Israel Museum & Bible Lands Museum
One of the of things I always wanted to see in Israel was the Dead Sea Scrolls which is why the Israel museum was one of the first places we had visited. It is a really neat museum with a huge model of how Jerusalem may have looked in Bible times. The Dead Sea Scrolls themselves are displayed underneath a dome in the shape of the top of a jar – symbolic of the jars in which they were originally found. I think the ones on display were actually replicas rather than the actual scrolls, but I thought it was pretty cool nonetheless. One thing that stuck out to me among the many ancient artifacts displayed throughout the museum was an ancient scroll made of metal. To me that has personal significance because of my belief in plates of brass kept by a man named Nephi, a prophet in the Book of Mormon, who traveled from Jerusalem to the new world around 600 BC. It used to be widely held that no such records in this area were kept on metal plates. This is why I find a discovery like this significant as testimony of what I already believe to be true. Later during my stay in the Holy Land I actually had the opportunity to visit the actual site where the scrolls were hidden for centuries. Click here to see my experience at Qumran.
August 12, 2009 “Last night was a ton of fun. Geoffrey, Tammy, and I went to the “Shrine of the Book” where the Dead Sea Scrolls are enshrined (at least the ones they didn’t have to take down for preservation). It was neat seeing the huge model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple period and listening to the info on the hand held speaker thing the let us use. It was also neat walking through the Shrine of the Book itself through the dark cold tunnel and learning about the old Qumran civilization that made the scrolls…” |