LU professor has plans for biblical museum

Randall Price has big plans for what is now a small space in DeMoss Hall at Liberty University.

Price, an archaeologist and Liberty professor, is executive director of LU’s Center for Judaic Studies, which opened in fall 2008.

Price plans to implement academic coursework and degree programs in Jewish studies. He also is working with school officials to establish a Biblical Museum at the university that would house antiquities from the biblical period.

Preliminary plans for a 10,000-square-foot museum already have been drawn, and Price hopes that within a couple of years it will be built.

His own collection of antiquities, as well as those that he could get on loan from dig sites, would be housed at the museum to provide the school and Lynchburg a window to the past.

“We felt there was a need to have a program in Jewish Studies because we want our Christian students to understand the issues,” said Price, who over the past 30 years has traveled to Israel more than 90 times.

With that goal in mind, in December, Price led 12 students, four from Liberty, in the school’s first archaeology program. They traveled to Qumran in eastern Israel, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered about 60 years ago in nearby caves.

Dated from near the time of Christ to the first century A.D., the documents were “the most important archaeological discovery in a century,” he said.

Students learned the basics of how to extract and identify items from the dig site, and how to label, record and store the pieces.

While at Qumran, the group found several ancient coins, pottery and animal bone deposits.

Price believes the bone deposits, dated from the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls, may have a relationship to the documents.

He believes the skins from those same animals may have been used as canvases for holy documents, such as those that now are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Linking the scrolls to the people of Qumran would bring a new level of understanding to the documents, he said.

His daughter, Emilee Price, a sophomore at Liberty, was one of the students who made the trip in December.

“It’s just amazing,” she said. “You know there’s more stuff, and we’re just trying to find more answers.”

She said making the connection between Biblical sites and her own life “means a lot to me.”

It also is meaningful to others, her father said.

“In a time when people are trying to understand the Middle East, seeing the richness of the past can bring more understanding,” he said.