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A new actor has suddenly appeared on the stage of the drama known as the Dead Sea Scroll Publication Scandal—an Israeli oversight committee. Although the committee has been in existence for some time, it was largely inactive. Indeed, it never even met until last fall.
Now, however, it is taking charge.
Reportedly the committee was irked—justifiably, in our view—that scroll editors were subassigning unpublished texts to their own students for editing. The committee wanted a more equitable method of assigning texts for publication.
One of the first things the committee did was to notify scroll editors that they no longer had sole authority to subassign and reassign texts. The committee wants these decisions to be made in consultation with the committee and with chief scroll editor John Strugnell. For that reason, scroll editor J. T. Milik told Father Joseph Fitzmyer that he (Milik) was no longer authorized to give Fitzmyer publication rights to certain texts Fitzmyer asked for. (See the article by Father Fitzmyer, “A Visit with M. Jozef T. Milik, Dead Sea Scroll Editor,” in this issue.)
Whether Milik would have given Fitzmyer these texts even if he had been free to do so remains unclear. It may well be that Milik would have refused Fitzmyer anyway and was happy to have the Israeli oversight committee as an excuse. Fitzmyer now blames the Israeli oversight committee for the continuing delay.
What this points up is that attention is inevitably going to be increasingly focused on the oversight committee. With its authority goes responsibility. Criticism that was formerly directed at the scroll editors will now be directed at the oversight committee.
To some extent the oversight committee will be tarred with the brush of the delinquent scroll editors. It is the latter who have failed to perform for over 35 years. But it will be the oversight committee that will be charged—sometimes by the scroll editors themselves, as in the case of Milik—for any further delay.
The only way for the committee to cut the Gordian Knot is to release photographs of the unpublished texts to everyone. Israel has every right to do this. Contrary to what Father Fitzmyer says in his article, opposite, it is clear that Israel now has ultimate authority and responsibility for the scrolls in the Rockefeller Museum. International law on this point is clear. (If it is not Israel’s responsibility, regardless of how it obtained possession of the scrolls, whose responsibility is it?) Moreover, we are not even talking about the scrolls themselves; we are talking about photographs of the scrolls. Surely Israel is authorized to let people see the photographs of the scrolls. Israel’s Antiquities Department placed the current restrictions on access to these photographs when it deposited them in the United States for safekeeping; without these restrictions, the photographs would be open to all. If Israel can restrict access, it can grant access. Legally the question is no different from whether Israel may allow Rockefeller Museum visitors to look at the objects in the display cases—or, more accurately, to look at photographs of the objects in the display cases.
Instead, the oversight committee appears to be adopting a policy simply of encouraging wider distribution of texts for publication. It hopes to convince the three scholars who are hoarding the most texts—John Strugnell, J. T. Milik and Emile Puech—to give up the texts they can’t publish promptly and to reassign these texts in consultation with the committee and Strugnell.
Rots of ruck, as they say.
In the meantime, the oversight committee will be blamed by Fitzmyer, and by others who share his views, for the delay.
To add to their burden, the oversight committee is finding that things are in even worse shape than they thought. A complete inventory of the texts, it turns out, cannot be made from available lists without redoing the painstaking division of documents done 30 to 35 years ago. The committee is therefore going to Milik and the others to ask them what texts have been assigned to them. A representative of the Antiquities Authority went to Paris to see Milik for this purpose.
In addition, it turns out that about 50 plates of texts are completely unassigned—after 35 years! But the oversight committee cannot identify precisely which plates these are, in order to assign them to others for publication. Presumably the unassigned plates are the least important texts; otherwise, one of the scroll team members would have scooped them up. Nevertheless, a number of scholars have expressed interest in studying them.
Given all that has happened, we believe the committee should conclude that openness is the only viable policy. Otherwise, another generation of scholars will be deprived of access to the scrolls. After the doors have already been shut on two generations of scholars, even one more generation of delay is too much.
A new actor has suddenly appeared on the stage of the drama known as the Dead Sea Scroll Publication Scandal—an Israeli oversight committee. Although the committee has been in existence for some time, it was largely inactive. Indeed, it never even met until last fall.a
Now, however, it is taking charge.
