Show HN: The Dead Sea Scrolls Visualized (opens in new tab)

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