Yesterday, a couple of days after we’d planned to, we saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

I thought it was an excellent exhibit, and I’m glad I went. There was a lot to see there. Beside the scrolls themselves (or, I should say, odd chunks of miscellaneous scrolls) I was surprised to see how much information they had on the Qumran site. It was helpful to me to understand the geography of the site better and to see what archaeologists have learned from its ruins. I also liked the displays that helped to explain paleography and its role in dating the scrolls.

Sadly, I found that my Hebrew, which is on the retreat even in the best circumstances, is not improved by putting all the words in an archaic script, in the handwritten equivalent of 8 point type, under thick glass, in the dark.

After we’d studied the DSS for awhile, we looked at some of the museum’s other exhibits: