The Great Isaiah Scroll: A Once-in-a-Generation Exhibition

For nearly 2,200 years, it lay hidden in a cave above the Dead Sea. Now, for the first time since 1968, the Great Isaiah Scroll has been unrolled to its full 24-foot length and placed on public display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

“A Voice from the Desert: The Great Isaiah Scroll” is a highlight of exhibitions marking the museum’s 60th anniversary. The manuscript will be presented in its entirety for only four months, with strict conservation requirements allowing 25 visitors at a time to enter the temperature-controlled Scroll Gallery for 10 minutes.

“This is the only complete biblical manuscript ever found so far,” curator Hagit Moaz said. “It contains all 66 chapters of Isaiah. It is a unique opportunity, once in a generation, to come and see this magnificent scroll.”

Radiocarbon dating places the Isaiah Scroll at approximately 125 BCE — roughly 1,000 years older than the oldest previously known Hebrew Bible manuscripts. The scroll is approximately 95–98% identical to the Masoretic Text in modern Hebrew Bibles.

Discovered in the Judean Desert just months before the establishment of the State of Israel, the scroll stands as tangible testimony to continuity — linking the Jewish people of the Second Temple period to a sovereign Jewish state more than two millennia later. Its words ring out across the ages: “Shout for joy, you who dwell in Zion!”