We (Dad, Mom, Tim, Ruth & Johanna) took a trip to Charlotte today to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Discovery Place during the last week of its 100-day display. M & M stayed back in Greenville first with Great Aunt Donna and then Naomi until their Aunt Donna was able to retrieve them after her long day of teaching.We had a super time, and it was definitely worth the expen$e! The exhibit was quite impressive, and, besides some fragments of the scrolls, included other artifacts found at the same site in Qumran. It also gave a lot of information about life and times of the Essenes sect, the people group which probably planted the scrolls in the cave hideouts about 68 A.D. We saw fragments from 10 scrolls, five of which were Biblical texts and five of which were extra-Biblical (e.g. the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, a commentary on Nahum, etc.) Seeing the tiny fragments gave us quite an appreciation for the scholars who had to piece them together and then somehow manage to read them. (We were especially surprised at how tiny some of the print was.) Above all, we were impressed at the providential hand of God in preserving these texts. It is amazing to consider how He allowed them to be hidden away and preserved by the salt air of the Dead Sea until just such a time as He deemed appropriate to reveal them, and with their revelation, to reaffirm that the words which we hold in our hands every time we hold a copy of the Scriptures are indeed the Words of God.
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By the way, our tickets also allowed us entry into the rest of the Discovery Place. Hence the reason you see brave Johanna putting her hands into the "petting zoo" aquarium where she was playing with an urchin.
Qumran was one of my favorite sites when I was in Israel.
Very VERY COOL! Wow. Glad you were able to go!
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