Two special displays and a new exhibition gallery have been inaugurated to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Shrine of the Book, home to the Dead Sea Scrolls on the campus of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, which opened to the public in April 1965.

And Then There Was Nano: The Smallest Bible in the World features the world’s tiniest version of the Hebrew Bible, created at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The Nano Bible serves as a contemporary complement to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the oldest Biblical manuscripts in the world, providing audiences with a unique opportunity to examine the technological evolution of the Hebrew Bible from antiquity to the post-modern era.

The Nano Bible was conceived of and created by Prof. Uri Sivan and Dr. Ohad Zohar of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the TechnionIsrael Institute of Technology, Haifa. It was made by engineers in the Sara and Moshe Zisapel Nanoelectronics Center and the Wolfson Microelectronics Research and Teaching Center.

The Nano Bible showcases the incredible story of the world’s smallest Hebrew Bible, etched onto a microchip no larger than a grain of sugar. The exhibition includes narrative presentations explaining the story behind the creation of the Nano Bible, a gold-plated silicon chip the size of a pinhead. The text, consisting of over 1.2 million letters, is carved on the 0.5mm2 chip by means of a focused ion beam. The beam dislodges gold atoms from the plating and creates letters, similar to the way the earliest inscriptions were carved in stone. The writing process takes about 90 minutes. The letters belong to a font unique to this technology and appear darker against their gold background. In order to read the text, it is necessary to use a microscope capable of 10,000-times magnification or higher.