Show HN: The Dead Sea Scrolls Visualized

[dandeto]

The Dead Sea Scrolls is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in recent history, and its relevance is bolstered since it is of interest to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I had heard of the discovery as a kid, but was surprised to realize how little I knew about it once I started reading books and watching videos by Hebrew Bible scholars on the topic.

I made deadseainsights.com to explore the discovery in an interactive and visually-engaging way. I was also very interested in the differences between the Dead Sea Scroll texts, which are dated to 250 BC - 150 AD, and the Masoretic text (specifically the Leningrad Codex), which is dated to around 1008 AD.

To do this, I could not use information from the books I read, since the text and translations are under copyright. I was able to find permissively-licensed transcriptions of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Leningrad Codex, for which I am grateful. You can find more information about that on the homepage.

Since HN is probably interested in my tech-stack: I kept it simple and built a static website that uses Bootstrap and D3. It’s hosted on AWS S3 and distributed to 108 edge locations via AWS CloudFront. So far, hosting has been under the free-tier limits and has cost me nothing.

Thank you for any feedback you’d like to give.

-dandeto