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The Dead Sea Scrolls have been liberated. The time has now come to preserve the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Whether the scrolls received worse treatment during the 2,000 years they spent in the caves than they have since being taken out of the caves about 40 years ago is debatable.
Taking proper care of the scrolls has not been easy, but it seems hard to accept their present condition as inevitable, especially in the case of the fragmentary scrolls.
Some of the fragmentary scrolls have been stolen, lost or misplaced. Even when they are where they are supposed to be—in the room dubbed the Scrollery in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem—it can take two or three days to find a particular fragment, according to one prominent researcher who has access to the scrolls.
Texts that have disappeared include a manuscript of the Biblical Book of Daniel and a manuscript of the Damascus Document, which may be the most important text for ferreting out the origin of the Dead Sea Scroll sectarians.
Shortly after they were acquired in the mid-1950s, the fragmentary scrolls from Cave 4 (more than 500 texts) were taken to the Palestine Archaeological Museum (now the Rockefeller Museum). There they were placed on tables in a long room with no climate or humidity controls. Early pictures show researchers handling the scrolls with cigarettes in their hands, freely moving pieces around from place to place—with no record of the fragments as they arrived at the museum. The sun is seen streaming in the window.
The Cave 1 scrolls that were acquired early on by Israel were cared for more carefully. They were—and are—housed in a special museum constructed for the purpose, the Shrine of the Book. Nevertheless, there too mistakes were made. The centerpiece of the museum is a huge drum around which was wound the great Isaiah scroll. However, in order to place it on the outside of the huge drum, it had to be bent backward, in a curve opposite to that in which it had lain rolled up for 2,000 years in the Qumran cave. As a result, the leather on which the text was written began to crack. The Isaiah scroll was subsequently removed and replaced with a replica. That is what tourists see today. The original is stored along with the other intact scrolls in a climate-controlled storage room where a temperature of 66° Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of 55 percent is constantly maintained. Even so there has inevitably been some continued deterioration.
The fragmentary scrolls in the Rockefeller Museum have fared much worse. Shortly before the 1956 Arab-Israeli war, the fragments were taken to Amman for security purposes and placed in a damp storeroom in the basement of a bank. The change from the dry hot air of the Judean desert to the moist air of the bank basement in Amman was disastrous. Mildew set in and it took several months to re-clean the scrolls when they were returned to Jerusalem. But even in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, they were not kept in a climate-controlled atmosphere. In short, no real effort was made to conserve them, and the deterioration has been correspondingly serious.
Because of the deterioration and occasional disappearance of the fragmentary scrolls, photographs, especially early photographs, assume major importance. Here again the situation is deplorable, although details are often unavailable because of the obsessive secrecy that has been the hallmark of the official editing team.
The fullest set of photographs was taken over a period of several years in the early 1960s—before the 1967 Six-Day War, when the museum fell into Israeli hands. These are the so-called PAM photographs—each has a PAM (Palestine Archaeological Museum) number.
From time to time new photos were taken of selected manuscripts—such as the Leviticus fragments for Professor David Noel Freedman, who had been assigned the task of editing and publishing this document, or the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns) for Professor Hartmut Stegemann, who was working on the arrangement of the fragments of this scroll. But the archive as a whole has never been rephotographed.
Thus, with the exception of rephotographed fragments, the negatives that have been placed in institutions around the world—the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC), in Claremont, California; Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati; and, most recently, the Oxford Centre for Post-Graduate Hebrew Studies in Yarnton, England—have all been made mostly from the original photographs taken in the 1960s.
Because the PAM photographs were taken 063on several occasions over a period of years, there are duplicates and even different photographs of the same fragment arranged differently or on a different museum plate.
The PAM number given to each of the photographs is in the regular sequence of the museum’s picture archive. That is why the photographs bear such high numbers—from the 39,000s to the 44,000s. The higher the number, the later the picture.
The photographer who took the PAM pictures is one of the unsung heroes of the Dead Sea Scroll saga. His name is Najib Albina and he was a superb photographer. After the Six-Day War he moved to the United States and has since died. In most cases his negatives remain the source for the finest record of the fragmentary scrolls—better in many cases than the original fragments themselves. This is because his pictures—often taken with infrared film—were taken before major deterioration set in.
Unfortunately, Albina’s negatives—from which the archive copies were made for the four institutions that house the duplicate sets—were themselves kept under deplorable conditions. As a result, Albina’s original negatives, too, have badly deteriorated. For years they were kept in a room that got very hot in summer. Some of the negatives stuck together so badly they simply had to be thrown out. Others were so crinkled, crumpled, rumpled and wrinkled that copies could no longer be made by laying a film on top of the original negative.
In these circumstances, earlier copies of Albina’s negative archive may be better than later copies. (On the other hand, if the fragment itself has not deteriorated significantly, a better result may be obtained by a new photograph taken with newly developed photographic techniques.)
The earliest set of copies, although an incomplete one, is at Hebrew Union College. This set may include copies that are 070superior to any other copy. By the time the copies were made by Robert Schlosser of the Huntington Library (the source of both the Huntington copies and the ABMC copies) in 1980, some of the original negatives had been thrown out and others were in such bad condition that they could not be copied by placing film over the negative. Oxford’s copies were made only a year or so ago, so presumably the negative originals had deteriorated even more, although Oxford also has some later photographs not in the other archives.
It is clear that a major effort to organize, conserve and photograph the fragmentary scrolls and the scroll photographs is desperately needed. Each day that passes means that there is less left to preserve.
The Israeli authorities who now claim to be in charge of the scrolls have neither the expertise nor the finances to do this. There is no question that it will be a very expensive project. The finest conservation experts in the world should be called in; and no expense should be spared.
If the Israeli authorities would provide open access for all to the photographic archives of the scrolls and release all other information about the history of the scrolls and their photographs, the money would likely be there. It requires only a change in attitude. The world is ready to help, if only we would be permitted to do so.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have been liberated. The time has now come to preserve the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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