The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Milwaukee Public Museum won’t be taking the holiday off. Instead, it will be open to accommodate last-minute visitors to its Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, which closes next week. Mostly written on parchment or papyrus, in Hebrew and Aramaic with a smattering of Greek, the hundreds of documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls became the most famous archaeological discovery since the opening of King Tut’s tomb. The Milwaukee Public Museum’s exhibition “Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: Ancient Artifacts, Timeless Treasures” not only displays these 2,000-year-old texts, but also sets the context for the scrollsespecially life in Jerusalem and Judea during the period when they were writtenand their place in the evolution of the Bible and religious belief. According to many scholars, a Jewish sect that predated and briefly coexisted with the nascent faith that became Christianity wrote the scrolls, which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy in the winter of 1946-47.