The Story of the Scrolls

by The Story of the Scrolls- The Miraculous Discovery

  More or less simultaneously with the handing over of the photographic collections came the production of a handwritten catalogue or concordance of all the words appearing in the non-biblical Qumran texts. The listing of each word within its context on index cards goes back to the late 1950s. It was only in 1988, however, that John Strugnell decided to publish privately twenty-five photocopied exemplars of this index to be made available only to official Scrolls editors. Unauthorized copies of the concordance circulated widely all over the place. In Oxford there were at least three of them, one belonging to me. Unforeseen by the IAA and the editorial team, these photographic archives and the concordance sounded the death knell to the policy of secrecy. Plans to lift the embargo on general access to the Scroll images were conceived in at least two of the three centres with photographic archives, one of which was successful.

  A petition by graduate students of Hebrew Union College to be allowed to consult the archive was given short shrift by the College authorities. On a higher level, two governors of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Martin Goodman and myself) submitted at the end of August 1991 a proposal to the board to rescind the agreement with the IAA on the grounds that it was against freedom of research and, in case the Israeli authorities refused to negotiate, to unilaterally grant bona fide scholars access to all the photographs, published or unpublished. That there was little chance to persuade the IAA to change their mind was obvious from a letter written by General Amir Drori, director of the IAA, to the president of the Oxford Centre: ‘Your request to grant Professor Vermes permission to study unpublished Qumran material deposited in your photo collection contradicts our recent agreement which guarantees that such material is merely safeguarded in your institution. Please reaffirm our provision that this material is strictly beyond the reach of scholars save those who were allotted material personally by us.’

  A meeting of the board of the Oxford Centre was called for the beginning of October 1991 and promised to be stormy as the president opposed the idea and the governors were divided. Meanwhile, to my regret, the initiative was overtaken by events in the United States. In 1991 Ben Zion Wacholder, professor of Talmud at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, obtained permission from John Strugnell to photocopy the concordance for the HUC library. A graduate student of the College, Martin Abegg, by now an internationally renowned Qumran scholar and the compiler of the two-volume standard concordance of the Scrolls, explained to Wacholder that with computer help he would be able to reconstruct whole texts from the word list. The professor at once proposed that they should proceed to publish them. Though worried, needlessly as it turned out, that the venture might compromise his academic future, Abegg agreed and with the help of Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society of Washington, DC a slim volume entitled A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls appeared on 4 September 1991. Next day, the New York Times trumpeted, ‘Computer hacker bootlegs version of Dead Sea Scrolls’. Piracy, screamed some of the official editors – one of them (É. Puech) referred to it as plagiarism even in 2006 – and they threatened to sue authors and publishers, though nothing happened immediately.

  Here I am obliged to introduce another personal detail. On 20 September, I received a telephone call from the archaeology correspondent of the London Times, Professor Norman Hammond, and was informed of the imminent release by the Huntington Library of Pasadena, California, of a full photo archive of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He asked me for a comment. Next morning The Times, beating the American media by twenty-four hours, announced the lifting of the embargo on the Dead Sea Scrolls and quoted my enthusiastic endorsement of it.

  One might have thought the Huntington Library was the last place to pull off such a coup. It specialized in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature and English and American history. Its involvement with the Scrolls was purely accidental and is connected with the nearby Claremont Ancient Manuscript Center, and its patroness, Mrs Elizabeth Hay Bechtel. Wishing to obtain photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls for her Claremont Library, Mrs Bechtel, accompanied by the Huntington’s chief photographer, paid a visit to the IAA in Jerusalem and, as it can happen only to multi-millionairesses, she returned to California not with one, but with two copies of the photo archive of the Scrolls. One of them went to the Claremont Center under the usual proviso of keeping the unpublished material locked away, but Betty Bechtel treated the other set as her personal property. Soon afterwards, she clashed with the directors of Claremont and unwisely they removed her from the board.

  Understandably piqued, she decided to deposit her Dead Sea Scrolls pictures at a rival institution, the much more prestigious Huntington Library, and subsequently donated them to it together with funds to construct an air-conditioned vault for the photographic negatives. This happened in the early 1980s and the legal deed of gift, of which I have a copy, and in which Mrs Bechtel asserted her right of ownership and inserted no clause concerning an embargo on any part of the collection, dates to April 1982. Nothing was heard about the Huntington Scrolls during the following eight years, but they were accidentally ‘rediscovered’ in 1990 by the newly appointed director of the library, Dr William A. Moffett. During a visit to the librarians’ office, Moffett noticed the air-conditioned vault and learned to his amazement that it concealed hot property, the photographic duplicates of the Scrolls which in 1990 had been the talk of the town in the international media. Wrongly deducing from articles he had read in the British press in the summer of 1991 that the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies was ready to open to the public its Qumran photos, Moffett, with the blessing of the Huntington board, decided to beat Oxford to it. A press conference was originally scheduled for 16 October to coincide with an American TV special on the Scrolls, but fearing that he might miss the boat, Moffett advanced the news release to 22 September 1991, announcing that any authorized reader of the Huntington would have access to all the photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls! Although the full front-page article in the New York Times had been scooped by the London Times twenty-four hours earlier, it was still an epoch-making news story.

  3. Outbreak of Revolution

  The mother of all Scrolls rows broke out next day. The IAA and members of the original editorial team, whose forty-year-long privilege was on the point of being shattered, were talking of theft and threatened with legal proceedings, but within three days came a volte-face. No doubt advised by their lawyers that they had no leg to stand on vis-à-vis the Huntington, and that the question of the legal ownership of the Scrolls was political dynamite, the Israeli archaeological leadership was advised to climb down. On 25 September it made a complete U-turn and issued a statement: ‘The Israel Antiquities Authority agrees in principle to facilitate free access to the photographs of the Scrolls.’ They invited all the institutions with photographic archives to meet the IAA and the official editorial team the following December to discuss how to proceed in the new circumstances, and how to protect, if not all the old procrastinators, then at least the work of scholars recruited in recent years. They were clinging to a broken reed and sought some extra time to lick their wounds.

  Moffett, encouraged by many and after consulting me on the telephone, declared his unwillingness to attend the Jerusalem gathering without a prior ‘unequivocal surrender’ by the Israeli opposition. Realizing the hopelessness of their case and pressed by the education committee of the Israeli parliament, the IAA and the editors caved in and on 27 October 1991 all the restrictions were lifted. The Qumran revolution, fighting for research freedom, triumphed. Even before the official lifting of the embargo, I decided to make the unpublished Cave 4 fragments of the Community Rule allocated to me the subject of open weekly seminars at the Oriental Institute of Oxford. Not only local Hebraists flocked to it, but also a number of colleagues and research students from Cambridge and London, as well as columnists of London newspapers.

  The doom-laden forecast by the official editors, who predicted a flood of errors and ‘bad scholarship’
arising from uncontrolled access to the Scrolls, of course did not materialize. There were no more silly ideas floated after 1991 than there had been before. On the contrary, free access to the unpublished fragments breathed new life into the scholarship and Qumran specialists were in constant demand by newspapers for fresh reports, proving that the subject continued to be of great interest all over the world. Soon, the four institutions – HUC, Claremont, Oxford and the Huntington – ceased to be the only, somewhat cumbersome, pathways to the Scrolls. One month after the IAA’s change of policy, in November 1991, the Biblical Archaeology Society published in two volumes A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a complete set of photographs, edited by two Californian professors, Robert H. Eisenman and James M. Robinson. In 1992, with the approval of the IAA, Emanuel Tov, the new editor-in-chief, issued a microfiche edition of the whole Qumran material. Finally, in 1997, entering the computer age, a digitized version of all the manuscript images of the Dead Sea Scrolls was brought out on three CDs by Oxford University Press in association with the Dutch firm, Brill Academic Publishers of Leiden. So today, scholars capable of deciphering these images can pursue their Qumran research in the comfort of their own studies at any time, day or night.

  How has the new situation affected the publication of the Scrolls, first and foremost, the large bulk of fragments from Cave 4? Let us look at the facts. Before the watershed year of 1991, only three volumes of the DJD series devoted to Cave 4 had appeared – in 1968, 1977 and 1982. From 1992 to 2005 twenty-three further volumes saw the light of day, the rest following in 2008 and 2009. The change in publication rate was due to the highly efficient and persuasive stewardship of the editor-in-chief, Emanuel Tov, and to the awareness of the editors that unless they hurried, someone else might publish their texts first. Removal of the monopolistic status seriously improved the speed of production. Besides, as I have noted, the images are already available in photograph, microfiche or CD-ROM form. Moreover, a two-volume study edition, published in 1997–8 by F. García Martínez and E. J. C. Tigchelaar, includes the Hebrew transcription and English translation of all the texts.

  The armistice that followed the war over the Scrolls brought together combatants from both camps. Collaboration has restarted and there have been only rare signs of surviving animosity. A large international conference and the exhibition of a rich collection of Qumran Scrolls and artefacts were organized by the IAA in 1993 at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, at which I, a constant former critic of the policy adopted by the original editorial team, was invited to deliver the keynote address. Four years later, in 1997, the monumental Golden Jubilee Congress, convened in Jerusalem, attended by everybody who was somebody in Scrolls research and concluded with a magnificent open air dinner at Qumran, brought together the previously warring factions in peaceful scholarly communion in a place where the thermometer showed 40 degrees Celsius at midnight. In true Israeli fashion, the specially composed music was broadcast so loud that it threatened to wake up the dead sectaries in the nearby cemetery.

  The only occasion on which old resentments resurfaced was during the lawsuit initiated by Elisha Qimron of the University of Beer Sheba (Strugnell’s late recruit to the official team) and supported by the Israeli archaeological establishment, against the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, considered in Jerusalem to be the chief culprit for the IAA’s loss of face. Shanks, in his preface to the photographic edition of the Qumran fragments by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson, reprinted Qimron’s reconstructed text of a Qumran document (MMT, short for Miqsat Ma‘ase ha-Torah or ‘Some Observances of the Law’), but without acknowledging Qimron’s contribution to it. Qimron would have been totally justified in demanding that this omission be put right. Instead he sued Shanks for damages amounting to $250,000 and was awarded less than one fifth of this sum ($43,000) by the Jerusalem district court and subsequently by the Israeli supreme court. A modern author’s entitlement to copyright in an ancient text has become a legal test case and has been the subject of a conference in 1999 at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a printed version of the papers, On Scrolls, Artefacts and Intellectual Property (2001), edited by Timothy H. Lim and others.

  The copyright formula attached to DJD, X, edited by Qimron and John Strugnell (with further contributions from J. Sussman and A. Yardeni), is quite unusual. Instead of assigning the copyright, as did all the previous volumes, to Oxford University Press, this volume omits the mention of the co-editor and other contributors and singles out Qimron as the owner of the copyright in combination with the IAA: ‘© Elisha Qimron 1994, without derogating from any right vested in the Israel Antiquities Authority with regard to the Scrolls’ fragments, photographs, and any other material which is in the possession of the Authority, and which the Authority has permitted Qimron to use for the purposes of the Work, and its inclusion therein.’

  This provides a splendid caveat for copyright lawyers in future.

  The release of the hitherto unpublished Qumran material has placed the whole contents of the eleven caves at the disposal of the confraternity of scholars and all interested persons. As far as the scriptural books are concerned, English readers can avail themselves of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, translated with commentary by Martin Abegg, Jr., Peter Flint and Eugene Ulrich (1999). The volume comprises all the scriptural texts from Qumran as well as those Apocrypha (Ben Sira and Tobit) and Pseudepigrapha (Jubilees, 1 Enoch and apocryphal Psalms) that the authors think belonged to the Qumran Bible. There are three English translations of the non-biblical documents. My 1962 volume, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, became in 2004 The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English in the Penguin Classics series. Textual quotations in the present volume are borrowed from this translation. F. García Martínez and E. J. C. Tigchelaar issued in 1997–8 a two-volume Hebrew/Aramaic study edition, The Dead Sea Scrolls, with facing English rendering. Finally, Michael Wise, Martin Abegg and Edward Cook produced The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation in 1996 and revised it in 2005. My translation is intended to be literary; the other two strive to remain as close as possible to the Semitic original.

  After sixty years of discovery and study, the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the enormous scholarly and general literature generated by them stare at us at long last from the bookshelves. All that remains for us to find out is what they actually mean.

  Postscript: The Nonsensical Theory of a Vatican Conspiracy

  After John Allegro’s earlier insinuations of a Church conspiracy, two ‘investigative’ writers, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, came up with the answer to the dilemma in a book melodramatically entitled The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, published in London in May 1991. They believed they had found the key to the Vatican conspiracy in the institution of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (on the Commission, see chapter I). Misrepresenting it as a latter-day Inquisition steeped in secrecy, and noting that Father Roland de Vaux had become a consultant of the Commission, the two authors drew the conclusion that the editor-in-chief from 1955 until his death in 1971 was under obligation to ensure (a) that the Scrolls are dated so early (second and first century BCE) that they are chronologically neatly distanced from the New Testament; and (b) that no manuscript that might threaten Catholic doctrine was released. This explains the years of inactivity of the editorial team under de Vaux and under his successors.

  Yet the theory is without any foundation. The dating of the historical context into which the Scrolls are placed by mainstream scholarship had been worked out by historians who were not controlled by the Catholic Church (Sukenik, Dupont-Sommer, Vermes, Yadin). Members of de Vaux’s editorial team later adopted their views. As for stopping the publication to keep religiously compromising texts away from public gaze, it does not make sense. All the manuscripts from Caves 1–3 and 5–10 appeared between 1950 and 1962 and the longest Qumran document, the Temple Scroll, was published by the Israeli Yigael Yadin in Hebrew in 1977 and in English in 1983. So the presumed secrets must
have lain among the thousands of fragments found in Cave 4. But de Vaux was not a decipherer of texts. If something explosive had been discovered in them, it would have been done by members of the team, several of whom (Allegro, Cross and Hunzinger) had never been, and Milik ceased to be, under the control of the Vatican. It is inconceivable that they would have remained silent just to please de Vaux or honour his memory.

  Besides, in October 1991, a bare five months after the appearance of the notorious Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, all restrictions had been lifted and, despite the keenest search by the entire scholarly world for hidden explosives, no one came up with anything that might shake the foundations of Christianity, Judaism or any religion. The one claim advanced by Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise that among the unpublished Cave 4 fragments there was a reference to a ‘slain Messiah’ turned out to be the result of a misinterpretation. The Messiah was not slain; he did the slaying.

  This would leave only one further possibility to account for the conspiracy theory. Roland de Vaux, on his own, unnoticed by the members of the editorial team, selected and destroyed materials held by him to be inimical to Christianity. Only ignoramuses could imagine such a scenario. Without the full cooperation of his colleagues, he would not have been able to find and decipher those dangerous fragments. A more sensible explanation for the delays must be found.