Great Isaiah Scroll Shown in Full at Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, for First Time Since 1968

This year, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem displayed the Great Isaiah Scroll in its entirety for the first time since 1968. The exhibition, titled A Voice from the Desert, presented the full book of Isaiah in a single scroll. The scroll was found in the 1940s and early 1950s in the desert lands near the Dead Sea, then part of Jordan, among the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1954. A Bedouin shepherd boy first came upon seven of the scrolls in 1947 while searching for a lost goat.

The scroll’s path to public display was long and complicated. The shepherd sold the fragments to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer, who brought four of them, including the Great Isaiah Scroll, to Athanasius Samuel, the metropolitan of the Syrian Jacobite monastery in Jerusalem’s Old City. Eleazar Sukenik, a Jewish archaeologist, recognized their importance and offered to buy them, but Samuel declined and sought further proof of their authenticity. After the 1948 war broke out, Samuel stored the scrolls in a bank vault in Beirut and later took them to the United States. Both Jordan and Israel claimed ownership. In 1954, an American intermediary, Samuel Gottesman, helped purchase the scrolls for the state of Israel for $250,000, without revealing the buyer, and the scrolls were flown to Israel that July.

The Isaiah scroll went on public display in 1965 as the focal point of the newly opened Shrine of the Book. In 1968 it was removed from display because of concerns about its fragility, and a facsimile was put in its place. The original was accessible only to a few scholars for decades. The scroll was digitized in a project completed in 2011, and it can now be viewed online. This year, the war with Iran closed the exhibition for several months because of safety concerns. Visitors were later readmitted, and the exhibition was extended through early October. Because exposure poses risks to the scroll, only 25 people at a time could enter the climate-controlled gallery, for seven minutes, and photographs were not allowed.

Visible features of the scroll show that it was used over a long period. The threads used to sew it together can be seen, along with corrections and additions to the script, and places where the parchment was torn and the holes repaired with different parchment. Scholars believe the scroll was actively used for about 100 years. The scroll measures 7.17 meters and spans 54 columns.

The essayist, Mordechai Beck, describes Isaiah as a prophet who, according to the biblical account, preached for more than 45 years during the reigns of several kings of Judah. The scroll contains between 90 and 100 words that do not appear elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. According to rabbinic tradition, Isaiah was murdered by Hezekiah’s son and heir, Menashe, and scholars continue to debate whether the book was written by more than one prophet. Beck writes that Isaiah rebuked his people for their complacency and injustice, observing that God “looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress” (5:7). Isaiah also spoke of a future restoration for those who repent, a lesson that the vulnerable deserve defense (Psalm 82:3).

Beck also notes that the prophet’s vision extended beyond a single people, pointing to passages about all nations gathering to the mountain of the Lord’s house. The essay concludes that the scroll remains relevant to visitors today, but this argument reflects the author’s view and is not a claim of fact.

The origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls remain debated. For many years, scholars assumed the scrolls were left by the Essenes, a Jewish sect that lived apart from Jerusalem. More recently, that view has been questioned. In a Haaretz article published when the exhibit opened, philosopher Rachel Elior suggested that “these scrolls belong to the library brought by the priests of Zadok” after they lost a conflict with the priests of the house of the Hasmoneans in the second century BCE. Other scholars hold different views. Oren Gutfeld, the most recent archaeologist to work at the Dead Sea site, told Haaretz: “There are about 500 caves yet to be explored in the area. Who knows, maybe we’ll find other scrolls even more ancient than that of Isaiah!”

Source: Read the original report