The Written Record

It is fitting that my first real blog post comes on the day I went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the San Diego Natural History Museum. A small set of them are currently on loan from the Israel and Jordan Antiquities Authorities along with contextual artifacts such as the clay pots that housed these delicate pieces of goat skin for close to 2000 years! I was surprised by the size of the scrolls, not one is taller than my fingerspan although some are more than one feet in length, each containing more than a dozen rows of carefully hand-scribed, fading Hebrew. The words of the Ten Commandments seem to cling to the desert parchment like tumbleweed, in danger of being obliterated by the winds of time. Yet even to a gentile like me, coming across the four dots symbolizing the Hebrew God's name made me pause, just as it did for that ancient scribe. At that moment, I understood the universal power of the written word.