Dead Sea Scrolls Now Available Online | Hacker News Reader

Dead Sea Scrolls Now Available Online

dss.collections.imj.org.il

180 pointsmootothemax40 comments

It confuses me somewhat how they can claim copyright over documents that are thousands of years old :S

http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/terms_pg

Copyright in the digital images of the manuscripts, created by the Israel Museum and displayed on this site, is held by the Israel Museum. Reproducing these digital images in any manner other than for research or private study requires prior permission or licensing.

The Wikipedia crowd are (rightly) griping about this; we've long held that faithful digital reproductions of 2D copyrighted work simply inherit the copyright of the original. It's sad to see such a nice thing marred by a silly approach to copyright.

As if they are scared people are going to, what, misuse the material and make a fortune out of it?

It's how copyright works unfortunately :( The creator of the content/picture own that picture unless they state it otherwise. Considering the nature of the document, it should be considered of public domain due to the broad public interest the document has.

Not necessarily. In the US, for example, this is not true (and this is the only place I know of it being tested in court). It was ruled that faithful reproductions of 2D works lacked originality (even if they required work to produce) and so PD work does not become copyrightable :)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_....

So in the US, certainly, I doubt this is copyrightable.

There was a case time ago, where apes, monkeys or gorillas (not sure) "stole" a camera a took pictures of themselves - now you have a copyright by a thousand monkeys...

> We've long held that faithful digital reproductions of 2D copyrighted work simply inherit the copyright of the original.

IANAL but I believe there was a U.S. court case upholding this view, in which a museum attempted to claim copyright on images of artwork made available on their website, and lost a resulting case.

Yep. Bridgeman v. Corel.

It is the copyright of the images themselves, not the documents. The irony of it is, since they own the original pieces, they can prevent you from taking photos.

Even more outrageous considering Israel stole the scrolls from Jordan after the 1967 war.

They claim that, but they are wrong:

"They were purchased by Prof. Mazar, Yigael Yadin ... and brought to Jerusalem, where they were on display at the Rockefeller Museum."

"Jordan alleges that the scrolls were stolen from the Rockefeller Museum..."

"The museum was run by an international board of trustees until 1966, when it was nationalized [read: Stolen] by King Hussein of Jordan."

And in any case they were owned by Prof. Mazar and Yigael Yadin, not Jordan.

Propaganda is everywhere with regards to any Israel/Palestine issue so you can't really believe anything because every issue has rabid loyalists on each side. But the fact is that before 1967 the museum was outside of Israel territory and after 1967 Israel claimed it for itself. There's no denying that.

And in 1948 it was British, and captured by Jordan. The Museum was started in 1938 by the British High Commissioner.

So Jordan captured it and it was in turn captured. Jordan has no claim whatsoever - either they recognize captures or they don't. You can't recognize your own captures but not those of others.

I suppose Britain might have a claim.

Other online Bible manuscript projects I'm aware of:

http://www.aleppocodex.org/ - complete Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), dating from about 930 AD

http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/ - Greek Bible (includes complete New Testament)

http://www.greek-language.com/Manuscripts.html - links to a ton of Greek Bible manuscripts

It's unfortunate there isn't a better clearinghouse for this. There's a tremendous wealth of data out there.

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlcodex.html - The Nag Hammadi Codex. Gnostic scriptures, some of which are of the Gnostic Christian varieties that were circulating around the time of Jesus and after. These offer a fascinating counterpoint to the officialized, hierarchical Christian dogma the ideas of the time were honed into.

Gnostic and other "non-canonical" writings are also of interest. www.earlychristianwritings.com/ is another quite fascinating source, with lots of letters and such. (Neither site seems to have manuscript scans, unfortunately.)

I would love to see a good source on the "circulating around the time of Jesus" claim. I've never been able to track down anything credible on that front.

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/Pagels-Gnostic-Gospels.html notes the existing manuscripts date to 350-400, that "some" must date to somewhat prior to 180 AD because Irenaeus speaks of "other gospels", and cites a Harvard professor who speculates that the Gospel of Thomas "may include some traditions even older" than the official gospels. Those are fairly weak claims; do you have support for your stronger claim?

> Gnostic and other "non-canonical" writings are also of interest. www.earlychristianwritings.com/

Is there any tl;dr versions of the above? I have curiousity about noncanonical writings, but don't have the time or inclination to go out and become a scholar of such things in order to sift wheat from chaff.

I've read a few non-canonical writings from that time (I'm a Christian). The most interesting orthodox writings are probably the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas. Among the unorthodox writings, probably the Gospel of Thomas and the Sophia of Jesus Christ. The Sophia of Jesus Christ being particularly, erm, "interesting".

> I would love to see a good source on the "circulating around the time of Jesus" claim. I've never been able to track down anything credible on that front.

Me too. The earliest writings I know of are Paul's letters and possibly the Didache, and neither of them were written until a couple of decades after Jesus' ministry.

I thought Mark was written around 40 years after Jesus.

Mark was written about AD 50, so about ~16 ish years after Jesus.

I believe the general consensus is that Mark were written around AD 70, making it closer to 40 years after Jesus.

There's some disagreement. Some date Mark to around 50 AD; others to between 65 and 72 AD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament#Dates_of_composit...

To be honest, I think that claim is from The DaVinci Code, which also confuses the dead sea scrolls with gnostic writings. That book is in turn inspired by new age theories that the gnostic gospels are a more original account of Christ, while the canonical gospels have been corrupted by the dogmatic church.

This view is not scientifically supported though.

Definitely still worth seeing in person if you can. Many people are unaware they were written by an estranged puritanical sect of the ancient Israelites that were not accepted by the mainstream community, which is why the scrolls were found in Qumran, and not Jerusalem.

Another important related issue is that the Dead Sea is losing one meter of water/year and will shrivel to the size of a small lake in 50 years if we do nothing.

http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,71715312001_20...

I hope this will be a model for all archaeological literature. It’s a real shame how controlling scholars sit on caches of the world’s cultural heritage not for years, not for decades, but for generations (in the case of the Oxyrhynchus papyri), dolling it out to the public only as they reconstruct and interpret the fragments. If humanities scholars aim to rise to the level of the hard sciences, let them emulate XArchive.

I should have called it literature archaeology.

Created in partnership with Google:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/from-desert-to-web-br...

no spoilers for those of us that haven't read them.

What's interesting to study is the difference between the dead sea scrolls and the "current" or canonical version of the old testament. See more on http://www.bibleandscience.com/archaeology/dss.htm and http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/symposiums/1st/papers/Anderson9...

Think that Judaism, Christianism and Islamism, and a big part of world culture are based or influenced on that.

Pretty neat, I'm most interested in Daniel.

Prior to the dead sea scrolls people would speculate the prophecies in Daniel were written after the fact.

The carbon dating in the dead sea scrolls seemed to prove otherwise.

Archive.org also digitalizing old Bibles. And you can download them too! For example: http://www.archive.org/details/novumtestamentum00eras

The DSS have been online for a while now, and this is only a few of the scrolls. However, it is very nicely done, and clearly the best online edition of these particular scrolls.

Clever implementation. Pay attention when browsing the Isaiah scroll to how the rolled up ends of the scroll change in size as you scroll it left to right.

Does this make seeing the real dead sea scrolls more or less impressive I wonder?

OK, I'm no Google fan (far from it), but this is pretty goddamn cool.

Not really that cool, when you see how they've ensured it will be available only as long as the web site and the institutional support continues.

If there was a download link for the whole thing, documents and UI+backend source, now that would be cool.

It’s about time.

as an aside, for a great book discussing the evolution of the current bible, you should read Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehram

*Ehrman

Ehrman's book mixes fact with a great deal of speculation. I would not recommend it as a starting place.

For a more factual treatment, I'd recommend starting with the wikipedia article on "textual criticism" (the process of reconstructing documents from imperfect copies). Its section on the New Testament has a list of the major textual problems, most of which have their own wikipedia articles.

If you want to get into books, David Alan Black wrote a fairly nice introduction to New Testament textual criticism. Bruce Metzger and Kurt Aland's books are both pretty widely respected as well. If you want to see the changes passage-by-passage during study, consider using the NET Bible (net.bible.org) and watching for notes marked "tc".

I wrote a commentary on a commentary of that. Getting meta, I know. :) But I think it's valid to consider both sides because Ehrman seems a bit misinformed about some things.

http://www.pakg1.net/2011/05/is-bible-full-of-forgeries.html

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