Dead Sea scrolls are posted online

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