John's Trip to Israel

Hello there. It's me, John, writing a much belated blog post about my trip this past summer to Israel. I went with a small group from school, and then stayed on an extra week to do some sight-seeing on my own.

With my school group, we mostly did things related to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here I am at Qumran:

It was very hot there. I couldn't imagine living in such a place.

The highlight of the whole trip was the time we got to spend in what I like to call the "Scrolls Storage Closet." We went to the "scrollery" where you can request some scrolls to look at for your work. We all thought we were going to get to see the few scrolls we had requested, through thick glass plating. We did get to do this. But we were surprised also.

One of the parts of our tour--before we did our work on the specific scrolls we requested--was a visit to the "storage room." We went through two locked doors (this is, of course, after the security check for the IAA headquarters and the security check before that to get into the Israel Museum) and found ourselves in a fairly small (8x15 ft) room with drawers. The lady (one of three conservationists working there) started pulling out "plates" (collections of 3-6 scroll fragments) to show them to us. We were excited. There was a scroll fragment in the flesh!

She was showing us how some of the old plates still had scotch tape that they couldn't get off. Then she pulled out another plate to show us how they now liked to keep them. Then she pulled out another plate to show us how they mounted them using Japanese parchment paper and linen. She would take them completely out of their casings, so that there was nothing between us and the scrolls but air! We soon realized that every single scroll was in that room, except the few (around 10) super important ones in the Shrine of the Book. She showed us the various stages of preservation for the parchment manuscripts, and then the papyrus manuscripts too!
 

And then things got really good. She pulled out a really nice, big portion of scroll (8 columns or so) that we immediately recognized was the Psalms scroll. This is a scroll that could easily be in the Shrine of the Book. It was beautiful. And right there in front of us! (She didn't take this one out from under the protective glass/plexi/whatever super-material they use on the front.) I was thrilled: I had written half of one of my papers dealing with one of the columns (Ben Sira 51). THEN she pulled out the Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll from cave 11. My professor literally swooned. It was incredible, about 13 columns, only 4 or so inches tall (like a pocket scroll). She also showed us the only dead sea scroll that contains the Ten Commandments (apparently people were lined up around the block to see this one the entire time it was in Toronto.)



So, that was sweet. We then got to spend a couple of hours looking at and studying some of the scrolls, one of which was the Psalms Scroll (that is, the 6 column portion of it that we had requested). It was so much fun, just to read the passage I had worked on, and sight read Psalm 138 and another Psalm that we realized was the Syriac Psalm 155 (that they didn't know existed in Hebrew until it was found in the Scrolls).

It was amazing.

We did many other great things, and after the people from my group left, I stayed on an extra week for some site seeing. But the scrollery was by far the best part of the trip!