Temple, letters and documents and hundreds of additional 2000-year-old texts.

The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls is considered one of the most important archeological findings in the 20th century.

What is Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collected works of 972 texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 that mainly comprises biblical manuscripts known as the Hebrew Bible and also the extra-biblical documents which was found on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they obtained the name Dead Sea Scrolls.

The texts had great historical and religious importance and include the earliest known surviving copies of biblical and extra-biblical documents, as well as preserving evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean, mostly on parchment and also on papyrus and bronze.