Friday, October 19, 2007

THE REVISED DEAD SEA SCROLL EXHIBITION IN SAN DIEGO is reviewed in the North County Times:
Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit lives on

By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer
Part 2 of collection opens, contains portion of Ten Commandments

It's not quite as exciting as discovering the Ark of the Covenant, but a 2,000-year-old scroll depicting the Ten Commandments is the highlight of an already landmark exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

The museum this week began displaying the second of its two-part series of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the largest collection of the artifacts ever displayed in the United States. The 24-scroll exhibit, which runs until Dec. 31, is in two parts because the Israel Antiquities Authority allows only 12 scrolls to leave the country at a time.

Curator Risa Levitt Kohn, director of San Diego State University's Jewish Studies Program and an associate professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism in the Religious Studies Department, said the scrolls demonstrate how consistent the Bible has been over 2,000 years.

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The Ten Commandments portion is said to be significant because it is the oldest and best-preserved of all the Deuteronomy manuscripts that were discovered in the find. Deuteronomy is one of the Old Testament books of the Bible.

The Ten Commandments text is longer than traditional translations of the Commandments, according to the exhibit's literature, and it includes the two biblical versions of the Sabbath commandment, Exodus 20:11 and Deuteronomy 5:11. Still, its content is easily recognized.

The text reads in part: "You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, and any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am an impassioned god."

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