In bringing the Dead Sea Scrolls into the cloud via an interface so user-friendly that even a humanities professor can navigate it, Google has once again played a part in something wonderful for the world. And I don’t mean “wonderful” in the modern web sense—like the way that Facebook has put me back in touch with friends from middle school, or that Twitter has turned one corner of my monitor into a global chatroom featuring most of the people that interest me. No, I mean something that will potentially advance the cause of historical scholarship in a way that hasn’t been done in about 200 years. Here’s why Google’s Dead Sea Scrolls project and efforts like it matter for all of us.