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One of the world’s preeminent Dead Sea Scroll authorities, who at one time had full access to all the fragments, including those still unpublished, has roundly condemned the continuing delay in releasing the full texts.
Speaking at a colloquium honoring Sam Iwry of Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore Hebrew University, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., Professor Emeritus at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., stated:
“Since 1960 there has been no excuse for the lack of publication. Publication understandably takes time, but they [the texts] should have been appearing at regular intervals. Yet this has not been the case.”
According to Fitzmyer, the principal reason for the delay is that the scholar-editors entrusted with publication want to write extensive commentaries on the texts before publishing them, so that theirs will be the last word on these important texts. In explaining the delay, Fitzmyer said:
“There is the scholarly desire to say the last word on the texts. This has been the main reason for the delay in publication. Yet we know that no one who pioneers in the publication of an ancient text ever says the last word on it.”
The scholar-editors entrusted with the publication often excuse their 023tardiness by pointing to the difficulty of fitting together thousands of tiny fragments that in effect constitute a giant jigsaw puzzle. But this work was essentially completed nearly 30 years ago, says Fitzmyer: “When that team was first put together [in 1952], the texts were entrusted to established scholars. It was their task, first, to complete the jigsaw puzzle, a task that continued until 1960.” Naturally, improvements can always be made in fitting the pieces together and in reconstructing the missing parts, but this is a task that never ends. With fragments like this, it frequently continues after publication, as well as before.
Fitzmyer also condemned the recent practice by which team members allow their own graduate students to publish texts while students of other established scholars are denied this opportunity (as are the other established scholars themselves):
“We have been witnessing in recent years a doling out of these precious texts to graduate students of team members. It is not that the graduate students are incompetent or that they are not properly guided. But they are not established scholars, and this practice raises a question of equity—the partiality being shown to graduate students of Harvard University or elsewhere.”
Two of the three surviving members of the original team of editors, chief editor John Strugnell and Frank Moore Cross, are both associated with Harvard.
Instead of using their time to direct graduate students in editing the scrolls, team members should have been working on their own publication of Dead Sea Scroll texts, Fitzmyer added: “All the time being spent on the direction of such [graduate students’] dissertations should rather have been put by the directors (team members) in the preparation of their own definitive volumes.”
Fitzmyer urged the scroll editors to publish the texts without extensive analysis and commentary so that other scholars would have an opportunity to analyze the texts:
“The texts should be published in brief form (diplomatic transcription) with a minimum of notes. Then the world’s scholarly community would have the opportunity to work on the texts, interpret them properly, and begin to resolve the hermeneutical puzzle of these precious ancient texts.”
As a young scholar, Fitzmyer spent 1957–1958 in Jerusalem working on a concordance of all the non-Biblical texts, by indexing each word in the texts on d separate note card. The next year, Raymond E. Brown, S.S., spent a year working on the concordance. 024William Oxtoby of Toronto University then continued the work. A Spanish scholar, J. Teixidor, also contributed to the work. “The idea,” Said Fitzmyer, “was that we who worked on the concordance would be able to publish it, once the texts were definitively published.”
Until very recently, this concordance was kept under wraps, to be used only by the scroll editors themselves. “A few years ago,” Fitzmyer recalled, “I received an invitation to buy a copy of the concordance at over $300, a text on which I had spent long hours, and the title-page did not even bear the names of those who had constructed it … The irony,” Fitzmyer added, “is that there is in existence such a concordance, and the texts to which it pertains are not yet published in full.”
Fitzmyer is himself the author and compiler of the definitive bibliography of the publications of the Dead Sea Scroll texts, including texts found in nearby wadis. His book, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study (Scholars Press, 1975, 1977), has gone through two editions, and a third is expected in 1990. The book also includes numerous scholarly study aids in connection with the scrolls.
As a result, Fitzmyer is as up-to-date as anyone—aside from the editors themselves—on the extent of the unpublished texts. Of the eleven caves in Wadi Qumran in which texts were found, all but two caves have been completely published. These two caves are Cave 4 and Cave 11. Caves 1 through 3 and 5 through 10 have been fully published. These nine caves yielded 212 complete or fragmentary texts. Cave 11 contained 25 texts, most of which have been published; the rest are either in press or are to be published shortly.
The real problem is Cave 4. All of the texts found in this cave are fragmentary. Among the thousands of papyrus and parchment fragments that were taken from this cave, not a single scroll was complete.
Cave 4 was found in 1952 by Bedouin tribesmen. They began to clean it out, but were soon discovered. Then the archaeologists, under Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique, took over. More than 6 feet of debris had accumulated over the centuries, from which the archaeologists rescued “at least 15,000 fragments,” according to de Vaux. Based on deductions from various publications, Fitzmyer has concluded that either 520 or 521 texts (arranged on 620 plates) from Cave 4 have been identified by the editors. Of these, only 98 texts have been published.
In short, over 81 percent of the Cave 4 texts remains unpublished. (Approximately 55 percent of the total number of Qumran texts remains unpublished.)
According to Fitzmyer, the “lion’s share” of the texts was entrusted to Josef Tadeusz Milik, a Polish refugee priest who had been studying for his doctorate at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Milik got this major assignment “because, as Time magazine eventually labeled him, he was ‘the Scrollery’s fastest man with a fragment.’” During the year that Fitzmyer spent in Jerusalem, however, “Milik was quite sick; later in the sixties, he left the priesthood and married a French woman, who apparently was able to 025help him for a time.” However, his last major publication came out in 1976, which means it was probably completed several years earlier. Since then, Fitzmyer said, nothing has appeared from Milik, “apart from a few small articles.” Fitzmyer notes that Milik “is often incommunicado, and one wonders whether the sickness has recurred.” In the past few months, Milik has reassigned some of his most important texts,a although he apparently still controls access to them (see “Dead Sea Scroll Variation on ‘Show and Tell’—It’s Called ‘Tell, But No Show,’” in this issue).
Fitzmyer also tells us something about the degradation of the texts since they were discovered. During the Suez crisis in 1956, “the fragments between plates of glass were boxed up and carried to the Ottoman Bank in Amman, where they lay in a basement for several months and suffered no little damage from dampness and mildew.”
During the Six-Day War in 1967, Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum, where the unpublished scrolls are kept, fell into Israeli hands.
“Impatience at the delay in publishing the fragments of Cave 4 raised the question in Israel about taking some of the fragments from the scholars to whom they had been entrusted, but Pére de Vaux succeeded in persuading Israeli officials to respect the gentlemen’s agreement that had been made [regarding publication rights].”
“The struggle for the scrolls must continue!” said Fitzmyer, who concluded his remarks by agreeing with Oxford don Geza Vermes that the delay in publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls remains “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century.”
One of the world’s preeminent Dead Sea Scroll authorities, who at one time had full access to all the fragments, including those still unpublished, has roundly condemned the continuing delay in releasing the full texts. Speaking at a colloquium honoring Sam Iwry of Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore Hebrew University, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., Professor Emeritus at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., stated: “Since 1960 there has been no excuse for the lack of publication. Publication understandably takes time, but they [the texts] should have been appearing at regular intervals. Yet this has not been the case.” […]
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Footnotes
See “New Hope for the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls,” BAR 15:06.