Chief Scroll Editor Opens Up—An Interview with Emanuel Tov

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For more than a decade, Hebrew University professor Emanuel Tov has been in charge of the scholarly team that is publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It hasn’t always been easy; but now, with the 37th volume of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series rolling off the presses, the project is finally nearing completion. With this publishing landmark in mind, BAR took the opportunity to interview Tov on his tenure as chief editor, and to get his perspective on the dramatic developments surrounding their release.

Hershel Shanks: Emanuel, you’ve just announced the completion of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.

Emanuel Tov: Correct.

HS: But you’re not yet finished.

ET: We are not finished. We are announcing the fact that all the scrolls that have been found are now in the public domain in scholarly editions. The fragments have been in the public domain as images [pictures] for some time. Now they are available in scholarly editions—that is, with one or two exceptions. There are 37 volumes in the DJD Series [Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, published by Oxford University Press; each volume includes photographs, transcriptions, translations and commentary on the scrolls]. The volume on Samuel, with Frank Cross [of Harvard] as the main author, is to be submitted soon. And a volume of Aramaic material is not out. All the others are out, all 37 volumes.

HS: There was once a fear that if the pictures were released before the scholarly editions came out, we could be flooded with poor scholarship from people who would come in and publish a text before the scholar that you assigned to that text. Has that happened?

ET: I think very little. Let’s not mention names, but in one case this happened.

HS: So the fear did not materialize.

ET: That particular fear, which I personally did not share anyway, did not materialize, partly because the people in our team were rather numerous. We had about 60 persons. With maybe one or two exceptions, people didn’t steal each others’ texts.

HS: I’ve heard it said that any competent scholar who wanted a text of the Dead Sea Scrolls to publish could get an assignment from you. Is that generally true?

ET: Hardly ever was someone turned down.

HS: What was your greatest problem as editor in chief?

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ET: The greatest problem we faced was the speed, or lack of it, with which some scholars worked, and my prodding of them. The same problem, recognized from the 1950s onward, was also my problem—that is, to see to it that everyone delivered his or her text according to the time schedule. It worked out well, but not without problems. There was a problem with this or that scholar, yes.

HS: I was quoted in the New York Times as saying that you were “a dogged encourager.” Is that an accurate description?

ET: I don’t know exactly what “dogged” means. Since I don’t know English, you have to explain to me what “dogged” means. Has it to do anything with a dog?

HS: No, no, it doesn’t. It means you persisted and you kept on it and you didn’t stop.

ET: Yes, I was very persistent to the point that one would probably call me a nudnick [Yiddish for someone who badgers]. That is one of the sources of our success.

HS: What was your greatest satisfaction?

ET: Well, the satisfaction is just the same as the problem: When people handed in their manuscripts and we were able to work on them and there was a good interaction between me and the scholars and they changed their minds on this or that because of what I said and what my team said and the volumes started coming out, that was my satisfaction.

HS: Did the scholars get paid?

ET: No, never. But some money went to assistants and equipment. If professor so-and-so was working in New York and could speed up the preparation of the edition by having an assistant, he’d get an assistant for so many hours. It worked.

HS: What was the greatest surprise in the course of your editorship?

ET: There were some surprises because of the personalities. There are pleasant and unpleasant [personalities] when you work with people.

HS: How did you come to be appointed editor in chief?

ET: I don’t know.

HS: Didn’t somebody come to you? Or did you apply?

ET: Oh no, oh no. In those very turbulent days of 1990, about which you may have heard something, [John] Strugnell [former editor in chief] was at the end of his time, and the oversight committee of the Israel Antiquities Authority [IAA] must have decided that I was the best man for the job. So they came to me and convinced me.

In the beginning they wanted me to have an office in the Rockefeller Museum. I strongly resisted that. I said if that’s the case, I don’t want to do it. I want to hold on to my own office [at the Hebrew University]. Also I said I can only do it if I am released from half of the time of my job. So the IAA made an arrangement with the university, which was really marvelous. I taught only half of my courses, and the IAA simply poured that money into the university for part of my job. This went on for ten years.

I also made it a condition that I was only willing to accept the job if the [pre-existing] international committee also appointed me, because those were the people I had to work with. Some politics was involved, but then I was also appointed by the international committee.

I also had John Strugnell’s blessing. He was very sweet to me. I use this word “sweet” because I mean it. He left the position obviously with bitter feelings.

He acknowledged that he was ill. He had to end his alcoholism. I don’t know whether I can give it any other name. He acknowledged that he was not in good condition, in the last years before he was discontinued. I had made a point of continuing him on the team to work on a certain text. And I appointed somebody to work with him—Dan Harrington [of Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge]. This worked out superbly. The result was a very fat DJD volume [volume 34].

HS: Strugnell didn’t voluntarily retire?

ET: No, he was discontinued. After 1967 [when Israel gained control of the fragmentary scrolls] the editors were appointed or endorsed by the Israel Antiquities Authority, and at a later stage he was officially discontinued.

HS: The trigger for that was the interview Strugnell gave that many regarded as anti-Semitic.^a

ET: This has often been said, but I would not put it that way. I distinctly remember the committee meeting that decided he was to be discontinued. They made the decision because of his not functioning as editor in chief, not doing the things he’s supposed to be doing as editor in chief. They made no reference to that interview. Maybe it was in the back of the minds of some of them—I don’t know—but it would have been completely wrong to use that as an argument.

HS: Did you know Strugnell before?

ET: Very well. I was his student, I was one of his beloved students. We had a very good relationship. I learned much from him. I could not have done what I have been doing and am doing without instruction from him.

HS: What was your reaction to the interview?

ET: Oh, I was sad. I was very sad about my total incomprehension that those were his views. To what extent he has changed them, I don’t know. But I am a Jew and I was sad; but I remained loyal to him, simply out of respect for him and simply in the belief that there is something wrong in his thinking on this theoretical issue—with regard to his views on Judaism, not on Jews. He makes this 034distinction, which maybe shouldn’t be made or maybe can’t be made, but he made it. He distinguishes between Judaism as a religion and Jews as human beings. He has no problem with the latter but he has some problems with the former.

HS: I would expect him to be very bitter toward me, because in some ways I precipitated his dismissal. But in the years since, we have become pretty good friends. Physically, he has his problems right now—he had a stroke—but his mind is as sharp as ever.

ET: Sharp as ever.

HS: The question I ask myself is, “Why is he not more bitter to me? How can he be friendly to me?” I mean, it’s easy for me to be friendly to him, because he didn’t hurt me. I hurt him. I say that he is the consummate Christian gentleman. Would you agree with that?

ET: He has mellowed. He always was a sweet person. Maybe somehow he has gotten to understand what went wrong.

HS: When were you appointed editor in chief?

ET: I was appointed in 1990 but I didn’t really take office until 1991, because during the first year I was on sabbatical.

HS: You said they were turbulent years. Why were they turbulent?

ET: [Joking] I think I’m going to tell you all kinds of things you don’t know about.

Those years were turbulent because there were many demands upon us by journalists who wanted to know this and wanted to know that. There were many interviews, and the team was not trusted by anyone, because the previous team, under the previous management, did not do much to increase that trust. And so, Who were we? And who was Emanuel Tov? An unknown entity. No one would trust that we would do a better job in producing those volumes in time than the previous management. And so even though I had all the trust in myself and even though I had no doubt, still the whole atmosphere of mistrust continued. I tried to stay as much as possible out of the media and politics. I just did my work.

HS: As you know, all the scrolls had been previously assigned to a very small group for publication before you got into it.

ET: Yes.

HS: You had to reassign a lot of those texts. Did you have to get permission from the people to whom these texts were originally assigned?

ET: Well, I’ll tell you how it went. It was not a matter of getting permission from them because they never would have given that permission. Simply, the oversight committee of the IAA took the decision in its own hands. I was part of it. Although I consider myself not a member of that committee—I was working with the committee. I made suggestions to the committee as to who could work on these particular texts, and the committee would say yes or no. As time went on, I was much more independent of the committee. But the major decisions were indeed made in those early years—1990, 1991. In practice it meant that many texts had to be removed from [Josef] Milik and texts had to be removed from Frank Cross. Cross was easygoing with this, Milik was not. Until today Milik, as I understand, is bitter and bears a grudge. He was not willing to live with the idea of having a smaller load. He was not willing to work on one-tenth of his original load—he wanted it all. I paid a visit to him and he was friendly. I tried to convince him to continue working on certain texts. I told him, “Please, we can help you with money, we can type out your manuscripts, we can give you an assistant, and all you have to do is to complete your manuscripts.” When we realized that he was not willing to do 035this, we had no choice but to turn, in the case of the Tobit material, to Professor Joseph Fitzmyer [of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.] and to give him the texts. Fitzmyer worked very fast; he published it in one year, and he did an extremely good job. Obviously this was very difficult for Milik and a very difficult task for me.

What I said about Milik is also true of Strugnell. He had an enormous lot. The whole lot was taken away from him. But he did not make any trouble. The only thing we left him was this group of texts that he worked on with Dan Harrington at my request. All the other texts were taken from him, basically without any problems.

We sometimes had transcriptions and the beginning of commentaries on some of the texts from these scholars. So whenever appropriate, this is mentioned on the title page of the editions. The title pages will say “Partially based on earlier reconstructions of Milik” or “Partially based on earlier reconstructions and commentary of John Strugnell.” We’ve always been as fair as possible, under the circumstances.

HS: I think that everybody from plumbers and taxicab drivers to professors has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when you get to the next question, and ask, “What do they say?” you almost always get the answer, “I don’t know.” What is the most important thing we learn from the scrolls?

ET: One thing we learned from the scrolls is, they don’t make a difference for Judaism or Christianity. We are all asked the same question: Do they make a difference for our Christian or Jewish religion? Well, they don’t. The Dead Sea Scrolls are important for the scholarly investigation of ancient Israel; they include ancient Israelite literature from the Bible to the second century of the Common Era. Scholarship on this period is not imaginable anymore without looking into the Dead Sea Scrolls. Textual criticism of the Hebrew Scriptures, my own area of expertise, is not imaginable without the Dead Sea Scrolls.

HS: How many Biblical scrolls are there?

ET: There are 200 from Qumran alone, and about 25 from other sites south of Qumran. They are all from the Dead Sea area, including on top of Masada. The Masada scrolls are very interesting. Two were found underneath the [first century] synagogue. The differences between all the Biblical scrolls are sometimes slight but sometimes major. All are important, even if there’s no difference from our received text, the so-called Masoretic Text, as in the case of the Masada scrolls. They are very important for our reconstruction of the history of the text.

HS: What effect have the scrolls had on how important the Septuagint is, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible?

ET: The Septuagint, in Greek, has been recognized from 1850 onward as a major tool for the study of the text of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars have tried to reconstruct the Hebrew parent text of the Septuagint, what we call the Vorlage. Now for the first time, we found in Qumran some Hebrew fragments that are very close to—almost identical with—the Septuagint text in Greek. These are fragments that have now endorsed the correctness of the reconstructions from the Septuagint. We now know that we are entitled to reconstruct that Greek text into Hebrew. What we will do with these retroversions from Greek in the final reconstruction of the Biblical text as a whole is a different matter. But the whole process of translating the Greek back into Hebrew has been validated.

HS: What is the most important new thing that you can tell us from the non-Biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

ET: To have so many categories of different writings of the Jewish people at that time, that is a major surprise. In the area 062of the sectarian writings everything is new. Obviously that’s a surprise.

HS: What do you mean by sectarian writing?

ET: By sectarian we mean the texts of the ancient community of the Qumranites, which I consider to be the Essenes (as the majority of scholars do). Their compositions reflect their own views about what is happening in the world, about what life in the hereafter will be, how we should interpret the Hebrew Bible and how we prove to ourselves that the Hebrew Bible is correct.

HS: What is the importance of the scrolls for Christianity and Christian history?

ET: From the very beginning, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, there were high expectations. Everyone was looking for Jesus in the scrolls. As time progressed, people forgot that the real attraction of the scrolls had been that they might reveal something about Jesus. There’s nothing in the scrolls about Jesus. There aren’t even writings of the New Testament. A few scholars believe that a few small fragments from Cave 7 are books of the New Testament, but 99.9 percent of all other scholars believe that this is incorrect. So there’s no Jesus.

I would say the major importance for Christians is to have writings from the time of Jesus, with here and there something that gives the background of ideas and words in the New Testament. But there’s no direct bearing on anything we have in the New Testament—neither Jesus nor John the Baptist.

The worlds of the early Christians and the Essenes were very different. Both started as splinter groups from mainstream Judaism. They both talked about a New Covenant. The Qumranites were discontinued, but Christianity continued. Yet they both use the same concept of having a new kind of contract with God.

HS: What is the importance of the scrolls for understanding Judaism of that time?

ET: We know now about different groups of Jews. We may well have a distorted view, because we have all the literature from one group—those at Qumran. We have so much literature from the Essenes now, and we don’t have the literature of other groups. We think we know about the relations and enmities between the Essenes and the groups that may be called rabbinical or proto-rabbinical—the Pharisees—but we only have it from one perspective (the Essene perspective).

HS: What’s the next step? We’ve got the scrolls out. They’ve been released, so that anyone can see them. You’ve now managed to publish them. They’re available to scholars—not only the pictures, which was the first release, but in scholarly editions analyzing each word, each letter. What happens now?

ET: What is the next step? I think pulling it all together.

HS: Interpretation?

ET: Interpretation. It is very important not to stay within the boundaries of the Qumran texts. Qumran scholarship has to be integrated into the scholarship of different disciplines. People who study ancient halakhah [Jewish law] will not study only the Mishnah and Gemara but also the Qumran material. In my discipline, Biblical textual criticism, that has already been happening. Improved summaries must be integrated into existing disciplines.

You know, there is no discipline of the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, and there really shouldn’t be. They need to be integrated into other fields of study. I think some people should focus on the Biblical text, as I do; others should focus on apocalyptic literature; still others should focus on early prayer.

We often call these scrolls the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Qumran scrolls. But this term is not correct. They are ancient Israelite scrolls. I stress this time and again. Probably one-third of these scrolls were written at Qumran. Two-thirds came from the remainder of Israel. So these finds represent all of ancient Israel.

HS: You and I are together today, but we were at one time antagonistic toward each other.

ET: We’ve always had a good relationship over the years. Ten years ago I was protecting our rights. There were those who criticized us and your soft voice was sometimes heard in places. I should say that after we started in 1990, 1991, this criticism went on. I’m not talking about you personally. Then in the second part of the last decade, much less criticism was voiced, but we are all together now.

HS: I agree with that.

ET: Not much praise has been heard about what we’re doing. But that’s the way it is in journalism. “Dog bites man” gets no audience; “man bites dog”—that’s something. “Man bites dog”: That was the situation in 1990 and 1991.

HS: Thank you very much, Emanuel.

For more than a decade, Hebrew University professor Emanuel Tov has been in charge of the scholarly team that is publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It hasn’t always been easy; but now, with the 37th volume of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series rolling off the presses, the project is finally nearing completion. With this publishing landmark in mind, BAR took the opportunity to interview Tov on his tenure as chief editor, and to get his perspective on the dramatic developments surrounding their release. Hershel Shanks: Emanuel, you’ve just announced the completion of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication […]