Via NYTimes:
The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.
Only a handful of the scrolls exist in large pieces, with several on permanent exhibit at the Israel Museum here in its dimly lighted Shrine of the Book. Most of what was found is separated into 15,000 fragments that make up about 900 documents, fueling a longstanding debate on how to order the fragments as well as the origin and meaning of what is written on them.
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Hey, who's the guy with the sword?
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August 31st, 2008 at 2:20 am
This field never ceases to generate controversy. Museum exhibits have been abusively slanted towards an increasingly disputed theory, and plagiarism charges have surfaced against Lawrence Schiffman, author of the popular book “Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls.” See
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/plagiarism-and-dead-sea-scrolls-did-nyu-department-chairman-pilfer-chicago-historian-s-work