Mostra sui Rotoli di Qumran apre oggi
Exhibition on Dead Sea Scrolls opens today
domenica 21 settembre 2008
Apre oggi la favosa mostra al Jewish Museum di New York. Ne parla Art Daily in un lungo articolo ben documentato:
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The exhibition at The Jewish Museum includes six Dead Sea Scrolls. These fragments of parchment documents consist of the Book of Jeremiah (225-175 BCE), one of the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible in existence; an early example of prayers from the Words of the Luminaries; the Book of Tobit, a Jewish text that was not included in the Hebrew canon but later accepted into some versions of the Christian Old Testament (Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox); the Aramaic Apocryphon of Daniel, which mentions a son of God; the Community Rule, which lays out the regulations for joining and being a member of a sect; and the War Rule, which describes a great war at the end of days. Each represents an aspect of the diverse religious milieu in which they were created more than 2,000 years ago. In an adjoining gallery, visitors will learn that scholars still do not agree about the origins and meaning of the scrolls decades after their discovery.
E sui chi fossero gli autori:
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Scholars have two basic theories about who used the scrolls. The first posits that the scrolls all belonged to a single religious sect that probably lived at the settlement of Qumran. Most scholars identify this group as the Essenes described in the writings of ancient historians, although other groups such as the Sadducees and even proto-Christians have been proposed.
L’altra:
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The second theory proposes that the scrolls were a random collection of texts reflecting the beliefs of many Jewish groups of the period. They represented either a single priestly repository or public library, or the sacred texts of various Jewish communities from Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Land of Israel. During the Jewish revolt against Rome beginning in 68 CE, refugees from further north hid their precious texts in the Dead Sea caves. This hypothesis holds that there is no connection between the scrolls and the settlement at Qumran, and that the site was a fortress, a villa, a farm, an industrial site, or a commercial center.
Beato chi abita a New York o si trova nelle vicinanze.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was one of the archaeological sensations of the 20th century. Treasured objects of ancient religious observance and intense modern scholarly debate, these parchment texts were found, starting in 1947, in caves in the Judean Desert, east of Jerusalem and near the Dead Sea. Created over 2,000 years ago, the scrolls turned out to contain previously unknown Jewish compositions as well as the oldest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible. When biblical scholars first learned of these texts, they were electrified by their potential for new revelations about Judaism and Christianity.
