The Shrine of the Book

The building is deliberately strange to look at: a low white dome, ribbed and glazed, rising out of a reflecting pool, facing a wall of black basalt across a plaza. It is not a folly. Every element of the Shrine of the Book, the wing of the Israel Museum built to hold the Dead Sea Scrolls, is a piece of argument in stone and concrete about the manuscripts inside it. The white dome is shaped to recall the lid of the pottery jars in which some of the scrolls were found in the Qumran caves. The black wall opposite it is a deliberate opposite. Visitors descend into the ground to reach the scrolls, passing between the two, in a building that stages the very dualism - light against dark - that some of the texts inside describe.

That is theatre, and the museum does not pretend otherwise. But the object of the theatre is not theatrical at all. What the Shrine of the Book protects is a set of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and the library of a Second Temple-period Jewish community, recovered from caves near the Dead Sea starting in the late 1940s. The building is evidence architecture: its whole design exists to serve, light and preserve documents whose age and content can be checked against Jewish textual tradition copied and recopied for two thousand years afterwards - and found, overwhelmingly, to agree.

What is inside

The core of the collection is the Dead Sea Scrolls: several hundred manuscripts and many thousands of fragments, written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, some in Greek, found in eleven caves in the cliffs above the ruin of Qumran on the Dead Sea's north-western shore. They include copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible, sectarian rules and liturgical texts belonging to the community that owned them, and other Second Temple-period Jewish writing not preserved in the later biblical canon. The Shrine of the Book displays a rotating selection, built around its centrepiece: the Great Isaiah Scroll, a virtually complete copy of the Book of Isaiah and the oldest known biblical manuscript of its length, exhibited on a form that echoes the wooden rollers of the scroll itself. A full facsimile is shown to the public; the fragile original is kept under strict conservation conditions and rotated in only occasionally.

The building also houses the Aleppo Codex, a much later but no less important manuscript: a mediaeval codex of the Hebrew Bible, produced in Tiberias and long kept in Aleppo, whose consonantal text, vowel pointing and cantillation marks were treated for centuries as the most authoritative version of the Masoretic text. Housing the Qumran scrolls and the Aleppo Codex under the same roof puts the two ends of a very long chain of transmission in one room: the community's Bible from the last centuries BCE, and the standard on which printed Hebrew Bibles are still checked today.

Why it matters as evidence

Before the Qumran discoveries, the earliest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts available to scholars dated from the early Middle Ages. The gap between those manuscripts and the biblical events and books they described was, in textual terms, an argument waiting to be settled: did a millennium or more of copying by hand introduce serious drift into the text Jews were reading and reciting? The Great Isaiah Scroll and the biblical fragments beside it answer that question directly. Set against the mediaeval Masoretic text, the Qumran Isaiah scroll is, apart from spelling variants and a small number of textual differences, essentially the same book. A community praying and studying in the last centuries before the Common Era was reading substantially the same Isaiah that synagogues read today.

The non-biblical scrolls matter for a different reason. Rule books, hymns, calendrical texts and commentaries recovered from the caves give a first-hand view of a Jewish community's own beliefs and practices, in its own words, from a period usually known to us only through later, external sources. Together with the Aleppo Codex on the far side of the same building, the collection lets a visitor stand in one room and trace an unbroken written chain: a biblical text copied in the Second Temple period, and a standard-setting Bible codex from thirteen centuries later, agreeing with each other and with the printed Hebrew Bible on the shelf at home.