Israel Museum: November 21

On Monday, November 21, Rafi and I caught a bus to the Israel Museum. We had been wanting to tour this museum for quite some time, even trying to walk there one day and accidently taking a very long way around - not arriving at the museum until near to closing. This time we planned accordingly to allow ourselves hours of perusing. We had heard that this was an excellent museum. In particular, I was excited to see the museum's collection of archeological objects as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It was a lovely day, full of sunshine and blue sky with fluffy clouds. The Hershey Kiss-looking building you can see in the picture above is the Shrine of the Book where the Dead Sea Scrolls are kept.

We toured the museum for a total of five hours, leaving only because it was closing for the day. We had so much more to tour! We spent the first part of our day in the Archeology section. This was a fantastic collection of ancient archeological finds from the area and told the story of the Land (Israel). The story was well told, with so much information to gobble up at each artifact. Photography was forbidden at the museum, but I managed to snap a quick picture of an ancient object on which is inscribed the Priestly Blessing. It is one of the first objects that has biblical writing on it. So cool! One of our favorite parts of the exhibit was the ancient glass section. We spent near an hour in that small part alone. It was fantastic! The glass was beautiful and colorful with iridescence. There was so much to look at and absorb into our minds.

After the Archeology exhibits, we quickly toured the Judaica exhibts that were also housed in the Israel Museum. It was wonderful as well. The Judaica collection housed by the museum is vast and very special. We barely even scratched the surface, having to leave it soon to find the Shrine of the Book - the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

We found the Shrine of the Book after leaving the main exhibitions and walking through the now rainy Jerusalem weather. We went down into a cave-like exhibit in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were contained. It was so neat to see them, ancient Hebrew script lettering all over the parchment. Rafi and I could make out letters and some words. It is so special that this language has been able to survive for so long throughout history even when Jews are scattered over so many countries and continents and now speak many more languages. The Dead Sea Scrolls include the "oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-Biblical documents" according to Wikipedia. They date from between 150 BCE. to 70 CE. Overall, it was a great day at the museum. We were both impressed by each exhibit and how the information was conveyed.