Sea Scrolls and Sunsets

Saw the Dead Sea Scrolls today at the Seattle Science Center. That was pretty cool. I was amazed at how small the pieces of parchment actually are and how hard they are to read - they're tiny. It was pretty weird to lean over the case and think about the fact that the piece of parchment I was staring at was thousands of years old. One cool tidbit: in many translations of the Bible we have today, you'll notice that the word "Lord" is always written in small caps, like LORD. Looks awkward, no? Well, my stepmom noticed that on the original copy of the manuscript we were looking at, you could see how the word "Lord" was actually written in a different style and size than the rest of the text - the Hebrew equivalent of what we do with the typeface today like we have it today. That was pretty cool.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are important both for Judiasm and Christianity. For Jews, they are the oldest existing versions of many of the prominent Old Testament books, such as Genesis and Isaiah, as well as a fascinating look into the life of the Qumran Jewish sect that is thought to have planted the scrolls in the clay jars and hidden them in the Qumran caves. For Christians, they are also definitive proof of the accuracy of our current translations of the Bible - the versions of the books contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls are exact, word-for-word copies of what we have (in Hebrew, of course). So the next time someone tells you that the accuracy of the Bible can't be certain because of how many times it's been copied or translated, you can tell 'em to do their research.

It snowed last night about 3 inches up on our mountain. That was surprising and also pretty cool.

Also, the sunset today was fantastic. Nothing like driving by downtown Seattle on I-90 during twilight when all the city lights are just coming on. The Olympics were out in all their glory and made for the perfect backdrop.