Macs Underpin Dead Sea Scrolls Project

Profiles in Success: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Apple technology has played a major role in a worldwide academic project: piecing together and publishing the 2,000 year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. A team of nearly 100 scholars, spread across several continents, used Macs to identify and reconstruct fragments of texts — among which are the earliest biblical writings known to man, and to add their commentaries and notes. As a result, 37 volumes of the scrolls have now been published, 60 years after they were first discovered.

“The Mac played an absolutely critical role in our 16 years of work”, confirms Professor Emanuel Tov, Editor-in-Chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project, based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Most important for us was the Mac’s versatility in using different fonts, as we were working in Greek, Hebrew-Aramaic, ancient Hebrew, Syriac and English. We also found the Macs so easy to use, and they literally never crash”.

The 900 scrolls, which date from 250 BC to AD 70, were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves near the ruins of an ancient settlement called Qumran, on the West Bank of the Dead Sea. The scrolls were in tens of thousands of fragments of leather and papyrus, written mainly in Hebrew and Aramaic.

The document texts are widely regarded as of great religious and historical significance. They include practically the only known surviving copies of biblical documents made before AD 100. They were once thought to be potentially explosive in their consequences, possibly containing secrets that would threaten the known origins of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

For decades, access to the complete scrolls was a major problem, as they became caught up in political and institutional conflict. Early efforts to piece together and publish the texts for academic scrutiny were slow and, in some views, inadequately resourced. Only eight volumes were published between 1955 and 1990.

The project gained new impetus in 1991 when Professor Tov, an eminent biblical scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, took over responsibility for managing the editing process. He extended the editing team from its original 10 members to an international group of nearly 100 scholars.

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