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Over the last 45 years, scholars have had to rediscover the Dead Sea Scrolls hundreds of times—almost every time they tried to find a particular fragment among the thousands stored between glass plates in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Some scholars have reported that the search sometimes took several days. But the recent publication of a preliminary catalogue of the scrolls may now put an end—at least in part—to such time-wasting searches.
After three years of data-gathering, the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC) of Claremont, California, has completed a preliminary publication of the Dead Sea Scroll Inventory Project: Lists of Documents, Photographs and Museum Plates. The cataloguing was done by the center’s Stephen A. Reed (now an assistant professor at Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe), in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority and with additional funding from the Dorot Foundation, the Annenberg Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The catalogue is now available to the public in 14 spiralbound, photocopied fascicles. Ranging from 30 to 70 pages each, the fascicles are divided by location, with six fascicles devoted to Qumran Cave 4, as follows: (1) Qumran Cave 1; (2) Qumran Minor Caves; (3) Murabba‘at; (4) Qumran Cave 4 (4Q128-186, DJD 5 and 6); (5) Qumran Cave 4 (4Q482-520, Maurice Baillet, DJD 7); (6) Qumran Cave 11; (7) Qumran Cave 4 (4Q1-127, Biblical); (8) Qumran Cave 4 (4Q521-575, Jean Starcky); (9) 075Qumran Cave 4 (4Q364-481, John Strugnell); (10) Qumran Cave 4 (4Q196-363, J. T. Milik); (11) Khirbet Mird; (12) Wadi ed Daliyeh; (13) Wadi Seiyal, Nahal Hever, etc.; (14) Masada.
Each fascicle contains a preface, an introduction and three lists: (1) a list of the documents according to their sigla, which gives for each the title, museum plate, name of the assigned editor, publication status, a bibliography and a cross-reference to the photos; (2) a list of all photos, identified by the PAM (Palestine Archaeological Museum photograph) numbers and by document, and their locations; and (3) a list of museum plates that tells what documents are contained on each plate at the Rockefeller Museum (formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum).
By the end of 1992, the ABMC hopes to publish a revised, one-volume book version of the catalogue. No computer version is available yet, but a database will soon be completed that will allow information to be retrieved from the three lists according to the fragments’ language, script, scroll material and title.
The fascicles may be ordered by anyone for $12 each ($13 outside the U.S.) from Marilyn Lundberg, Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, Box 670, Claremont, CA 91711.
Over the last 45 years, scholars have had to rediscover the Dead Sea Scrolls hundreds of times—almost every time they tried to find a particular fragment among the thousands stored between glass plates in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Some scholars have reported that the search sometimes took several days. But the recent publication of a preliminary catalogue of the scrolls may now put an end—at least in part—to such time-wasting searches.
