The Israel Museum and Shrine of the Book is a unmissable place to be visited in Jerusalem. A simple visit can reveal to a visitor how amazing is the archeological finds. The Shrine of the Book is the house of Dead Sea Scrolls and one of the most important museums around the World about the ancient History, especially about the biblical archeology.
The Israel Museum is the largest cultural complex in Israel and is ranked among the world’s leading in art and archaeology museums. The museum founded in 1965, the museum is the house of encyclopedic collections.
The Israel Museum includes works dating from prehistory to the modern days, in its archaeology artifacts, universal fine arts, Jewish art, life wings, and features the most extensive holdings of biblical archaeology in the world.
The Museum also includes a First Century Model of Jerusalem, the model is very an important feature to understand how was the Holy City in the Herodian period.
The original campus is the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts in the world, as well as rare early medieval biblical manuscripts.
Adjacent to the Shrine is the Model of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period, which reconstructs the topography and architectural character of the city as it was prior to its destruction by the Romans in 66 CE, and provides historical context to the Shrine’s presentation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Other important finds in Israel Museum
Uzziah’s tomb. There is an epitaph now preserved in the Israel Museum marking the burial place of Uzziah, king of Judah. It represented a secondary burial of his bones.
On view are works by modern masters including Jacques Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, and David Smith, together with more recent site-specific commissions by such artists as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mark Dion, James Turrell, and Micha Ullman.
The Museum’s celebrated Billy Rose Art Garden, designed for the original campus by Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, is counted among the finest outdoor sculpture settings of the 20th century.
Source: Israel Museum
The museum includes a courtyard which contains archeological ruins dating back 2,700 years. Visitors can see exhibits depict 4,000 years of Jerusalem's history, from Canaanite era to modern times.
The museum using maps, videotapes, holograms, drawings and models, visitors may also ascend to the ramparts, which command a 360-degree view of the Old City and New City of Jerusalem.
As of 2002, the Jerusalem Foundation reported that over 3.5 million visitors had visited this amazing museum.
Important Finds in Israel Museum
Tomb of King Herod, the Greater
Dead Sea Scrolls
Altar of Sacrifice from Beersheba
Canaanites Tombs
Tel Dan Stele
Piece of Temple Mount Corner
The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient manuscripts that were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran, on the northwestern shores of the Dead Sea. They are approximately two thousand years old, dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE. Most of the scrolls were written in Hebrew, with a smaller number in Aramaic or Greek. Most of them were written on parchment, with the exception of a few written on papyrus. The vast majority of the scrolls survived as fragments - only a handful were found intact. Nevertheless, scholars have managed to reconstruct from these fragments approximately 850 different manuscripts of various lengths.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls represents a turning point in the study of the history of the Jewish people in ancient times, for never before has a literary treasure of such magnitude come to light. Thanks to these remarkable finds, our knowledge of Jewish society in the Land of Israel during the Hellenistic and Roman periods as well as the origins of rabbinical Judaism and early Christianity has been greatly enriched.
Source: Israel Museum
