The shrine of the book

We spent part of a day gonig to the Israel Museum. One of the highlights at the museum is the shrine built in honor of the finding of the Dead Sea scrolls. The exhibit begins down underground; like entering a cave where the scrolls were found just over 60 years ago. You see tools and writing instruments and coins from the Essene community at Qumran, the community which copied and preserved these ancient manuscripts of the Bible. As you work your way deeper into the cave, you finally enter the shrine of the book - a room that is designed to look like the inside of one of the clay pots that held the scrolls for nearly 2000 years. The outside of the shrine can be seen in the picture at the right; doesn't teh white domed roof look like the lid to a pottery jar to you? In a way, we are people of the book; we listen to the Bible as God's word to us, a book filled with words of life.