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Dead Sea Scrolls Coming to U.S.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are coming to the United States, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
An exhibit of fragmentary scrolls will be shown at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., at the New York Public Library, and in a San Francisco museum. The first stop will be Washington, D.C. in April 1993. After a three-month stay in Washington, the show will move to New York in October.
The fragmentary scrolls are now housed in Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum, but are not on display. None of the longer intact scrolls from Israel’s Shrine of the Book will be included in the show. But the exhibit may include at least one copy of MMT, which, some scholars who have seen it say, is a letter from the Teacher of Righteousness, an early leader of the Dead Sea Scroll sect. The Biblical Archaeology Society is being sued in Israel for over $200,000 by Ben-Gurion University professor Elisha Qimron for publishing a reconstructed Hebrew transcript of MMT to which Qimron claims he owns the copyright.
The exhibit will also include numerous artifacts related to the scrolls, as well as photographs. The cost to move the show will exceed $1 million.
Poland Strikes Another Blow for Intellectual Freedom—MMT Once Again Available
The Qumran Chronicle, a journal published in Poland, has announced that an annotated translation of MMT is once again available to its subscribers.
MMT is the controversial Dead Sea Scroll text that was assigned for publication more than 35 years ago to John Strugnell, the now-deposed chief editor of the official publication team. In 1980 Strugnell enlisted Elisha Qimron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, to assist him in publishing MMT. Together, Qimron and Strugnell have now completed a 300-page commentary on MMT that has been submitted to Oxford University Press for publication, but the book has not yet come out. In the meantime, the text of MMT is still not available—at least officially. Strugnell and Qimron, however, have given copies to colleagues, and it has been widely photocopied around the world.
In December 1990 Zdzislaw J. Kapera, the editor of The Qumran Chronicle, published one of these photocopies of MMT in a special supplement to his journal. After complaints and threats from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Kapera discontinued distribution of this supplement.
A photocopy of the Hebrew transcript of MMT as it appeared in The Qumran Chronicle was appended to the publisher’s foreword in BAS’s facsimile edition of photographs of the scrolls. Based on the inclusion of this photocopy of MMT, Professor Qimron sued BAS and BAR editor Hershel Shanks, claiming that he owned the copyright on his decipherment of MMT. Without notification to the defendants, Qimron applied to the Jerusalem court, where the suit was brought, for a temporary restraining order to enjoin BAS from distributing its facsimile edition of the scrolls anywhere in the world, so long as it contained the one-page transcription of MMT. The court granted the injunction.
MMT is apparently a letter, perhaps from the Teacher of Righteousness, the leader of the Dead Sea Scroll sect. Six copies of MMT were found in Qumran Cave 4, but all were fragmentary. About 120 lines of the text can be reconstructed by using what has survived in one copy to fill in what has not survived in other copies. Qimron claims that reconstructing the text in this way gives him a copyright on the reconstructed text and that no one else may copy the text, even after his book comes out.
Now another copy of MMT has been published in Poland. It is entitled An Annotated Translation of Miqsat Ma‘aseh ha-Tora (4QMMT) by Professor Bruno W. W. Dombrowski, an American scholar living in Germany. Subscribers to The Qumran Chronicle can get this volume by sending $3.00 to Dr. Z. J. Kapera, Editor, The Qumran Chronicle, ul. Borsueza 3/58, 30408 Krakow, Poland. If you are a subscriber who did not get the original supplement containing MMT (because Dr. Kapera stopped distributing it), you may obtain a copy of the new annotated translation (with English text) by Professor Dombrowski simply by requesting it from Dr. Kapera. If you would like to become a subscriber to The Qumran Chronicle, two-year subscriptions are available for $44. Add $16 for airmail and add $3 for the MMT volume.
Whether Professor Qimron will bring a lawsuit against Dr. Kapera and Professor Dombrowski to prevent the distribution of this new copy of MMT is not known. Those interested in receiving this text are advised to order their copy quickly.
Ben-Gurion University Enlists Israeli Academics in Suit Against BAS
Professor Dov Bahat, the rector of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, is enlisting the support of Israel’s academic community for Professor Elisha Qimron’s lawsuit against the Biblical Archaeology Society. BGU’s Bahat (not to be confused with Dan Bahat, a well-known archaeologist who is a member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board) is circulating a letter that he is asking other Israeli academics to sign that “denounce[s BAS’s] unauthorized publication” of the 120-line Dead Sea Scroll text known as MMT.
The letter prepared by BGU’s Bahat states that Qimron’s “struggle concerns members of the academic community worldwide” and “call[s] on Ben-Gurion University to take a leading role in ensuring that the scholarly and scientific rights of researchers be respected, and that those who violate such rights [i.e., the Biblical Archaeology Society] be brought to justice.”
In a separate letter to BAR editor Hershel Shanks, BGU’s Bahat claims that Qimron’s lawsuit involves “a national and worldwide issue.” So far Bahat claims he has 12 signatures to the letter he is circulating and that more people are signing up.
Professor Qimron’s lawsuit claims BAS violated the copyright he owns in his decipherment of the 120-line Hebrew text that dates back more than 2,000 years. He is claiming more than $200,000 in damages.
Major Scroll Conference in December
Reflecting the recent burgeoning of Dead Sea Scroll research since the scrolls have been released, a major conference of Dead Sea Scroll scholars is scheduled in New York City, December 14 through 17, 1992. Sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the conference will 057bring together scholars from Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Canada, Austria, Germany, Israel and the United States.
The sponsors stress that all views will be given a voice at the conference. Included among the speakers are Robert Donceel, who with his wife is completing the final excavation report on Roland de Vaux’s 1950s excavation of the settlement at Qumran; Joseph Patrich, who has been surveying the caves in the area of Wadi Qumran with an eye to the possibility of finding more scrolls; Emanuel Tov, who heads the official publication team; Norman Golb, who contends that the Dead Sea Scrolls constitute a Jerusalem library, reflecting a variety of Jewish views, that was hidden in caves to prevent its destruction by the Roman army; and many other leading Qumran scholars, among them Eugene Ulrich, Lawrence Schiffman, Kyle McCarter, Hartmut Stegemann, Michael Wise, George Brooke, Philip Davies, Joseph Fitzmyer, Shemaryahu Talmon, John Collins, Robert Eisenman, Elisha Qimron and James Charlesworth.
For more information, contact Conference Department, The New York Academy of Sciences, 2 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10021.
Mogilany, Poland, Center of Dead Sea Scroll Scholarship
A little Polish village hardly seems a likely spot for a center of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship. But Mogilany, outside of Cracow, has become just that.
At the instigation of Dr. Zdzislaw Jan Kapera, an academic librarian and bibliographer with a special interest in Qumran scholarship, the first, second and third Mogilany Conferences in 1987, 1989 and 1991 brought together Dead Sea Scroll scholars from around the world.
Now, through Kapera’s energy and initiative, a stream of publications is issuing forth—with poor-grade paper and plenty of typos, but also with lots of scholarship.
In addition to the volumes of the papers given at the Mogilany conferences, Kapera has started a scholarly journal called The Qumran Chronicle.
Of particular interest to BAR readers is a just-released volume, published by Kapera, entitled Qumran Cave IV and MMT—A Special Report. The first two papers in this volume, both by Kapera, are entitled “The Unfortunate Story of the Qumran Cave Four” and “How Not to Publish 4QMMT in 1955–1991.” Each contains tidbits not available elsewhere. Other papers are by Lawrence Schiffman, Joseph Baumgarten, George Brooke, Philip Davies, Robert Eisenman, Hans Burgmann and Piotr Muchowski. The volume costs only $15 and is available from Otto Harrassowitz, Asien Abteilung, Taunusstrasse 5, Postfach 2929, D-6200 Wiesbaden 1, Germany.
Volume 1 of a two-volume festschrift for leading Qumran scholar J. T. Milik has also just appeared and includes contributions by Emanuel Tov, Sebastian Brock, André Lemaire and Jacob Neusner ($48 paper, $60 cloth).
Another volume that should be available by the time this announcement appears is a book by Kapera entitled The Third Battle of the Scrolls—The Philological Scandal of the Century ($15 paper, $25 cloth).
Sectarian Scrolls to Be Published
The first volume of a critical edition of all the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, containing previously unpublished scrolls and new readings of already published scrolls, is due this winter from Westminster/John Knox Press of Louisville, Kentucky and J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) publishers in Tübingen, Germany. The series is the work of the Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project, headed by James Charlesworth.
Five volumes in all are projected for the series. The initial volume concentrates on the rules by which the Dead Sea Scrolls community was to live. Among the documents included are the Rule of the Community (1QS), the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa), the Damascus Document (CD), the War Scroll (1QM) and the Purification Rule (4Q514).
In addition to Charlesworth, the contributors to the first volume are Joseph Baumgarten (Baltimore Hebrew Univ.), Jean Duhaime (Univ. of Montreal), Jacob Milgrom (Univ. of California at Berkeley), Elisha Qimron (Ben-Gurion Univ.), Jimmy Jack McBee Roberts (Princeton Theological Seminary), Lawrence Schiffman (New York Univ.), Daniel Schwartz (Hebrew Univ.) and Loren Stuckenbruck (Kiel Univ.).
Subjects of the future volumes are hymns and prayers, commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, apocalyptic and other texts, and a parsed concordance (words listed by their root letters) based on the new critical readings of the texts.
