Le Dix-Septième Jour, Jeudi. (The seventeenth day, Thursday 6/2)

 Thursday was our day at Qumran and dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Really, though it was educationally valuable, it wasn't very exciting...like, at all. Qumran is a community of priestly people who lived out in the desert waiting for the Messiah. They were suuuuper strict about stuff, to the point where you weren't allowed to relieve yourself during the 24 hours of shabbat (sabbath) and breaking the rules had serious repercussions. So we got to visit the site of this community.

 The reason we went to the site of Qumran is that it is right next to where all the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We could actually look out and see cave four (the cave where most of the scrolls were found) from standing right at the ruins of Qumran.

We had the privilege of having the curator of the Shrine of the Book (the Dead Sea Scrolls wing of the Israel Museum), Adolfo Roitman, teaching us about the scrolls. Apparently he has never done any lectures on the scrolls away from the Shrine of the Book, but he came with us to Qumran for the morning. He was pretty cool, but it was hard to pay attention to anything in the baking sun there. 

After we finished up at the Qumran site, we went to the actual Israel Museum and did more of the lectures about the scrolls there. They had some really cool videos, too. Below is a picture of the scale model of Jerusalem right before the fall of the second temple. Basically, around Jesus' time. The model was HUGE! It used to be in a different location, and it was a yearlong project to cut it into pieces and move it a bit through the city to put it in the museum. Yikes!

And this is a random Jewish man who all of a sudden jumped in and added his opinion to the lecture we were getting in our private tour. He talked for several minutes straight and didn't really even seem to notice that the tour wasn't open to public input. Welcome to Israel, people!



That's kind of all we really did for the day. Like I said, it was pretty anticlimactic.