The Dead Sea Scrolls

Yesterday, we took a field trip down to San Diego to view the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Natural History Museum. My first thought was that I need to raise the standards on my boys' penmanship!

We strolled the hallways, listening to pre-recorded messages, looking at the artifacts at each station. Some stations had extra information, which generally included Scripture. My overall impressions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, are that they were not what I had expected! I guess I had envisioned them to be massive scrolls with lots of information, with little signs of aging. Instead, what I saw, were these itty-bitty puzzle pieces, with many more pieces missing than accounted for!

I marveled at God's providential timing of them being found. First, and foremost, they were found before our current preservationist standards. Because men were unafraid to use their bare hands and Scotch tape, they actually got a lot more study/work done on them, before they discovered that they might be compromising the life span of the artifacts. I think that if they were found now, that preservation would be first, and only after the years of properly preserving them, would the study of them had been started and under very strict standards.

I also enjoyed learning about Qum'ran, the location near the Dead Sea, about 13 miles outside of Jerusalem, where over 700 manuscripts have been found. It is a place I would like to visit, but I think I would have really liked to have visited it 2000 years ago.

I let Andrew, Philip and Stephen wander at their own pace, with their own ear pieces. I only tried to stay within seeing distance of Andrew. I figured I could get their download at the end of the tour.

At the end of the tour, I asked Andrew, "What did you like the most?" He answered the pictures of the story of David and Goliath, but that he didn't like the museums interpretation of Goliath. Before I could ask any further questions, he let loose on a diatribe, that had really bugged me, but I had looked beyond it. "Mommy, why do the scientist people have to change it from BC to BCE and from AD to CE?" It was a rhetorical question, as they had explained it in one of the first stations. "That is really a dumb idea!"

Philip, the 12 year old, answers, "Well, it is really dumb because they don't want to be religious, but what are the Dead Sea Scrolls? They're religious!"

Stephen then attacked the logic of the whole dating, because they haven't even changed the start year, which is all based on Christianity. Don explained to them that the Jewish people continue to keep a Jewish calendar that dates us into the thousands, however, in order to trade and function in the rest of the world, they needed to adapt to the calendar based on Christ.

Today, Andrew was reading his Bible and he says to me, "Mom, this was written in 70 AD, (and then in a mocking voice) but if scientists had written it, it would be 70 CE." I laughed, and I said, "Remember Andrew, only SECULAR scientists would have written it that way."
It occurred to me that Andrew, all 10 years of him, is still indignant about this "atrocity" to the naming of our dates. Am I that indignant? No. Should I be? I wonder. Maybe I'm not because I've had this information before (Sadly, only because I taught World History to David and Priscilla). Or maybe because I'm used to the secularism. Or maybe I've lost my zeal to fight battles that seem too big to take on. Or maybe I needed my 10 year old to remind me that I still need to be zealous in my faith, and I need to keep walking the Walk and talking the Talk, so that I can be "salt" that preserves what needs to be preserved in this world.