The Story of the Scrolls

by The Story of the Scrolls- The Miraculous Discovery

  If the affairs of the editor-in-chief were in chaos, so were also – as I was to discover – those of OUP. It turned out that they did not have any list of the names, let alone of the addresses, of the members of the editorial team, so could not communicate with them. When I supplied both names and addresses, the senior OUP official contacted the defaulting editors, but only the Anglo-American contingent was prepared to answer. Milik, Starcky and Baillet simply turned a deaf ear to the request. By contrast, Strugnell, Cross and Skehan, as befitted ‘Anglo-Saxon’ gentlemen, promptly replied and forecast a rosy future, firmly assuring Benoit and OUP that their finished typescripts would be delivered at various precise dates between 1973 and 1976. Skehan, however, attached conditions to the delivery of his material. He would not allow his name to appear in the volume if it visibly entailed any association with an Israeli institution such as the Shrine of the Book or the Department of Antiquities. Should a link of this sort prove unavoidable, his contribution could be published as long as it remained anonymous. Circumstances prevented his determination from being tested. In 1980 Patrick Skehan died without his editorial task – embarked on a quarter of a century earlier – being anywhere near to completion, since DJD, IX, on which his name featured, did not appear until 1992.

  To revert to 1972, the date of the signed undertakings, the years passed – 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976 – and none of the promised manuscripts materialized and reached Oxford University Press. The solemn commitments turned out to be empty words. After a delay of five years, I uttered a prophecy of doom in the opening address of my Margaret Harries Lectures at Dundee University, which was to form the first chapter of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, published later in the same year of 1977:

  On this thirtieth anniversary of their coming to light the world is entitled to ask [the editors of the Qumran Scrolls]… what they intend to do about this lamentable state of affairs. For unless drastic measures are taken at once, the greatest and most valuable of all Hebrew and Aramaic manuscript discoveries is likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century. (pp. 23–4)

  This outcry was noted and regularly repeated in the press, but without receiving serious acknowledgement from Benoit and his troops. But their time was running out. Public protest was reactivated by John Allegro, already in disgrace among academics after the Sacred Mushroom, but still having access to the letters’ columns of The Times (17 April 1982), where he expressed ‘doubts of the scholarly integrity’ of the editorial team. Benoit endeavoured to answer publicly not only the accusation of mischievous critics (meaning Allegro), but also the concern of ‘honest scholars’ in a note appended to a book review in the Revue Biblique (1983, pp. 99–100).

  Besides malicious and dishonest criticisms, I perceive in the scholarly world, among decent people who do not suspect anything sinister, astonishment and regret provoked by the slowness of the large ‘definitive’ volumes of DJD, a slowness by which I am the first to be upset. I wish to give a clear explanation and offer a ray of hope.

  He blamed the disruption of the ‘good continuation’ of the DJD series on the political events that disturbed the Middle East. First, the Jordanian government nationalized the Rockefeller Museum, then, following the Six Day War, the Scrolls came under the authority of ‘another government’. Fortunately the editors were granted freedom to get on with their work and they were doing so, but slower than one would have wished. Benoit was thick-skinned enough to place part of the blame for procrastination on OUP! The apology ended on an optimistic note: ‘One cannot promise miracles, but every effort will be deployed to advance the publication as fast as possible.’

  This blow of hot air was Benoit’s swansong. Next year, in 1984, he divested himself of the editorial mantle, which subsequently fell on the shoulders of John Strugnell. In 1987 the eighty-one-year-old Pierre Benoit died, having produced only a slim DJD volume by Milik and a fat one by Baillet in twelve years of stewardship.

  Dissatisfaction grew and the atmosphere turned explosive. More than thirty years after its creation, the editorial team had a mere three volumes of Cave 4 material to their credit. The still unpublished Cave 4 texts were to fill twenty-three further volumes. My prophecy regarding the academic scandal of the century came to fulfilment. The time for action had arrived.

  V

  The Battle over the Scrolls and its Aftermath

  After decades of procrastination, the highly privileged editorial team exhausted the patience of the scholarly world and the interested, but increasingly suspicious and impatient public. After Pierre Benoit had inherited the editorial office from the omnipotent Roland de Vaux, the New York Times (9 August 1972) devoted one of its leaders to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and firmly admonished the newly appointed editor-in-chief to get on with the job to avoid ‘public outrage’. With no sign of a change of heart in the editorial camp and no noticeable progress in the rate of publication, general dissatisfaction grew and approached boiling point. As was signalled in the previous chapter, resignations and ‘natural wastage’ progressively reduced the size of the notorious ‘international and inter-confessional’ editorial team.

  1. Growing Frustration

  Roland de Vaux had died in 1971 without even beginning to write his archaeological report. Monsignor Patrick Skehan followed him in 1980, with his bunch of biblical manuscripts nowhere near to going to the printers. Eugene Ulrich of the University of Notre Dame became his heir. The German Claus Hunno Hunzinger withdrew, and the fragments of the War Scroll acquired a new editor, Maurice Baillet. The ailing Benoit resigned in 1984 and died in 1987. In 1988, the French Orientalist Jean Starcky died with his large collection of Aramaic Qumran fragments left completely unedited. It was passed on to Émile Puech, another French Catholic priest, employed by the CNRS. John Allegro, treated as the black sheep of the team, whose chief merit was that he had put together a shabby edition of DJD, V, in 1968, quit or rather was squeezed out of the select company of the chosen.

  Those who theoretically continued were J. T. Milik, whose last volume appeared in 1977, and two Harvard professors, Frank Moore Cross and John Strugnell. As far as DJD was concerned, these two were unproductive ever since joining the team in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Strugnell’s largest contribution to Qumran was an over 100-page-long book review, rightfully demolishing his colleague Allegro’s DJD, V. It was only after recruiting collaborators that two volumes bearing the name of Strugnell and one that of Cross were belatedly published. Strugnell was assisted respectively by Elisha Qimron and D. J. Harrington for completing DJD, X, in 1994 and XXXIV in 1999, and Cross’s edition of DJD, XVII, the Samuel fragments of Cave 4 entrusted to him more than fifty years earlier, was published in association with D. Parry in 2005. The last three volumes of the series (DJD, XXXII, by Eugene Ulrich and Peter Flint, XXXVII, by Émile Puech, and XL by Eileen Schuller and Carol Newsom) are dated 2008 and 2009.

  The scholars who were steadily increasing in number and were either directly involved with Qumran or working in fields closely or remotely associated with the Scrolls were becoming more and more restless. Their research was hindered by their inability to consult the unpublished Qumran texts. Even worse, since no catalogue of the discovered Dead Sea documents was released, researchers did not even know whether Jerusalem did or did not hold texts which might be of interest to them. (The first full list of the contents of Caves 4 and 11, compiled by Emanuel Tov, was published by him, at my invitation as editor, in the Journal of Jewish Studies, in the spring issue of 1992 (volume 43, pp. 101–36).) The privilege conferred on the members of the group by their invitation to the editorial team was not put to good use. Requests for information were not refused; quite often they were simply met by a stone wall of silence and remained unanswered. There may have been exceptions of which I am not aware, but if there were they only proved the rule.

  The resentfulness of the ‘have-nots’, the vast majority, was exacerbated by the two unproductive Harvard professors’ nonchalant and snai
l-pace practice of editing by proxy. They passed on the texts entrusted to them to their graduate students, and a series of doctoral dissertations – some of them excellent – slowly trickled in while the rest of the learned and learning world was kept at a safe distance from the promised land of the unpublished Scrolls.

  Hearing the groans of scholars, the press, too, pricked up its ears. The propriety was queried, even the legality, of the ‘closed shop’ policy introduced by de Vaux and maintained by his successors, Benoit and Strugnell. Moreover, investigative journalists began to wonder whether something sinister was going on behind the smokescreen of non-publication. Following earlier accusations levelled by Allegro against the Catholic conspiracy of de Vaux and his associates, and ignoring the fact that F. M. Cross was a Protestant, they began to circulate the rumour that the absence of editorial activity resulted from an order issued by the Vatican. It was murmured that some Qumran texts contained matters highly damaging to Christianity and consequently de Vaux was ordered by his Roman task-masters to keep them secret at all cost. To put an end to the growing speculations and, if possible, reawaken the lethargic editorial process, an opportunity arose in Britain to bring this whole scandalous business into the open. Mark Geller, director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College London, received in 1986 a substantial sum of money to organize an international conference on an academic subject connected with Judaism that would be of interest to the general public as well as to scholars. He came to Oxford to consult the renowned Roman historian Fergus Millar and myself and we agreed that a symposium on the present state of Dead Sea Scrolls research would be an appropriate topic, especially as the year of the Symposium, 1987, would mark the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of the first Qumran Scrolls. Bringing together all the official editors and subjecting them to the moral pressure of public scrutiny might force them to put their cards on the table and come up with an acceptable plan of action. The logjam might thus be unblocked… provided that the editors accepted the invitation and attended the conference.

  Almost all came, led by Strugnell, since 1984 editor-in-chief designate after the resignation of Benoit. (Editor-in-chief designate means that, having been elected three years earlier by his colleagues on the editorial team, his appointment was still under consideration and thus unconfirmed by Israel’s Department of Antiquities.) Only Milik stayed away: he did not decline the invitation; according to his time-honoured habit, he just refrained from answering. Despite the coincidence of the opening of the Symposium with the British general election on 11 June 1987, the London press devoted much attention to the event and followed it with keen interest. The week before the meeting, on 6 June 1987, The Times called for action in the knowledge that many scholars from outside the closed circle of the editors were raring to do the job. The outcome of the conference was to a large extent predictable. There were superficial apologies from the tardy editors and optimistic, but vague, predictions were made regarding the completion of the publication. Strugnell promised a detailed schedule. All that scholars and the world were expected to do was to trust it and him.

  But Strugnell was faced with an unexpected proposal which was moved in the opening address and repeated at a public meeting held in the British Museum. As the organizer of the Symposium most directly involved with Qumran, it fell to me to welcome the participants and, carefully navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, I put forward what I thought was a fair middle course of action, catering for the conflicting interests of the editors, on the one hand, and the rest of the scholarly world on the other. The editors should have all the time they needed to complete their onerous work of detailed, punctilious transcription, commentary and annotation, but in the interest of the public good, they should in turn release at once the photographs of the unpublished texts so that anyone interested and academically qualified might have access to them for their research. The members of the editorial team had enjoyed many years of monopoly over the rest of the world. If, despite this, newcomers were to beat them in the race, they should blame only themselves. These words were received in dead silence in editorial quarters. However, when I repeated the proposal at a large public meeting – in front of the microphones of the BBC – it was met with an emphatic ‘No’ from editor-in-chief-to-be Strugnell. In his view, photographs without the editors’ detailed explanations would be useless, misleading and would result in bad scholarship, implying that only members of the official group had received the divine charisma to enable them to read and understand the documents. Besides, he wondered, impertinently, about all the fuss. Another mammoth collection of ancient documents, the Greek papyrus fragments from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, relating to the New Testament and early Christianity, although discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, was still far from being fully edited. Compared with Oxyrhynchus, the publication of the Qumran manuscripts was proceeding rapidly! The protesters’ complaints were hysterical.

  On the face of it, then, the British effort to breathe life into the editorial process proved useless. Nevertheless it had the indirect effect of increasing public awareness of the ‘academic scandal of the century’. I also made a private approach to the Israeli minister of education, who was ultimately in charge of the Scrolls, and advised him not to confirm Strugnell’s appointment as editor-in-chief unless he gave free access to the photographs of the unpublished Scroll fragments without delay. This initiative also petered out. Receipt of the communication was never acknowledged and its contents were somehow leaked to Strugnell and his colleagues. However, according to a well-informed Jerusalem source, the letter was noted and had its effect three years later when Strugnell’s six years of inefficient editorship were brought to an inglorious end.

  Meanwhile, the pretence that all was well continued with the blessing of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), whose leaders, after years of hesitation, rubber-stamped Strugnell’s appointment. The depleted editorial team was enlarged by including several former Harvard doctoral students who had been working on the edition of various Cave 4 texts. There was even a major innovation: Israeli Qumran experts Elisha Qimron and Emanuel Tov, the first Jews to be involved with the Cave 4 material, were added to the team of editors. Yet Strugnell’s days as Scrolls’ boss were numbered. The international media, alerted in the wake of the London Symposium, were after his blood. In 1989, a columnist of Scientific American accused him of impeding the research of other scholars; and the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), Hershel Shanks, declared open season on Strugnell. A series of articles appeared and Strugnell was given the right of reply. He treated his critics as people of no significance: they were in his words ‘a bunch of fleas who are in the business of annoying us’. BAR retorted with a caricature picturing the fleas and quoting their ‘bites’, starting with my by then proverbial ‘academic scandal of the twentieth century’. Under the pressure of this kind of ‘persecution’, on top of his drink problem, John Strugnell broke down. Interviewed by a reporter from Ha’aretz, the leading Tel Aviv daily (on 9 November 1990), he completed the process of self-destruction by declaring Judaism a ‘horrible religion’ which should have disappeared long ago. He later denied that he was an anti-Semite and attributed his outburst to one of his manic-depressive fits. Nevertheless, this unfortunate act was too much even for his colleagues on the editorial team and he was forced to resign. In December 1990, the IAA, suddenly opting for diplomatic tact, relieved him of his editorship on health grounds, and appointed as his successor the Israeli Emanuel Tov, professor of biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem early in 1991. After nearly four decades, a new age was dawning, but all was not yet sunshine and blue sky.

  2. An Israeli Editor-in-Chief

  Tov started his editorship with two masterstrokes. Whether by persuasion or arm-twisting, he first prevailed upon Joseph Milik, who by then had been editorially largely inactive in the Qumran field for a dozen years, to relinquish the huge pile of unpublished manuscripts given to him by de Vaux almost fo
rty years earlier. This was a sad occasion as Milik was incontestably by far the best decipherer and editor of Qumran texts and the most productive of all the members of the editorial team. But by 1991, pushing seventy, affected by earlier alcoholism and other health problems, he was no longer his genial self of the 1950s. He reacted badly to this act of ‘ingratitude’, but alas the move was necessary. He was, however, generous enough to help younger scholars who inherited his unfinished lot. Turning his back on the Scrolls, and devoting himself instead to Nabataean epigraphy and Polish philology, he died in Paris in January 2006, aged eighty-three years.

  Tov’s second brilliant move was to increase tenfold the size of the original editorial team, raising it to over sixty – Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and people from all the various continents. I was one of them and had the privilege of being allowed to choose the texts (the Cave 4 fragments of the Community Rule) I wanted to edit. I invited my former student, Professor Philip Alexander of Manchester, to join me and our volume, DJD, XXVI duly appeared in 1998 and we contributed also to DJD, XXXVI in 2000.

  However, there was one thing Emanuel Tov would not or maybe could not do. He did not abolish the closed shop system invented by de Vaux, and inexplicably adopted by the IAA. Nevertheless, this nefarious policy was already doomed. Unwittingly its upholders themselves undermined it in the wake of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war. It was then decided in Jerusalem that as an insurance policy for the protection of the Scrolls in the event of another armed conflict, photographic archives would be deposited in the United States and Britain. Three such safe havens were selected: Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Ancient Manuscript Center in Claremont, California, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton, outside Oxford. The condition laid down by the IAA was that photographs of unpublished texts must not be shown to anyone apart from the official editors or persons formally authorized by the editor-in-chief. As an illustration, a notice affixed to the door of the Oxford Centre’s ‘Qumran Room’, containing a filing cabinet filled with photos of unpublished Dead Sea documents, proclaimed that no one could gain access to them without the written permission of Professor John Strugnell. Protests to the president of the Oxford Centre (David Paterson) were of no avail as he himself, unknown to the Board of Governors, had signed an agreement with the IAA.