'Dead Sea Scrolls: Life in Ancient Times'

One of the largest collections of Dead Sea Scrolls and the most comprehensive collection of Israeli antiquities ever organized is currently at the Museum of Science, Boston. A traveling exhibit, it will be in Boston until October 20; then it will move on to Salt Lake City, Utah. 

In addition to 20 rare fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection—some never exhibited before—visitors will get a glimpse into daily life in ancient times, through exhibits featuring more than 600 ancient objects, such as weapons, terra-cotta figurines, coins, shoes, textiles, mosaics, ceramics, and jewelry. A replica of a four-room house along with a time line and a multimedia presentation provide context.

The Sentinel’s Rosalie E. Dunbar recently spoke with Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn (Professor at San Diego State University) who co-curated the exhibit with Debora Ben Ami (Iron Age collection curator at the Israel Antiquities Authority). 

Was it thrilling to work with these ancient documents? 

The entire experience was very humbling. Whenever you come into contact with artifacts, whether they are written documents like the scrolls, or pottery or jewelry, or something else, and you know those objects are 2,000 to 3,000 years old, you realize that 2,000 years ago people were penning documents that asked very deep-seated theological questions, and at the same time they were making utensils that they could use every day in their home. It connects you to the past in a very profound way. And of course the objects themselves are very precious.

We tend to think that we’re all so unique in the things we do and the questions we ask and in our intellectual pursuits. When you see that people 2,000 years ago were also trying to figure it out, you realize we’re not that unusual, that there’s a universal human experience.

What are you hoping people will come away with?

We had several goals. One was to transport people back in time and to a very different place in terms of the world, so that coming out of the experience they would feel like they didn’t just journey to Israel but also took a trip back to the past. Another was to help people understand that the biblical stories of Israel are only one piece of a big puzzle. To try to explicate the way archaeology helps to inform that puzzle, helps sometimes to inform the biblical text, or to complicate it a bit more.

We wanted to create windows into the past, so in the biblical sections of the gallery visitors can get little glimpses of what a house would have looked like or the kinds of objects and pursuits that would have been part of everyday life. And we do it again in the Second Temple period, which is the period contemporary to the scrolls. 

What about the three-ton stone that’s a section of the Wailing Wall, where people can put in requests. Do you really want people to be putting in personal requests?

We wanted to have a stone from the wall to provide an object that people could both recognize and touch. I also wanted something that resonates both with the Second Temple period, which is when the wall was built, and with the present because people still go there on pilgrimages today. The whole idea of the notes and the writing of the notes—that grew organically out of the exhibition in New York. 

We never really intended for that to happen, but there’s such a tradition of placing notes in the wall that it happened in New York, and we decided to facilitate it for visitors in the other cities to which the exhibit has traveled—Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and now Boston. We’re expecting that visitors in Salt Lake City and beyond will also respond to this spontaneous way of leaving prayers, as well.

“Dead Sea Scrolls: Life in Ancient Times“ was created by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) from the collections of the Israel National Treasures and produced by Discovery Times Square and The Franklin Institute. For more information go to mos.org/exhibits/dead-sea-scrolls.