Today we went to the Israel Museum in the morning on Tiyul with our Jewish History Class. We got to see a scale model of what Jerusalem looked like around the first century CE, which included the second temple. After seeing this, we went downstairs to see the original Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest known texts of what we know as the Tanakh. They have been dated to as far as back 200 CE. To me, it was really fascinating to see these because it really put it in perspective how old our religion is. I have always known Judaism is thousands of years old, but I never really thought about what that meant until today. I was standing in front of scrolls that say the same things that the Tanakh I bring to Jewish History class says, which means I'm studying the same words Jews have been reading since those shriveled  pieces of parchment were written. Furhermore, Judaism is thought to possibly be as old as 4000 years, and the scrolls are only 2000 years old. While I know the Tanakh is not that old, it's still wild to think that the religion I practice, though radically different, has been being practiced for that long. I know this thought is not original at all, but the scope of that never really made sense to me until I saw the scrolls today, and I was able to see how ancient they looked. They are magnificently preserved scrolls, but even so they don't look like something anybody could easily read.