A former Polish priest now living in Paris, Milik is an original member of the small Dead Sea Scroll publication team designated in the early 1950s. Called by Time magazine “the fastest man with a fragment,” Milik obtained from his colleagues by far the largest lot of texts to edit and publish. It was he who refused to write letters or answer mail, even from the Israel Department of Antiquities. It was he who only with the greatest reluctance and under pressure released some of his more than 50 unpublished manuscripts. Now he has none left, forced to relinquish them all, he says, by Emanuel Tov, the new editor-in-chief of the publication team.
Until recently Milik has been the villain of the piece. Now, however, it is time to recognize his enormous contribution to Dead Sea Scroll studies.
Seventy-two and white-haired, he is spare, neatly dressed and stands nearly straight as he opens the door of his Paris apartment only steps from the Tour de Montparnasse. He invites me into his study/bedroom, where we talk. He can barely bring himself to look at me; he casts his gaze down and to the right, toward the tall window behind his desk. I am, after all, one of his attackers. At first he answers my questions with only a word. He is working on nothing from Qumran. “Tov took everything from me,” he says bitterly. He has no Dead Sea Scrolls to publish.
Gradually, he opens up. For seven years, he explains, the original team worked feverishly to assemble the thousands of scroll fragments into discrete documents and to piece them together. Now other scholars are publishing the scrolls, often without giving appropriate credit. Tov recently published the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever that was in large part the work of Father Dominique Barthelemy, who is now at the University of Fribourg. Tov neither put Barthelemy’s name on the title page, says Milik, nor adequately recognized him inside.1
But that is not all. Milik published more than all the others combined, yet criticism is directed at him. He points to those by name who have not published. Harvard’s Frank Cross: just a few fragments. What of Cross’s Wadi Daliyeh papyri, he wants to know, which Cross has had for 30 years? Will they ever be published? And Jonas Greenfield of Hebrew University: He has had the Aramaic documents from Nahal Muraba‘at for at least as long. Will they ever be published? He doubts it.
And Joseph Fitzmyer, who came to see him and asked to have the Tobit manuscripts reassigned to him.a Milik turned him down, but Tov later gave them to him. Fitzmyer, however, will never publish them. It takes 40 years adequately to publish a scroll like this, because it will not do simply to publish the text and a few notes; the text must be understood before it can be reconstructed. No one over 40 should receive a scroll assignment. Old men do not have enough time left to do it right.
Milik has 40 years of notes from his study of the Tobit fragments. It seems unlikely that Fitzmyer will ever see them.
Milik has kind words to say about some scholars—James VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame, who has been reassigned the publication of the Jubilees fragments, and Rabbi Joseph Baumgarten, who has been reassigned the fragmentary texts of the Damascus Document. They have been given Milik’s notes.
I mentioned to him a festschrift in his honor prepared by the Polish Dead Sea Scroll bibliographer Zdzislaw Kapera. Milik declined to go to Poland to receive it. Clearly, this was not the kind of festschrift he envisioned for himself. But for an “international” festschrift, prepared by senior Dead Sea Scroll scholars, he would go to Jerusalem, he said.
He does travel—mostly to see his brother in London. He has not been back to Poland since he left in 1946, however, even though he has nieces and nephews there. Nor has he returned to Jerusalem. Yes, he would go, but only under the right circumstances.
Seemingly frail, he says he is healthy and has years of work left in him. He lives in a fourth floor walk-up (called the third floor in Europe) so of necessity he gets some exercise. He is working now on the more than a thousand Nabatean inscriptions carved into the stone mountains in and around Petra, the Nabatean capital a hundred miles south of modern Amman. After that, he may return to some kind of interpretive work on the scrolls.
I asked him what he thought should have been done, how the scrolls should have been handled. He had no suggestions, although he recognized that the work was too much for the original publication team. But they should have been reassigned more slowly. This way much of his voluminous notes will never be used.
The way he has been treated has been “terribly unjust.” The criticism has focused on him, despite the fact that he has published more than anyone.
Jozef Milik’s competence is unquestioned. His ability to assemble, decipher and reconstruct Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts is unparalleled. And, as he says, he has produced more than all the others. It is time to recognize this. Leading scroll scholars should prepare an appropriate festschrift in his honor.b That his original assignment was too massive for any one human being to publish, that he consented only with the greatest reluctance to the reassignment of his texts, that he is essentially a taciturn man who, as he admits, does not answer letters (but does answer phone calls, he says) is all irrelevant at this point. The fact remains that he has made an enormous contribution to Dead Sea Scrolls studies, perhaps as much as anyone. Now is the time for this to be said. Now is the time to honor Jozef Milik.
It is time to honor Jozef Milik.
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Since writing these words, I have learned that others have agreed with this thought. It would be inappropriate to say more at this point because festschrifts are supposed to be surprises.
Endnotes
1.
But see Tov’s Foreword to the volume: “Scholars will always associate the name of R. P. Dominique Barthelemy, O.P. … with [this scroll] because of his masterly treatment of its contents in Devanciers, a book which in many ways has revolutionized scholarship. That monograph also presented the preliminary transcription of the scroll (R), though not in the form of an edition in the usual sense of the word. Barthelemy had, however, done a substantial amount of work towards such an edition, mainly, a first attempt to reconstruct the incomplete lines. This work was discontinued because of other obligations, and when Barthelemy asked me in 1982 to prepare the present edition, he kindly placed these notes at my disposal.”
