The largest collection of biblical artifacts ever displayed outside Israel, the exhibit, which opened October 28 and will run through April 15, is already featuring 20 Dead Sea Scrolls, with sections from the biblical books of Genesis, Psalms, Exodus, Isaiah, and others.
The Ten Commandments scroll will be added to the show from Dec. 16 through Jan. 2.
Dating from 50 BCE to 1 BCE, the scroll was found in Cave 4, one of the 11 caves near the site of Khirbet Qumran on the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea where a highly fragmented collection of documents in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic writing was discovered between 1947 and 1956.
Written in Hebrew, the scroll contains the text of the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy (the fifth book of the Old Testament) and is the best preserved of all the Deuteronomy manuscripts.
It features four complete and two partially damaged columns and was likely intended as a prayer leaflet.
Owned by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the scroll is believed to be the second-oldest version of the commandments, after the Nash Papyrus, which dates to 150–100 BCE. However, this manuscript, which was discovered in Egypt and is now in the Cambridge University Library, is less complete and more fragmented.
Lines for what was hailed as "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century" were indeed a couple of miles deep.
According to Risa Levitt Kohn, professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University and one of the exhibition's curators, ancient religious relics like the Ten Commandments scroll exert a unique fascination.
"You can actually see, up close, the oldest parchment copy of laws that have influenced so much of western religious and secular culture," Levitt Kohn told Discovery News.
Read more at Discovery News
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