The Palestinian Authority demanded this week the cancellation of an exhibition in Canada of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which it said were stolen by Israel from Palestinian territories, Canadian media reported.
Top Palestinian officials wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper asking him to step in to cancel the exhibition, which is set to open in June at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, according to the Toronto Star newspaper.
“The exhibition would entail exhibiting or displaying artifacts removed from the Palestinian territories,” said Hamdan Taha, director-general of the archaeological department in the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities,
“I think it is important that Canadian institutions would be responsible and act in accordance with Canada’s obligations,” Taha wrote in the letter to Harper.
The museum plans a six-month showcase of 16 of the 900 manuscripts from the Dead Sea.@
The Dead Sea Scrolls, written mostly on parchment and partly on papyrus, were discovered in 11 caves on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea where they had moldered undisturbed for roughly 20 centuries until 1947 young Bedouin shepherds searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert entered a long untouched cave and found jars filled with ancient scrolls.
That initial discovery by the Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years archaeologists searching for a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people who deposited the scrolls excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the caves are found and the Dead Sea.
Within a fairly short time after their discovery, historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating established that the scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century BC to 68 AD. They were indeed ancient! Coming from the late Second Temple Period, a time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, they are older than any other surviving biblical manuscripts by almost one thousand years
Initially, housed in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, under Jordanian control, the scrolls were absorbed by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War, an act considered illegal by international law. The scrolls were then removed from East Jerusalem and taken them to the western city, where they remain today
The scrolls, written mainly in Hebrew, and partly in Aramaic and Greek, have shed light on the earliest origins of Judaism and Christianity and are considered to be one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time.
In the letter, signed by senior Palestinian government officials, the objectors argue that the texts were acquired illegally by Israel.
“The scrolls provide evidence that information handed down in the books of the Bible is accurate.”
TITS
