Closing This Weekend: The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World

The exhibit The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World at The Jewish Museum is closing this Sunday, January 4. The museum has six scrolls on exhibit, three of which have never been exhibited and three of which have never been seen in New York City.

[image from museum]

According to the museum:

They represent the important transformation that occurred in Jewish worship from sacrifice to Bible study and prayer, the debates among Jewish groups of the Second Temple Period, and the indirect connections between the scrolls and early Christianity. The scrolls include a part of one of the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible in existence, the Book of Jeremiah, which dates to 225-175 BCE. Other texts that will be shown include an aprocryphal Jewish work, the Book of Tobit, which was not included in the Hebrew canon but was eventually accepted into some versions of the Christian Old Testament; early examples of prayers from Words of the Luminaries; and Aramaic Apocryphon of Daniel, which mentions a son of God. Also shown will be excerpts from two sectarian compositions, the Community Rule, which lays out the regulations for joining and being a member of a sect, and the War Scroll, which describes a great war at the end of days.

The Dead Sea Scrolls date back to the third century BCE through the first century CE, but the first of the 900 scrolls was not found until 1947 in a cave in the Judean Desert.

The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue (@ 92nd Street). Admission is free on Saturday.