Sunday, I spent several useful hours in the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition hosted by the San Diego Natural History Museum. While I am reasonably well acquainted with the history, issues and details of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran, I found the exhibition to be a profitable exercise. A wide range of material is provided to help put the Scrolls into an appropriate context. In developing the exhibition, care has been taken to make the issues of the Scrolls relevant to the present day.
The exhibition is in three parts, starting with a general photographic and video introduction to Israel and the general area of the Dead Sea. Coupled with this is a series of exhibits dealing with pottery and its importance to archaeology. Moving downstairs into the Gallery, one is introduced to the archaeology of Qumran and the discovery of the scrolls. Photos of early participants in the recovery, purchase and translation of the Scrolls are presented. Then one moves into the area where the Scrolls are displayed. The museum has naturally anticipated that some periods will have a larger attendance than others. Monday, for instance, is a low attendance period while Sunday afternoon is peak. I’d recommend that you try to attend in one of the low periods. A helpful timetable is provided on the official museum site. The museum has wisely sought to control the number of viewers at any one period, but on a Sunday afternoon, there were just too many people to do justice to viewing. On the other hand it is great to see so many from Southern California spending a Sunday afternoon in a museum rather than on the beach! I speak of numbers mainly because it is desirable to get as close as possible to the enlarged photographs and documentation of the fragments. The documentation frequently poses a question of the viewer, but unless you can get close enough, it is a forlorn hope to respond. I also question what may have happened to the lighting of the scrolls when I was there. No lighting effectively illuminated the scrolls themselves with the exception of the Copper Scroll. Now, I appreciate that the lighting has to be controlled and limited for the preservation of the documents themselves. But the lack of direct lighting meant that the Scrolls couldn’t be fully appreciated in their own right given the subdued ambient light available in the room. The Natural History Museum has joined forces with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Dead Sea Scroll Foundation to assemble this display. What is fascinating is that fragments held by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan are also part of the exhibition, an encouraging sign of co-operation. Further materials are on loan from the Russian National Library of St. Petersburg as well as from local collections. UCLA’s virtual Qumran was also on display, but that highlights another concern about numbers. The flat screen panels for displaying videos and the virtual display could have been larger. Given the crowds of people wishing to view the media, the size of the display screen in critical. To any readers who plans to visit the exhibition, my advice would be that you avoid rushing the experience. The exhibition ends with a focus on the interests of those who wrote the scrolls some two thousand years ago. Those issues as to humanity and its place in the universe are as relevant today as they were then. Here at Vision, we seek to address many of those issues.
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