死海古卷（或稱死海經卷、死海書卷、死海文書），是為目前最古老的希伯來文聖經抄本（舊約），除了《聖經·以斯帖記》以外的《舊約全書》全部內容都能在死海古卷中找到，還含有一些今天雖然被天主教承認、但被基督教新教認為是外典（包括次經及偽經）的經卷，此外，當中也有一些不是《聖經》的文獻。
此古卷出土於公元1947年的死海附近的庫姆蘭（Khirbet Qumran，或譯昆蘭或坎巒），故名為死海古卷。古卷主要是羊皮紙，部分是紙莎草紙。抄寫的文字以希伯來文為主，當中也有少數由希臘文、亞蘭文、納巴提文和拉丁文寫成。 一般認為這是公元後66年~公元後70年猶太人反對羅馬的大起義，被羅馬鎮壓失敗後，猶太教文化面臨滅頂之災，一些猶太教的苦行教徒將古卷埋在死海附近乾燥的地方，以求保全本民族文化。這些苦行教徒就是艾塞尼教派（Essenes）的庫姆蘭社團（昆蘭社團），不過也有人對此提出異議，提出這裡是奮銳黨的軍事秘密要塞的假說。
艾賽尼派（或譯「愛色尼派）是當時猶太教的四大派別之一，另外三大派別為撒都該人（Sadducess）、法利賽人（Pharisees）和奮銳黨（Zealots）。
English----
Dead Sea Scrolls Go Online in Israel Museum Project With Google
The Dead Sea Scrolls, so ancient and fragile that direct light cannot shine on them, are now available to search and read online in a project launched today by the Israel Museum and Google Inc. (GOOG)
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful,” said Yossi Matias, managing director of Google’s R&D Center in Israel.
The people who wrote the scrolls hid them in caves along the shore of the Dead Sea, probably about the time the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and are generally attributed to an isolated Jewish sect that settled in Qumran in the Judean Desert. The manuscripts, for the most part in ancient Hebrew, were discovered between 1947 and 1956.
Sections of the scrolls are on display at Israel Museum’s Shrine of the book and rotated every three to four months so as to minimize exposure. Only a facsimile of the Great Isaiah Scroll is on display. The Google tool on the Israel Museum website makes entire scrolls accessible and allows browsers to zoom into the text as well as read its translation in English.
“This gives you a way to understand the beginning of biblical history,” said museum director James Snyder. “Nothing could be more important.”
The project follows a Google project that went live in January and put online an archive and search function for photos from Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. The world’s largest Internet search engine is also working on a project in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority that will make available on the Internet fragments of the scrolls so they can be studied by scholars.
Cultural Opportunity
“The opportunity is amazing here for culture and heritage information,” Matias said. “We are trying to expand this and address these historical and heritage archives and there are great things that can be done here.”
Five of the eight scrolls housed at Israel Museum since 1965 have been digitalized, including the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Temple Scroll and the War Scroll. The Great Isaiah Scroll can be searched by column, chapter and verse, including the famous “and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” It is accompanied by an English translation tool and includes an option for users to submit translations of verses in their own languages.
“For us, the Dead Sea Scrolls couldn’t be a more important iconic cultural artifact,” said Snyder. “Any opportunity for us to bring them to the widest possible public audience and offer the opportunity to really begin to understand what these amazing documents are all about is something that we embrace.”
Google’s Chief Executive Larry Page is pushing into new markets such as mobile and display advertising, while trying to preserve the company’s leadership in search, an area that generates most of Google’s revenue. Shares of Google have dropped 0.3 percent in the past 12 months, compared with a 1.1 percent decline of the S&P 500 Index.
Both Israel Museum and Google declined to say how much the project cost.
---npr 的訪談 可聽
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/02/140988899/dead-sea-scrolls-come-alive-on-google
Dead Sea Scrolls Come Alive On Google
Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem have partnered to launch a new website that allows people the ability to view the Dead Sea Scrolls in detail. Host Audie Cornish talks with Jon Stokes, who writes about technology for Wired.com.
Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
AUDIE CORNISH, host: For 2,000 years, the Dead Sea scrolls were seen by no one. Today, they can be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet. Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem teamed up to put high-quality images of the scrolls online. Images of the relics - the oldest known copies of biblical text - went live on the Web last week. Jon Stokes writes about technology for Wired.com. He is also a scholar of biblical history. And he joins us from KALW in San Francisco. Jon Stokes, welcome to the program.
JON STOKES: Thank you. It's good to be here.
CORNISH: Now, the scrolls may be new to the Web, but they were discovered in 1947, and historical scholars have had access to copies and translations for decades. I mean, what's the big deal about having them online now?
STOKES: So, there's a long and kind of sordid and really interesting publication history behind the scrolls. Because if you're a scholar, you dig something up out of the ground that's brand new or you're assigned to work on something that hasn't been discovered, you might take, you know, a decade to publish this, to really get it in shape to publish it because this is your career. I mean, this is going to be your piece of immortality. You're going to be the guy that did the first critical edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, Isaiah Scroll or what have you. And so there was fierce scholarly competition and the work just dragged on and on and on and scholars got really frustrated at the delays; the wider scholarly community, because they said, hey, you know, this is a once in a generation kind of find and it's been, you know, 20 years and we haven't had access to this, especially not in the way that we want. So, when I was in grad school, there would be a special day in the semester and everybody would get excited because we would get to go and have an in-person look at some of the manuscripts that were in the University of Chicago's collection, or in Harvard's collection. And, you know, the students would sit and these things would be laid out for us and we wouldn't be able to touch them and you could look at them with a magnifying glass. But that was, like, you know, once or twice in my life that happens. Most scholars are lucky if you're able to just get your hands on a really good high-quality color copy of a text that you're working on. So, now this thing has been put online and anyone, you know, my daughter, you know, God forbid, decides to follow in my footsteps and try to become a humanity scholar or a historian, she'll have grown up in a world where she can get really, really close to these manuscripts in a way that almost nobody could.
CORNISH: How close will you be able to get. I'm trying to imagine - what will the scrolls look like online? Will you be able to zoom in on the material the way you can like Google Earth or?
STOKES: Yeah, that's correct. So, these were photographed at a 1,200 megapixel resolution. You know, so if you think about an eight megapixel camera. I mean, this is, you know, 10-Xed out or better. And you can scroll up and see the fibers, you know, and the particles in the manuscript.
CORNISH: Jon, you're a biblical scholar, so I have you ask: have you gone online and looked at the Dead Sea Scrolls and are you excited about the possibilities of what it means for your own work?
STOKES: Absolutely, absolutely. These are searchable. You know, I can actually search these, you know, by English translation. You know, I can go to a specific verse or a specific phrase and I can zoom in and I can attach comments to it. But, yeah, I mean, it's definitely the kind of tool that scholars need.
CORNISH: So, it's not the same as actually getting to touch it but it's the closest any of us are going to get.
STOKES: It's almost better. I mean, I've seen these things in person. And, you know, you look at them with a magnifying glass and it's almost better to be able to do the kind of really, really high-level zoom in and that's going to be incredible.
CORNISH: Jon Stokes is a technology writer and biblical scholar. He joins us from KALW in San Francisco. Jon Stokes, thank you so much for joining us.
STOKES: Thank you.
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