It was on this day in 1991 that the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, opened up access to photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls to scholars for the first time. The first of the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered by the Bedouin in 1947. They turned up in 11 caves along the Dead Sea, 13 miles east of Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise about 900 documents, most of them fragments, written mostly in Hebrew, as well as Aramaic and Greek. They include texts that are also in the Hebrew Bible — at least part of every book of the Old Testament besides the Book of Esther.
Access to the Scrolls had been limited for many years to a small group of members of the academic elite. But on this day in 1991, the Huntington, without asking any permission from the Israel Antiquities Authority, which held the scrolls, announced that they would make their photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls available to any scholar who wanted to come and study them.
Posted over on the Writer's Almanac
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