Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the Dead Sea scrolls went online yesterday in a project launched by Israel's national museum and the internet search giant Google.
Publishing five of the most important Dead Sea scrolls on the internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts to make them available to anyone with a computer.
The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. The public can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English.
The originals are kept in a secure vault in a Jerusalem building constructed specifically to house them. Access requires at least three different keys, a magnetic card and a secret code. The five scrolls are among those bought by Israeli researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers. AP
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