The Latest on MMT: Strugnell vs. Qimron

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In a conference held at the University of Notre Dame on April 25 through 27, the complete set of Dead Sea Scrolls photographs was released in microfiche form.

Dr. F. H. Pruijt, president of E. J. Brill Publishers of Leiden, Holland, presented the first copy of The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche on the evening of April 26 to Emanuel Tov, editor-in-chief of the official team of scroll editors. Flashbulbs popped and minicams from Dutch and German television whirred as Tov accepted the book of microfiches with its two companion index volumes.

The edition had been planned since November 1991, when, under the pressure of competing unofficial editions, the Israel Antiquities Authority agreed to make a complete collection of photos available.

Despite the official air of the proceedings, the Brill edition, it was later learned, is not in fact ready for general circulation. Only 92 of the planned 130 or so microfiches containing 6,400 photographs were actually in the book handed to Tov. It is still not clear when the Dutch publisher will have the entire set ready.

The ceremony was the high point of a conference called “The Dead Sea Scrolls: State of the Question.” All of the speakers at the conference were members of the international team officially responsible for publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Making a rare public appearance was John Strugnell of the Harvard Divinity School. Strugnell had been editor-in-chief of the official team, but was asked to resign in December 1990 in the wake of a controversial interview with the Israeli 069newspaper Ha-Aretz He continues to write and work on his allotment of scrolls, and he also disclosed that he is writing a memoir of his experiences.

Despite a frail physical appearance, the 62 year-old Strugnell spoke clearly and authoritatively on “4QMMT and Its Contributions to Qurman Studies: The State of the Question.” He surprised many in the audience by retracting some of his previously expressed opinions on 4QMMT and revealed some sharp differences in interpretation that he now has with his co-editor of that scroll, Elisha Qimron. 4QMMT was little known until the mid 1980s, when Strugnell and Qimron described it as a letter written from the Teacher of Righteousness apparently the founder of the Dead Sea sect—to the Wicked Priest, the Teacher’s persecutor and the sect’s enemy. This revelation had an explosive effect on “outsider” scroll scholars, who began to call for greater access to the unpublished scrolls. ( The text of MMT has still not been released.)

“I hereby withdraw suggestions of a letter,” Strugnell announced. He went on to say that he now sees no trace in it of the teacher of Righteousness, nor does he think the addressee of the text is the Wicked Priest. Instead, 4QMMT is a legal treatise with no immediately apparent system or principle of unity. It seems to be a collection of laws that may be analogous to the Biblical book of Deuteronomy.

Strugnell refused to try to date the composition of the text, except to note wryly that it could be anytime “after King Zedekiah and before the end of time!” Strugnell nevertheless assigns 4QMMT to a time before the definitive formation of the sect.

Qimron, according to Strugnell, still holds to the idea that the text is a letter from the Teacher of Righteousness to the Wicked Priest. Strugnell admitted that it was strange for a scholar to review—in advance—the work of a co-author, but said that “this is by no means the strangest episode in the history of the publication of MMT”—an oblique reference to the recently concluded lawsuit of Qimron against the Biblical Archaeology Society and Hershel Shanks, editor of BAR, for printing a preliminary reconstruction of the text.

Other conference speakers included Shemaryahu Talmon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore Hebrew University, Lawrence Schiffman of New York University, Eileen Schuller of McMaster University, Daniel Harrington of the Weston School of Theology, John J. Collins of the University of Chicago, Emile Puech of the École Biblique in Jerusalem (making his first visit to the United States), Deborah Dimant of the University of Haifa, and Tov.

Several of the papers focused on the editors’ struggle to accommodate the newer scroll material into the prevailing theories about the formation and identity of the sect. Many still hold to the popular “Essene hypothesis,” identifying the scroll sect with the Essenes, a sect described by the ancient writers Josephus, Philo and Pliny. Others favor a reevaluation in the light of 4QMMT and the Temple Scroll, the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These texts, according to Schiffman and others, support the idea of some kind of connection of the sect to the Sadducees.

Talmon resisted any further efforts of this kind. He believes that there is no convincing evidence for any identification of the scroll writers with any previously known group. “We are playing the wrong game,” he grumbled in a discussion period following Baumgarten’s lecture, which favored the Essene hypothesis.

In a conference held at the University of Notre Dame on April 25 through 27, the complete set of Dead Sea Scrolls photographs was released in microfiche form.