I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at The San Diego Natural History Museum back in December of 2007. I was out there with a friend from Arizona. We were booked for a cruise, and decided to arrive a couple of days early, and take in some of the sites as neither of us had ever been there. We hadn’t known about the exhibit, but came upon it as we were walking around Balboa Park. We were glad we were in the right place at the right time, because the exhibit ended that month.
That same tour also went through Chicago, and was a big draw. It went somewhere else, then the subsequent museum dropped out, so the Grand Rapids museum bid on it, won, and I got to see it more or less locally. Enjoyed it immensely. I think the museum lost money on it, which had been the problem for the museum that had dropped out and others which hadn't.
There are thousands of scroll fragments - most are kept at the Department of antiqiuities, the Rockefeller Museum, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Many were found up and down the Dead Sea Western Shoreline - Qumran, but many more near Ein Gedi and southward. One metal scroll Q3-15 cave 3 at Qumran) is located in Ammon. Many scrolls have yet to be studied and logged, but many are ‘in progress.) Contrary to most people’s understanding, most of the scrolls are civil documents (marraiges, deaths, titles, etc.) Biblical scrolls are amazingly similar to current documents, but are written in ancient Hebrew, so there are some differences. The community at Qumran was not the ‘monastic’ Essenes as were proposed by Father Roland Guérin de Vaux OP, a French Priest who was the first to study them (his Dominican background influenced his conclusions). There were graves found with the bones of women and children at the Qumran site, next to the scriptorium where the scrolls were transcribed. The ‘Essenes’ were a messianic cult that were a subset from the ancient Saducees. Their most notable treatise was “The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness” that was originally published by Eleazar Sukenik in 1955. I have personally seen privately held scrolls from the Grandson of the original bedouin discoverer. The point of sharing this knowledge of the scrolls is to let people know that there are thousands of them and they were written by Jews from abot 120 BCE to about 60 CE in Israel. That was while they were under Roman Administration, but I believe about 2000 years before the Palestinian Authority was ‘created’. This part of Israel was not refered to as ‘palestina’ until the Emperor Hadrian named it Syria Palestina in 135 CE after he crushed the Bar Kokhba Rebellion and wanted to ‘disappear’ Israel from the history books.
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