047
It had been almost 32 years since I last saw Jozef T. Milik. We were in Jerusalem, and we had both been working on the Dead Sea Scrolls. My work consisted of helping to prepare a concordance of the non-Biblical texts from Cave 4 by placing each word of these texts on a 4-by-5 card with a notation as to where it appeared. Milik, a Polish scholar, was a member of the international and interconfessional team set up in 1952 to piece together, study and publish the thousands of fragments recovered from Qumran Cave 4 earlier that year. Because of his ability, Milik had been entrusted with the lion’s share of those fragments. He has since published a number of them, but today he still has a great number of them to publish.
The last time I saw Milik was the day before I left Jerusalem, July 8, 1958. Recently I had the opportunity to go to Paris, so I decided to try to pay him a visit.
Several years ago a friend had given me Milik’s address. Before leaving Washington, D.C., I obtained his telephone number from BAR editor Hershel Shanks.1
I telephoned Milik and made an appointment to visit him that day, Wednesday, April 4 at 3:30 p.m. When I arrived, he greeted me kindly and showed me into the study of his modest apartment.
We talked about old times, acquaintances, members of the team who had since died, and so on. He showed me a copy of the concordance on which I had worked during 1957–1958. I had begun the concordance, and other scholars (Raymond E. Brown, S.S., William Oxtoby and Javier Teixidor) continued the work in subsequent years, so that eventually it included all the non-Biblical texts from Caves 2 through 11. The cards were eventually photographed, and the photographs were bound into several volumes. Distribution of the concordance, however, was limited to the scroll editors themselves. I had not seen a copy of it in book form before Milik showed me his copy.
In 1976 Milik published his stout volume, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon). I had heard that he was preparing a similar tome on the fragments of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, so I asked him about his work on those texts. He showed me a manuscript of over 300 pages—partly typewritten, partly handwritten—but I got the impression that he had not worked on it recently. In fact, since 1976 Milik has published only 048a few articles, some of which are not clear or duly intelligible.
Milik complained of the pressure being put on him, especially by people in the United States and Israel, and he mentioned in particular Biblical Archaeology Review and its editor. He considered the pressure undue because he has already published more than all other members of the team put together. The trouble, however, is that Milik was entrusted with more texts than all the other members of the team, and with texts of far greater importance than those allotted to the others.
Milik was entrusted with the important fragmentary texts of the Manual of Discipline,2 the Damascus Document,3 Tobit,4 various Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, calendaric texts, the T|eharÆt (ritual purity texts), the Brontologion and the “son of God” text, all of which, among others, still remain to be published by him.
I told Milik that money was being sought from American foundations to facilitate the publication of these texts (see “Scroll Editors Spurn $100,000 Offer to Publish Book of Photographs of Still-Secret Texts,” in this issue). But the problem is not money; it is rather the prying loose of such texts from those who have had the right (by a gentlemen’s agreement) to publish them.
Eventually we talked about the persons to whom Milik had already yielded the right of publication of some of his texts: Joseph M. Baumgarten, of the Baltimore Hebrew University, is now to publish the 4Q fragments of the Damascus Document; and James C. VanderKam, of North Carolina State University, is to publish the 4Q fragments of the Book of Jubilees.
Since I had worked on Milik’s Cave 4 fragments of the Manual of Discipline for the concordance in 1957–1958, I asked him whether he had done any more work on those texts. His answer was noncommittal; I gathered that they remain just as they were in 1957. So I made bold to ask him to give me the right to publish these ten texts.5
Milik replied that he could not then give me an answer to my request, because an Israeli official, some representative of the Scrolls Oversight Committee, was to visit him and make some arrangement about the texts that were still to be published. Milik could not recall the name of the Israeli official, but told me that the visit would take place on April 6. (See “Israeli Oversight Committee Takes Charge of Dead Sea Scrolls,” in this issue)
Since Milik knew that I was to leave Paris to return to Washington on April 11, he told me to telephone him on Monday evening, April 9, and that he would then give me an answer. My hopes were high.
When I telephoned him on Monday evening, however, he told me that he could not give me permission to publish those fragments of the Cave 4 texts of the Manual because his Israeli visitor said that a committee had been set up in Israel to oversee such work. He spoke of “un comité israëlien” and said that the person who visited him was merely a representative of that committee, who herself had no real authority. Milik added that he had mentioned my name to the representative of the Israeli committee and had suggested that I be given the right to publish these texts. There the matter stands, as I understand it. In effect, Milik had to refuse me the permission to publish the fragments. I was, of course, disappointed.
All of this raises a serious question, which Milik discussed during our conversation. When Qumran Cave 4 was discovered by the Ta’amireh Bedouin in 1952, it was not in Israel, but in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, part of the so-called West Bank. Since the Palestine Archaeological Museum, as it was then known, did not have sufficient funds to buy all the Cave 4 fragments from the Bedouin (or from their go-between, Kando, the Syrian cobbler of Bethlehem), the Jordanian authorities in the Department of Antiquities sought financial assistance from foreign institutions. The going price in 1952 was one Jordanian dinar per square centimeter, the dinar being pegged at the pound sterling (which then equaled about $5.60). Institutions such as the University of Heidelberg (Germany), McGill University of Montreal (Canada), University of Manchester (England) and the Vatican Library put up money to help the Jordanians buy the fragments from the Bedouin. It was important that this be done, because the fragments had to be kept together in the scrollery of the Palestine Archaeological Museum until the giant jigsaw puzzle—consisting of thousands of fragments—could be put together. If the fragments had been sold by the Bedouin to individuals, the puzzle could never have been put together. The agreement was that the fragments would stay in the scrollery until they were finally published by the international team. Once published, they would be sent to the institutions that had provided the money to acquire them. An equitable distribution had been made of the pieced-together texts. The texts so identified were all marked with the names of the institutions for which they were destined.6
For some reason, on May 8, 1961, the Jordanian government nationalized all the fragments and scrolls in the country. What recompense was to be made to the foreign institutions is not known. The fragments of Cave 4 remained in the scrollery of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, but they had thus become the property of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
During the Six-Day War (1967), Israel occupied the West Bank. Eastern Jerusalem, in which the museum (now known as the Rockefeller Museum) is located, thus came under the sovereignty of Israel.
The international legal problem is obvious: What right does the Israeli government have over Jordanian property? Does the Israeli Department of Antiquities have the right to set up a committee to oversee the publication of scrolls and fragments discovered in Jordan? Does such a committee of oversight have the right to tell Milik that he cannot pass on to someone else permission to publish the fragmentary texts that he can no longer handle himself? Milik spoke at length about this delicate problem during our conversation.
Thus it is now an Israeli government committee that is holding up the publication of Qumran fragments! And that has to be recognized.
I know those fragmentary Cave 4 texts of the Manual of Discipline, having analyzed every prefix and word in them for the concordance. It is clear to me that I could quickly produce an edition of these texts consisting of photographs of the fragments, a diplomatic transcription of their texts in modern Hebrew type and an English translation with brief notes on variant readings. That could be done within six months. Then scholars 049the world over could study the texts and come to a common understanding about the meaning of this important sectarian work.
But I cannot do so, because Milik has apparently been told by the Israeli oversight committee that it will decide who gets such texts to publish. Thus the problem lies not solely with Milik.
Friends in Paris have told me that they rarely see Milik; he seldom comes to the libraries where he used to consult needed books. I came away with the impression that Milik, who is now 68 years old, will publish little more of the texts in his lifetime. Therein lies the problem.
Pressure has to be put on Milik and on the Israeli government committee to expedite a solution to this problem. And further pressure has to be put on the other scholars who are as delinquent as Milik to yield the right of publication to others who are competent to do this work.
