Bits & Pieces

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Computers Enhance Scroll Studies

If “making it” in today’s world means being on a computer, then Dead Sea Scroll studies have finally arrived. Two new developments have thrust the scrolls into the digital arena.

The first is the availability on computer of all the information contained in the 14 fascicles of the Dead Sea Scroll Inventory Project: Lists of Documents, Photographs and Museum Plates, prepared by Stephen A. Reed of the Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Center (ABMC) of Claremont, California.^a Like the fascicles, ABMC’s newly launched Electronic Manuscript Center provides such data as document titles, name of the assigned editor, publication status, bibliography, a list of photos by PAM (Palestine Archaeological Museum) number and a list of museum plates that tells what documents are contained on each plate at the Rockefeller Museum (formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum). Users of the database can, for example, identify in a single procedure all the photos and plates for a particular Dead Sea Scroll document.

Researchers visiting the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center can use the database at no charge. Others can join the Center’s electronic bulletin board for $25 per year (plus phone charges). The Center is at 1325 N. College Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711; inquiries can be made by phone at (714) 621–6451.

Across the Atlantic, the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies has announced that a complete set of Dead Sea Scroll photos is available to “linguistically qualified scholars” for study at the Centre. The 3,300-plate archive, located at Yarnton Manor, five miles from Oxford, contains photos of all the published and unpublished Qumran manuscripts and fragments.

The Centre also possesses electronic scanning equipment that transfers the photos into digitalized images. Researchers can enhance images so that letters illegible to the human eye even with the help of a magnifying glass can be made readable. (For an example of a computer-enhanced fragment, see the photos in “The ‘Pierced Messiah’ Text—An Interpretation Evaporates,” “Fragments,” BAR 18:04.) Researchers can also use the computer to move fragments around on screen in order to test possible “joins” with other fragments.

Those wishing admission to the Oxford collection should apply in writing (stating their academic qualifications and the precise nature of their study) to:

The Oxford Centre reserves the right to refuse applicants whose academic qualifications it deems insufficient.

Scroll Books in the Pipeline

What began as a trickle of books about the Dead Sea Scrolls is fast becoming a flood. Here is a rundown of some books that are currently in the writing stage.

Jerusalem and the Origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by University of Chicago professor Norman Golb, is due this year from Macmillan. Golb’s focus will be on current theories regarding the nature of the Qumran site and the identity of the people who lived there. Golb views the site as a Jewish military settlement dating to Hasmonean times (and not as a semi-monastic Essene community, as widely thought), and he describes himself as “vehemently opposed to the idea that the scrolls were the product of any one sect.” The large number of texts at Qumran and the more than 500 scribal hands that wrote them indicate to Golb that the scrolls were documents hidden by Jerusalemites in anticipation of the Roman siege of 70 A.D.

Also due in 1993, from the evangelical publisher Zondervan, is The Rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Ed Cook, a scholar associated with the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Research Project at Hebrew Union College. Cook is planning to produce a narrative account of the scrolls’ original discovery and their recent “rediscovery”—the successful battle over access to the unpublished scrolls. Cook, too, will review the theories regarding the origins of the Qumran group in light of the newly available texts. “Some minority theories [regarding origins] are back on the table after having been shelved for many years,” Cook says. He adds that while the book is aimed at the general public, the publisher’s basic constituency is conservative Protestants. With that in mind, Cook will include a chapter on the links between the scrolls and Christianity, including “some of the wilder theories, and some of the more sober ones.”

Popular archaeology writer Neil Silberman is writing The War for the Scrolls for publication by Grosser Books in the fall of 1994. He will retell the history of the scrolls from their discovery to the latest debates, focusing, as have his earlier books, on the political uses of archaeological discoveries. Silberman describes the book as something of a follow-up to his biography of archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who was instrumental in acquiring several scrolls for Israel.

Further in the future and most scholarly of all is a two-volume encyclopedia of the scrolls due from Oxford University Press in 1996. Lawrence H. Schiffman, of New York University, and James VanderKam, of the University of Notre Dame, will be general editors. The volumes will be organized by topic and will contain an estimated 600,000 words. The editors expect it will take a full year solely to develop the table of contents.

Also in publishing news, Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by BAR’s Hershel Shanks and published by Random House, maintained its number four position on Publisher’s Weekly’s religious bestseller list for October. As we reported in our previous issue, the book debuted in the fourth slot on the September list.

Computers Enhance Scroll Studies

If “making it” in today’s world means being on a computer, then Dead Sea Scroll studies have finally arrived. Two new developments have thrust the scrolls into the digital arena.