World’s Tiniest Bible Goes on Display in Israel

(JTA) — You’ve never seen the Bible like this before. That is, if you can actually see this version.
For the 50th anniversary of the Shrine of the Book wing of the Israel Museum, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, the museum has launched an exhibition on the “nano bible,” or the world’s smallest Bible, created by Israeli scientists at the Technion.
The Nano Bible, which is engraved onto a 0.5 mm2 chip and is barely visible – a Technion description compares it to the size of a grain of sugar – was first produced back in 2009, when one of the first copies was given to Pope Benedict XVI on his trip to Israel.
This Bible, conceived by Uri Sivan and Ohad Zohar of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion, is technically an engraving. To produce it, engineers took a wafer of silicon, coated it with a layer of gold less than 100 atoms thick and engraved the text with a focused ion laser beam. Engraving the book’s 1,200,000 Hebrew letters would have been an, ahem, biblical undertaking, so naturally the scientists devised a computer program that allowed the ion beam to inscribe the letters in around an hour and a half. Compare that to the year and a half it can take for a scribe to complete a kosher, hand-lettered Torah scroll.
“More than any other book, the Bible symbolizes the transmission of human civilization from one generation to another,” Sivan said. “We tried to connect to the device. We wanted to get people curious about the revolution that is taking place before their eyes.”
The exhibition, which opened on April 20, runs through the end of next year. A video on Technion’s Facebook page gives more background on the exhibit and its origins.
The smallest bible in the world….
Technion’s Nano Bible, the world’s smallest Hebrew Bible, is now on exhibit at the Israel Museum’s renowned Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. Learn how scientists and engineers from Technion’s Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute engraved the entire Hebrew Bible on a chip no larger than a grain of sugar. The Nano Bible was fabricated in the Sara and Moshe Zisapel Nanoelectronics Centre at the Wolfson Microelectronics and Teaching Centre. The exhibit and video are supported by a generous gift from Joan and Arnold Seidel and family.
Posted by Technion Live – Technion ~ Israel Institute of Technology on Sunday, April 19, 2015
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.