070
Walk into the Madison Building of the Library of Congress (LC), turn left just inside the entrance, and you can gaze at what less than two years ago only a small handful of scholars were allowed to see: a dozen Dead Sea Scroll fragments from the collection of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.
The 12 fragments form the core of an exhibit at the Library entitled “Scrolls from the Dead Sea: The Ancient library of Qumran and Modern Scholarship.” Also on view are 88 related artifacts—an inkwell, a jug, a vase, goblets, pots, a lamp with an original wick and linen wrappers for the scrolls—excavated at 071Qumran. About 50 items from the LC’s collections, including rare books, maps, prints and photographs, augment the ancient objects.
The exhibit’s organizers have taken great care to ensure that the show is far more than a presentation of objects. The captions and audio tape trace the history of the scrolls’ discovery, the slow pace of publication, the controversy over scholarly access to the scrolls and the ongoing debate regarding which sect—if indeed it was a sect—produced and collected the scrolls.
The show is handsomely mounted and features up-to-date technology intended to help preserve the scroll fragments. The exhibit area is illuminated by low light aimed away from the cases that house the scrolls. The cases are illuminated only when a viewer trips an infrared motion detector; if there is no motion for 15 seconds, the illumination turns automatically off.
The fragments seem too fragile and modest to have been the cause of a major academic and legal debate: torn scraps of texts, most only a few inches high, some nearly in tatters, frayed at the edges and bearing surprisingly small writing. Many seem as if they are about to crumble before the viewer’s eyes. To ensure that that does not happen, the LC preservation staff, in consultation with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), developed special housing units in which each fragment travels and is displayed. The units feature ten layers of protective materials, including ultraviolet filtering acrylic sheeting on top, polyester netting above and below each fragment (the transparent netting is sewn together just outside the fragment’s perimeter to form a safe pocket) and acid-free blotters to modulate the relative humidity inside the housing unit.
The fragments on display include a Psalm scroll, containing both canonical and non-canonical psalms; portions of the Community Rule (also known as the Manual of Discipline), listing the rules by which the people of Qumran are believed to have lived; the War Rule, perhaps better known today as the “Pierced Messiah” fragment describing depending on the scholarly reading you go by—either a messiah who would be killed by the enemies of the community or one who would kill the community’s enemies; a fragment containing parts of Leviticus 22–27; a commentary on Hosea; and the extremely important fragment known as MMT.
MMT was the cause of a lawsuit brought by Israeli scholar Elisha Qimron against the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS). Qimron claimed that a page in BAS’ Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls that contained a reprint of Qimron’s reconstruction of MMT was in violation of his copyright. The Israeli court agreed. At the Library of Congress exhibit, the MMT fragment is flanked by a copy of the book open to the page that precipitated Qimron’s lawsuit. (The Library consulted its attorney, who said it was permissible to display the very page the court said violated Qimron’s copyright.)
Conservation of the scrolls is of course a major concern to both the Library of Congress while it hosts the exhibition and to the Israel Antiquities Authority, the governmental body responsible for their care and publication. LC staff and IAA officials worked together closely for ten months preceding the exhibit over preservation issues. In connection with the exhibit’s opening, the Library hosted a talk by Esther Boyd-Alkalay, head of the conservation section of the Israel Museum and a consulting conservator to the IAA.
Boyd-Alkalay reviewed the history of the scrolls’ treatment—mistreatment would be more accurate—after their discovery in 1947 and outlined in detail the repairs and conservation techniques undertaken in the laboratory of the Rockefeller Museum. We hope to present a full article on this work in an upcoming issue of BAR.
The Library of Congress expects 250,000 people to visit the exhibit before it closes on August 1. For information on tickets, call (202) 245–5284. The exhibit next travels to the New York Public Library (October 2, 1993 to January 8, 1994) and the M. H. DeYoung Memorial Museum in San Francisco (February 23 to May 8, 1994).
Walk into the Madison Building of the Library of Congress (LC), turn left just inside the entrance, and you can gaze at what less than two years ago only a small handful of scholars were allowed to see: a dozen Dead Sea Scroll fragments from the collection of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.
