By Donald H. Harrison

When the Dead Sea Scrolls come to San Diego less than a year and a half from now for their most extensive exhibition outside Israel, they will be coming to a geographic area that is remarkably similar to their original home, according to Prof. Risa Levitt Kohn, who will curate the exhibit for San Diego's Museum of Natural History.

Visitors who are able to get tickets at a still-to-be-determined price for what is expected to be one of the best attended shows in San Diego museum history—given the importance of the Scrolls to Judaism, Christianity and Islam—will see just how similar the two areas are.  

They will be treated to a photographic exhibit  created by Israeli and American photographers as they transit the museum from the south entrance (near Balboa Park's signature fountain) toward the Legler-Benbough Exhibition Hall, which will be extensively reconfigured to conform with the Israel Antiquities Authority's strict demands for temperature and light controls as well as  high security for the sacred documents.

The photographs will compare the deserts of Southern California and the deserts of Israel, the Dead Sea and the Salton Sea, the Galilee and the foothills of San Diego County. The beautiful geography of Israel is unknown to many Americans, whose mental images of the country may have been formed by what they see on television about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The photographs will provide a context for envisioning the region where the remarkable Dead Sea Scrolls were found. 


Prof. Risa Levitt Kohn, Dead Sea Scrolls curator

As the visitors wearing  audio head sets listen to a recorded narration, they will pass through an atrium near the Natural History Museum's north entrance.  In that the Dead Sea is the lowest point on the surface of planet Earth, the atrium has the creative minds of the Natural History Museum's staff whirling.  Why not use the drop of the atrium to dramatically illustrate the topography of the region, giving people the sense of looking down from the hills of Judea to the Dead Sea?

Although Dead Sea Scrolls have been exhibited at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in such venues as Houston, Mobile, and Charlotte, and will be seen in Seattle prior to the San Diego show, Levitt Kohn says this is not a "traveling exhibition" in the sense of the same exhibits going from place to place.

Those other exhibitions were for three months, whereas this one will be for six months, from July 1 to December 31, 2007.  Furthermore, different sets of scroll will be shown in the first three months and in the last three months in keeping with the policy of Israel's Antiquities Authority to give the sacred objects "a rest" after three months. This, therefore, will be the first exhibition where a changeover both in scrolls and story boards will be required.  

Levitt Kohn earned her doctorate at UCSD, which has a Judaic Studies Department that is world renown. One of her professors, David Noel Freedman, not only is the editor of the Anchor Bible commentaries, but was one of the first scholars to translate Dead Sea Scrolls written in Paleo-Hebrew.  The hundreds of scrolls discovered since 1948 in eleven Qumran caves  are also written in a more modern Hebrew, in Aramaic and in Greek.  The oldest were written approximately 250 BCE and the most recent dates approximately to 68 CE—a short time before the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Upon entering the main exhibition hall, visitors will be treated to an exposition about Qumran itself, which today is an archaeological site below the cliffs where, as the story is told,  a Bedouin goat-herder threw a stone into a cave one day in 1948  and heard the sound of pottery breaking.  On investigating, he found the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Bedouins sold scrolls to dealers in antiquities before the significance of the discovery was understood. When the scrolls were obtained by people who understood their theological importance, photos were discreetly sent to scholars around the world in an attempt to understand their meaning. That was when Freedman got his first look at the texts.

Weston Fields, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, which raises money for continuing research into the scrolls, visited Freedman at UCSD while Levitt Kohn was completing her doctoral studies. Levitt Kohn said she told Fields that San Diego would be a wonderful venue for the exhibition, and he encouraged her to see if arrangements could be made. She in turn contacted the Museum of Natural History, and after considerable discussion, and financial planning—because exhibitions of this sort are very expensive, just the insurance alone—the decision was made to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls here. 

Levitt Kohn, who now is an associate professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University, said that Freedman and other scholars in  Southern California are being called upon to help devise materials for the exhibition, including a section discussing various theories about the people who left the Scrolls in the caves and what was going on in their time.

The curator, whose doctoral dissertation was on the writings of the Prophet Ezekiel, said the three centuries over which the Dead Sea Scrolls were being written, was a time of transition from the religion of the ancient Israelites—as described in the Torah—to a rabbinic Judaism that was a forerunner of the religion as we know it today.

She said after the Jews were permitted in 539 BCE to return from the Babylonian Exile, many religious ideas were developed simultaneously—some seemingly forerunners of modern Judaism, others forerunners of Christianity.  For example, she said, some scrolls found at Qumran discussed concepts of prayer, teachers to point people in the right direction, as well as rituals that have their counterparts in modern Judaism. Other scrolls discuss concepts like an apocalyptic war of good versus evil foreshadowing ideas that would be discussed in Christianity's Book of Revelations. 

Among the scrolls found at Qumran were every book of the Hebrew Bible except the Book of Esther, which deals with events that took place in Persia, Levitt Kohn said.  None of the scrolls mention either Jesus or John the Baptist, although the latest scrolls were written approximately the same time as tradition says they lived.

Levitt Kohn said that today's Hebrew Bible is remarkably consistent with the wording of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  "There is a tremendous amount of continuity between the biblical text that we find in Qumran and what you would find if you were to open up your Chumash.  There are some minor differences.  Whenever you talk about scribes copying texts they are going to make mistakes, drop a word, add a word, skip a word. Every once in a while there also will be some sort of editorial change; the scribe trying to make something clearer.  But overall there is a tremendous amount of continuity." 

What is important to know, she said, is that the people who copied the scrolls viewed what is today known as the Torah as a sacred text, one that was authoritative and which needed to be copied unchanged from the original.

She said that to her knowledge, very few of the textual changes from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the modern-day Torah had theological significance—all were what today in the world of  printing and computers we call "typos."

Before seeing the scrolls, museum visitors also will have the opportunity to view a film discussing the science that was used to determine their age and to restore those that had suffered from weathering or mishandling.  Such modern-day science as  DNA comparisons help scholars understand which scroll fragments made from the skins of goats and ibexes belonged together.

Today, nearly 18 months before the exhibition, Levitt Kohn still does not know which Dead Sea Scrolls will be shown in San Diego, only that there will be a different 12 shown over each three-month cycle.  However, she said, she put together a wish list which the Israel Antiquities Department is evaluating.  Among the wish list are seven biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. She added that not all the scrolls are religious texts; some deal with secular matters pertaining to day-to-day life in the area.

Although once someone sees the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, anything else might be anti-climactic, Levitt Kohn said there may still be some wonderful things to see in the anterooms of the exhibition.  For example,  she said,  the museum is trying to obtain from various sources exhibits that exemplify  how the Bible was passed down through the ages.  She hopes to obtain on loan from other museums and archives some Torah scrolls as well as some illuminated manuscripts and early printed Bibles. 

To handle the expected crowds, Levitt Kohn said the museum plans to issue tickets bearing starting times. Once inside visitors may stay as long as they like, but Levitt Kohn said in the museum world one talks about "strollers" and "streakers."  The former go through an exhibit carefully, reading all the materials, and looking at the exhibits.  The "streakers" tend to zip through everything, just to get an overview.  "If you are a streaker, you could be in and out within an hour probably, depending on whether you see the film," she said.  Strollers, in contrast, could spend the entire day there.  Extended museum hours are probable.

To protect the Dead Sea Scrolls from light pollution, photography will be strictly prohibited.  There will be plenty of security on hand to enforce that rule, so please leave your camera at home.  The Natural History Museum plans to print a catalogue for the exhibit, so you will be able to take home very good souvenirs

The museum also plans to have internationally-recognized authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls giving a different lecture each week over a period of 22 weeks. A Kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum is being developed for schools who want to incorporate the Dead Sea Scrolls into their studies.

Levitt Kohn said  she expects to  be teaching a course at San Diego State during the exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls, in addition to her curatorial duties.  She said she imagined other academic institutions might decide to offer similar courses. As it turns out, ten thousand delegates will be attending a combined meeting in November 2007 of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion.  There may be times during the exhibition when San Diego feels like a religious world capital!