A Chat with Stephanie Weaver

Maraya: What was your role in this exhibit?

Stephanie: I was brought on about a year before the show opened as a co-exhibit developer. We had fourteen months for the process of planning and development and fabrication. Pretty short! They had started two years prior to that, working on what pieces were going to be in, negotiating with the Israeli Antiquities Authority, negotiating with the other libraries.

Maraya: How did you arrive at the idea of using quotations?

Stephanie: One of my first tasks was to start doing research and understand the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls myself. I had to figure out the key points: the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, what they are, their conservation, what place they have in history, and also what place they have in terms of religious faith. The Scrolls are many things. They’re books of the [Hebrew] Bible, but they’re also historical documents, and they’re the documents of this mysterious group of people who never called themselves by name.  No one agrees about who the authors were.  Some people think the Scrolls were written at the site where they were found by the Dead Sea, and other people think they were from the library at the Temple in Jerusalem and were brought to Qumran in order to keep them safe from the Romans who were about to invade. I also did a very informal survey of friends and family, as part of my baseline information, to find out what people thought the Scrolls were.

As an interpretive writer, the first thing you start looking for are the bare-bones facts — what are we going to be telling people about? The fascinating thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls story is that every single book you read about the Scrolls is different. The names of the Bedouin people who discovered the Scrolls are spelled differently in every book because it’s transliterated from Arabic into English. Mohammed edh-Dhib, who probably found the scrolls, may have been alone, or maybe he was with his cousin, or maybe there were three people. And nobody agrees on when the Scrolls were found. The Bedouin don’t follow Western calendars. They have a different sense of time, and they have a different attitude toward antiquities than Westerners do. So, it could have been 1944, it could have been 1946, maybe Mohammed edh-Dhib had them in his tent for a couple of weeks, maybe it was two years. I mean, every single book is different. So my first thought is, “Holy cow — what do we put up on the wall?”

Early on, my feeling was that there was no “truth” to tell the visitor. That was going to be a pretty high-level interpretive challenge. But my other thought was that I wanted every member of the story to be treated with equal respect, including the Bedouin.

Maraya: And they’re not usually treated with respect?

Stephanie: Certainly not in the literature. There was some not-very-subtle racism in the accounts of the Scrolls’ discovery, which were written by white Western males who did not look kindly upon the Bedouin. The [discoverers] are referred to as ‘boys,’ and I’m looking at the picture and these guys look like they’re in their twenties. One author calls them ‘dirty scoundrels,’ another refers to them as ‘thieves.’

Maraya: Because they found and took the Scrolls?

Stephanie: Yes. To pass the time as shepherds, this guy, or these three guys, would walk by a cave — there are thousands of caves — and they’d toss rocks in. If it sounded like they’d hit something interesting, they’d go investigate. The caves where the Scrolls were found were almost impossible to get to, way high up.

That’s how people in the desert make money. They find old stuff and they take it in to town and that’s how they supplement their income. It’s not legal, but it’s very common. It’s happening in Iraq right now. If you can sell something and make a year’s worth of salary, it’s hard to tell that person, “No, you shouldn’t do that.” This has gone on in the ancient world forever. And so I certainly didn’t want to blame [the Bedouin]. The fact is, if it weren’t for them, the Dead Sea Scrolls would still be in the caves; we wouldn’t know about them.

So I think it’s racist to call them “boys” when you can see from the photo that they’re at least in their twenties. I felt that it was very important that we were aware that there were these filters. It was a personal goal of mine that everybody in the story would be treated with equal respect, and that everyone’s aspect of the story was presented as equally important.

So, fairly quickly, I had the thought that, wouldn’t it be great if they could tell their own stories? I started thinking about how we could get first-person quotes even before I knew whether they were out there.

Maraya: Where did you find the quotes?

Stephanie: As we went along, I started searching. The Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, Weston Fields, had an unpublished manuscript that he allowed us to look at. Over the previous twenty years, he had interviewed everybody who was still alive, and had gotten these first-person accounts, and they were all in this manuscript, or footnoted. It was a gold mine. He had actually talked to the Syrian Orthodox priest, one of the first buyers of the Scrolls, and he’d talked to Mohammed edh-Dhib.

We found the family of one of the scholars — most of the them have passed away by now — and they had a taped interview, and they were willing to loan it to us.

We started finding these assets around, and seeing that we did actually have a lot of first person points of view.

Maraya: So, the intent to treat the Bedouin respectfully inspired the idea for the first-person quotes. But you had other personal stories in there as well.

Stephanie: Yes. We did make sure that we had personal quotes throughout the whole exhibition. In the section about Qumran, where the Scrolls were discovered, the first-person quotes were actually from the scrolls, so they were day-in-the-life quotes. Nancy Owens-Renner, the lead developer, chose those.

Maraya: Translated from what was in the scrolls?

Stephanie: Yes. First-person quotes from 2,000 years ago.

There are scribes in Ethiopia today making Christian Bibles, on goat-skin scrolls, essentially the same way that they made the Dead Sea Scrolls 2,000 years ago. We had a video of that, and I pulled a quote of one of the scribes from the video. We tried to bring that kind of personal narrative throughout the entire experience.

Another thing — it was quite some time, weeks or months, after the Scrolls were found before someone looked at them and recognized what they were. And I thought, “That must have been unbelievable, to be the first person to read this thing and to know what it was, to know that it was 2,000 years old, to know that you’re looking at the oldest copy of the Bible.” That’s a hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment. Who were those guys who had that realization? So I’m reading along, and there was a Jewish scholar who recognized them, and there were these two young American scholars who happened to be in Jerusalem at the time and could date the script. And yes, they wrote letters back to their wives, and yes, the guy tells his family, “I think I found this amazing thing.” None of them could sleep that night!

Maraya: You were finding the human stories behind the artifacts.

Studio photo of Muhammed edh-Dhib taken soon after he found the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Stephanie: Yes, the team and I wanted visitors to have the sense that the people in this story were real. The picture that they always publish of Mohammed edh-Dhib, the Bedouin who probably found the scrolls, was clearly shot in a photographer’s studio, probably in Jerusalem, maybe not even in his own clothes. He looks like Rudolph Valentino, in this really fancy outfit with this dagger and everything. My husband looked at it and said, “That’s such a glory shot.” [Laughs.] And I said, “Yeah, this is wrong.” Because clearly that wasn’t how he looked on a regular basis. This was not the guy who crawled into a cave and found the Dead Sea Scrolls.  I was able to work with the son of one of the scroll scholars, and we found a different picture of him. It was taken fifteen years later, so he was much older. But he was at his home out in the desert, holding a goat. And it felt much more like what these guys probably looked like. That was an editorial decision the team debated: do we want him closer to the right age, or do we want him feeling more realistic to us? And in the end we chose the more realistic picture. Again, a filter, but one we chose deliberately.

Another interesting thing happened in the conservation section [of the exhibition]. Back in the 50s, when the Scrolls were found, Scotch tape had just been invented. Everyone thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. And so they used Scotch tape to patch the Scrolls back together. And then they pressed them under glass. That’s the two worst things you can do to parchment, Scotch tape them and press them under glass. The conservationists in Israel are trying to undo all of that but it caused terrible deterioration.

We had side-by-side quotes. Here’s the scroll scholar in the 50s saying, “And it was so wonderful, we didn’t lose any of the pieces because we had Scotch tape.” And then we had the current Director of Conservation saying, “Well, this turned out to be a really unfortunate choice that they made, but that was the best that they knew at the time.” That to me makes the story really interesting. If you didn’t have the first-person quote, you’d think, “Oh, those stupid people, they used Scotch tape.” I wanted people to have that sense that this was an ongoing story of people doing their best. And that they were really human.

Maraya: Were these quotes and personal stories something you had to push for?

Stephanie: I pitched it to the team after working on the research for a month or two. It’s something that we could have easily dropped along the way if I hadn’t continued to push for it. It’s not that people were against it, it’s just that there are so many competing factors when you’re going through an exhibition process like that. We had a team of 8 or 10 people, and something like that can fall by the wayside simply because of time if there’s no advocate. I also had to work harder to find quotes throughout, in order to make it a strong thread. And of course, we had to cut some great quotes for space. But I always had a sense that it was going to be a powerful element of the exhibition.

Maraya: How did you feel about the show once it opened?

Stephanie: I felt like we really did a good job of bringing the story [of the Dead Sea Scrolls] to life. And helping people understand not just what these things were and what they mean to religion, but the adventure of the story, and all the different characters, and amazing foibles that went on, and the controversy.

I’ll tell you about the moment that made me the proudest. Midway through the summer, I had a meeting with the imam at our local mosque here in San Diego to talk about a completely different project. I asked him about the exhibition and he said, “Oh yes, I’ve been there, and I walked through with these two rabbis. We hadn’t known how similar our sacred texts were, and we were looking at every scroll, and talking about it, and talking about the Koran and then talking about Torah, and how similar they were.”

And then he looked at me, and he said, “I found myself there.” And I just got chills. Because I really wanted that — if you were Muslim or Jewish or Christian, or uninterested in religion for that matter, that you could go to that exhibit and see what you were looking for, and not feel like something was being pushed at you. So to hear him say that, I thought, “Wow, we succeeded.”

Maraya: What lessons did you take from this project?

Stephanie: It’s a really important function to take the time to create a big idea that both defines and limits your content — even when you don’t have total control, like we didn’t, because the artifacts had already been chosen. There will always be more information that you could include, and including everything doesn’t make for a good visitor experience.

And the other thing I would say about large exhibitions like this: take a step back on a regular basis and look at the overall experience, how the pieces fit together. Put it in the schedule once a month or once every six or eight weeks. I did a bubble diagram where we’d say, the first room with the queue is kind of interactive, and then in the next room it’s all visual. There’s a really dense section here, so the next section has to be light. And then we’d say, okay in this phase they have a break, they get to walk down the stairs. To just register what it’s going to be like for the visitor. At one point a lot of the benches had gone away because there wasn’t room for them, and we had to push to get them back in because we knew that people were going to be exhausted.

A takeaway message from working on a complex exhibit like this: be respectful of each other. Be able to let go of stuff, whether that’s your own pet idea, or someone else’s. Set that expectation upfront that you know you’re going to have a lot of really great ideas and that they’re not all going to end up in the show. But hopefully as a team, you can create a great experience.

Tagged as: dead sea scrolls, getting personal with media, quotations

Stephanie Weaver
Visitor Experience Consultant
Experienceology

San Diego, CA

Stephanie Weaver helps cultural attractions create seamless visitor experiences. She is the author of Creating Great Visitor Experiences: A Guide for Museums, Parks, Zoos, Gardens, and Libraries.

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