Biblical Museum

Yesterday I visited Amsterdam's not particularly well known Bijbels Museum - the Museum of Bibles. I read somewhere that they had one of the Isiah scrolls from Qumran and I thought I'd check it out. The museum lies in the Herengracht, which is an old and beautiful canal street. When I arrived there was a poster advertising a traveling exhibit of Giotto frescoes from a chapel in Padua! The museum is in a huge 17th century canal house and has preserved little tableau of rich burger life. Bypassing the furniture collection, I headed for Giotto; disfortunatamente, when I got to the Giotto exhibit, it turned out to be a traveling show of photos of Giotto frescoes, cleverly arranged to replicate the experience of standing in the chapel. Next, I went to look for the Isiah scroll. I once saw a tiny fragment of one of the dead sea scrolls, and I was excited about seeing one of the major ones intact. Scrolls like Isiah were really important for Judeo-Christian-Islamic scholars as, among other things, they allowed us to compare our relatively late copies of Old Testament texts with much older ones. Strike two: the scroll was made of plaster. It looked like it was from a really high-class Dead Sea gift shop.



As it turns out, the museum is largely devoted to a series of minutely crafted 19th century models of the Holy Land. These are of an enormous model of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.








As well as models there are curio cabinets with Egyptian, Jewish and Roman knickknacks and ephemera. They even had a mummy, with the grisly head unwrapped and placed on a shelf of its own.




There was a large model of the Arc of the Covenant with the high priest at prayer on the Day of Atonement, backed by a video projection of scenes from Israel, interspersed with shots of dolls in Hebrew outfits.




And of course, the obligatory view finder exhibits.





The museum also had Bibles, lots and lots of bibles...





It was such an old school museum, I loved it.