At Least Publish the Dead Sea Scrolls Timetable! - The BAS Library
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At Least Publish the Dead Sea Scrolls Timetable!

By Hershel Shanks

A new timetable for the publication of still-secret Dead Sea Scroll fragments is being negotiated between Israel’s Department of Antiquities and the scholar-editors to whom publication was assigned 35 years ago. Fragments of approximately 400 different documents found in caves near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea remain unpublished and inaccessible to all but a select few scholars—the “charmed circle” Columbia’s Theodore Gaster has called them—to whom the manuscripts were given for publication more than three decades ago. The date currently being discussed for completion of the scholars’ work is 1996. But Harvard Professor John Strugnell, newly appointed […]

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Footnotes

1.

See “Jerusalem Rolls Out Red Carpet for Biblical Archaeology Congress,” BAR 10:04; “Failure to Publish Dead Sea Scrolls Is Leitmotif of New York University Scroll Conference,” BAR 11:05; “Antiquities Director Confronts Problems and Controversies,” BAR 12:04; see also “The Meeting Season—A Time to Learn, A Time to Drowse, A Time of Mingle with Colleagues from Around the World,” Bible Review, December 1988; “Debate on Enoch Stifled for 30 Years While One Scholar Studied Dead Sea Scroll Fragments,” Bible Review, Fall 1987.

2.

See Geza Vermes and Pamela Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (London: William Collins, 1977) p. 24.

3.

“BARview: Israeli Authorities Now Responsible for Delay in Publication of Dead Sea Scrolls,” BAR 11:05.

4.

One person very close to the Israeli decision-making authorities told us that BAR has “done a wonderful job, performed a great service and is really responsible for all the movement toward publication.” But, he added, “At this point, don’t be a bully.”

5.

“Jerusalem Rolls Out Red Carpet for Biblical Archaeology Congress,” BAR 10:04.

6.

See Philip Davies’s comments in “The Meeting Season—A Time to Learn, A Time to Drowse, A Time of Mingle with Colleagues from Around the World,” Bible Review, December 1988.