“Will Marty Abegg Ever Find a Job?”

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The monopoly over access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was broken in 1991. One of the key events in that breakup was the publication of Dead Sea Scroll texts that had been reconstructed by computer from a concordance. We will here detail this important, but little known, incident—but first, a little history. By 1960, the eight-man Dead Sea Scroll publication team had some remarkable achievements under its collective belt. The team had already transcribed all of the thousands and thousands of scroll fragments in their possession—estimated at between 15,000 and 25,000. Transcription is the first step in the publication and study process. With a transcription, a scholar can easily read the letters that a fragment contains (if the letters are uncertain, this is noted), instead of having to break his or her eyeballs looking through a magnifying glass at an ancient parchment that is about to crumble.

Once transcriptions are completed, the next step is to concord them—to list every word in the fragments with a notation as to where it appears and what the adjacent words are. This is the beginning 037of the process of understanding what the texts really say—comparing each word to its other occurrences and its sense in one fragment to its sense in others. Of course, many other steps are involved in evaluating the text of a fragment and, hopefully, connecting it with other fragments.

The concordance of these fragments also was completed by 1960. Each word in the fragments had its own three-by-five card, noting where it appeared and what the adjacent words were. But the concordance was available only to the eight scholars on the publication team, not to outsiders.

In 1988 copies of this concordance were privately printed from the three-by-five cards for the use of the then-dispersed publication team, and a copy eventually found its way to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

With the aid of this concordance, a graduate student named Marty Abegg was able to reconstruct the transcripts. And he eventually allowed his reconstructions to be published by the Biblical Archaeology Society.

In October 2001, a symposium on the “Politics and Publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls” was held in Carmel, California. Invited to participate was Abegg, now associate professor of religious studies at Trinity Western University. He described publicly for the first time his fears at allowing these transcripts he had reconstructed to be published—after all, they were the work of other scholars and he was just a graduate student—and how he finally had decided to go ahead and allow them to be published. It was such a fascinating presentation that we present it here, with an introduction by Michael Phelps, Director of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, California. BAR editor Hershel Shanks also offers a few details, here revealed for the first time, relating to his own involvement in the publication of the scroll fragments.

Michael Phelps:

In the late 1980s the Scrolls were back in the media. They hadn’t been in the media for a long time—since 1947 and 1948. In the late 1980s they returned to the media because of the lack of publication. Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, should largely be credited for that. He made the public aware of the lack of access and it became a controversy again.

Marty Abegg, I’d like you to tell your story of involvement in the 1991 publication, when Cave 4 materials became accessible to everyone, and your participation in that.

Martin Abegg:

Thanks, Mike.

I was introduced to the Dead Sea Scrolls by accident. In 1984 I moved my family to Israel to study at the Hebrew University. In the fall of 1986 I signed up for a class on the “Septuagint of Jeremiah.” Emanuel Tov [now the chief editor of the Dead Sea Scroll publication team] was the instructor, an expert on the problem. The book of Jeremiah is very different in the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation from the standard Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. It’s an interesting problem and I was anxious to get into this problem at the grass-roots level.

In the weeks before the class began, I began hearing rumors that the nature of the class had changed drastically. When I came to the first day of the class and sat down, indeed I found out that Professor Tov had changed the class from dealing with the Septuagint of Jeremiah to dealing with Biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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Emanuel had just been given the responsibility of doing some work on Joshua and Jeremiah. He was anxious to get a bunch of students active in his work. That is how I entered the process.

I almost dropped the class. I wasn’t much interested, frankly, in looking at all this fragmentary scroll material, but Emanuel was so excited about the material and it was a year-long seminar, so I stuck it out. That was quite a special class with a very special man.

When I was getting ready to leave Israel in 1987, after taking this class and having done some work with Emanuel, I was sitting in his office one day. He warned me not to make available any of the material that I had worked on during the class to my professors at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where I was going back to.

That was ringing in my ears as I came back to the States. A friend from Israel had told me at that time, “Don’t get involved with the scrolls. It’s so difficult to get access and there are so few people who are actually able to work on them first-hand that it really is a dead-end. You should try to do something else.”

So I did try to do something else, but it didn’t work. Back at Hebrew Union College, I fell into the hands of [Professor] Ben Zion Wacholder. He had a great interest in the scrolls and that’s where my work began.

When I began my doctoral studies there in 1987, I learned that Hebrew Union College had a collection of photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Rare Book Room. Several of us were doing our dissertations on various aspects of scroll research, so we approached the administration to get them to release this material—not for publication, but for those students who were working on dissertations to study them. They refused us. The photographs were there just as a security measure—in case the originals were destroyed in some kind of catastrophe. The photographs had been taken back in the 1950s, and Hebrew Union College had a duplicate set in case there was a problem in Jerusalem. The college had signed a contract with the Antiquities Department in Israel not to allow access to them. A set of photographs was also placed in Oxford at that time, for the same reason. As it turned out later, the set at Hebrew Union College was a partial set. Some people said that I had gotten access to this material, kind of handed to me on the side, but that is not true.

Soon after we were turned down by the college, we began hearing rumors about a concordance of the scrolls that had been created back in the 1950s and had been privately published in a very limited edition sometime in the 1980s. Of course the authorities at that time said, no, there was no truth to the rumor. But as a matter of fact it was true.

The next piece of the puzzle occurred at a conference in Haifa, Israel, where my dissertation advisor, Ben Zion Wacholder, was riding in the same taxi with [Harvard professor] John Strugnell on their way to give papers that afternoon at the conference. Strugnell was then chief editor of the small Scroll team. And Ben Zion asked John Strugnell if indeed this concordance did exist. John admitted to Ben Zion that it did.

And of course Ben Zion, never bashful about asking for anything (he says if you want something, ask for it; all they can say is “no”), asked: “Can we get a copy of this—at the Hebrew Union College?” And John thought for a bit and then said, “Send me a letter and we’ll take it up. I think that we can do something for you.”

I was the TA [teaching assistant] for Ben Zion at that time, and I typed the letter to Professor Strugnell. Just the other day, I found the letter Strugnell sent back, giving the Hebrew Union College a copy of the concordance.

Professor Strugnell probably assumed, although he never stipulated this in his letter, that the concordance would go under lock and key, possibly in Ben Zion’s study, but nothing was ever said about that. The copy of the concordance went to the library. The library had a policy that materials in its holdings were made available to the public, not just to the students, not just to the professors, but to anyone. You couldn’t check it out of the library but you could go in and use it there. You understand that this concordance was of non-published materials—all of the materials that were inaccessible for so long. The concordance consisted simply of three-by-five cards that had been Xeroxed. The cards were laid out on the copy bed and copied 21 at a time and it was printed up in five volumes.

I was working on a dissertation on the War Scroll [one of the published intact Dead Sea Scrolls] at the time. The War Scroll is somewhat like the Scroll community’s version of Revelation. A number of other fragmentary copies of the War Scroll had not been published and I needed to see them.

I was waiting with baited breath to see whether this concordance was just a list of words of the unpublished scrolls or whether it was “keyword in context.” If you’re familiar with concordances, for example, “Strong’s Concordance of the King James Bible,” this is a “keyword in context” concordance. It gives the word, where it appears in the Bible and some adjoining text. I was hoping for something like that with the scroll concordance. And it turned out to be exactly that. And it was done very well. I was able to reconstruct the texts that I needed to see for my dissertation.

Because of my rather addictive personality and 039because this worked so well, and it was so much fun seeing this new material—you just can’t imagine what it’s like seeing this material that so very few had ever seen, all of this wonderful, wonderful material—I just began reconstructing manuscript after manuscript. There were a number of things that I was interested in at the time, so I simply reconstructed what I wanted.

Eventually I took the texts I reconstructed to Ben Zion. He was just dumbfounded. As a scholar of Jewish law, he had been waiting practically his whole academic life to see this material. He had not been allowed to see very much of it. And here was a graduate student bringing it to him, which is rather odd. (I wish my graduate students would bring me things like that.)

I can remember his first comment as if it were yesterday. He said, “We must publish this material.” And sitting across from him, my first thought is: “I will never work. I won’t be able to get a job. No one will ever hire someone who plagiarizes these texts and makes them available.” I actually called a friend of mine, Bruce Zuckerman, who was working with the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center at the time. I told Bruce what I had done. He was dumbfounded. I said, “You can’t tell anyone. But what do you think? Ben Zion wants to publish it. Should I publish it?” He said: “Don’t do it! Don’t do it: You’ll never work!”

A good friend of mine, Ed Cook, whom I’ve collaborated with on a couple of projects since, said: “Don’t do it! You’ll never work!”

I asked my pastor. He said, “Do it !”

I asked my father. He said: “It looks to me like the ethical shoe is on the other foot. I think you should do it.”

The straw that broke the camel’s back was Ben Zion himself. Here was a man who was one of a very special generation who had been uprooted from Eastern Europe during World War II, who had spent their whole lives studying Jewish literature and law and knew it by heart, and yet had been kept away from this material all these years. For Ben Zion and others like him, I finally made the decision. Yes, I would agree. And we ended up publishing the texts.

The next question was, who should we publish it with? E.J. Brill, an academic publisher, came to mind, but Hershel Shanks’s name came up quite early in the conversation, and we decided to give Hershel a call. And he nearly fell on the floor when he found out what we had. So in the fall of 1991 the Biblical Archaeology Society began to publish the texts reconstructed from the concordance.

Several things happened that fall: In addition to our transcriptions, the Biblical Archeology Society 070published photographs of the unpublished scrolls. And the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which also had a security copy of the scrolls on microfiche—in case something happened to the originals in Jerusalem—decided to make the microfiche available to any scholar who wanted to use it. So the deed was done: The cat was out of the bag.

Hershel Shanks adds:

I vividly remember the telephone call I received from Ben Zion Wacholder, telling me that he and Marty had begun to reconstruct the scrolls from the concordance and that they wanted to publish them. They were in the middle of the process; the work wouldn’t be completed for some time.

At that time, I had already received a call from Robert Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach, telling me that he had a surreptitious set of photographs of the unpublished scrolls.

This was at the height of the press interest that we had generated and I had no idea whether either Eisenman or Wacholder would come through with what they proposed. I never mentioned either one to the other.

Wacholder’s proposal to publish the transcripts had another problem. We did not have the money to publish them. So I suggested to Professor Wacholder that we publish them in fascicles; with the proceeds from the first fascicle we would get the money to publish the second fascicle. This also solved the problem that the reconstruction process had not yet been completed.

And that is what we did. We published four fascicles of transcripts, totaling 1,236 pages. But the first fascicle was only 118 pages. The effect was like a thunderbolt. As Marty said, the cat was out of the bag. With the proceeds from the sale of this fascicle, we were able to finance the sale of the next fascicle and so on.

When we published the second fascicle, I received a call from Father Joseph Fitzmyer of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., one of the world’s most distinguished and respected Dead Sea Scroll scholars. He wanted a copy of Fascicle Two and was willing to write a review of it for BAR. Suddenly, we had become very respectable.

Incidentally, Robert Eisenman also came through with the photographs of the fragments. We still don’t know where he got them and he won’t tell us. But we published those, too.^a At about the same time the Huntington Library decided to make its microfiche copy of the unpublished fragments available to scholars. The fight was over. We won. (Except for a lawsuit brought by scroll scholar Elisha Qimron in an Israeli court, which we lost and which ended up costing us over $100,000—but that’s another story.^b)

Back to Martin Abegg:

In November 1991 the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) held its annual meeting in Kansas, and the official editors of the scrolls there announced that they would allow the unpublished material to be available to anyone.

Emanuel Tov had just been named chief editor. Emanuel has done just an amazing job. He is the man for our time, I believe. In 1991 only seven volumes had been published. Today the series is completed with Volume 39.

You might wonder what my relationship with Emanuel Tov is these days. After all, he is not only the editor in chief of the scroll publication team, but he is the man who introduced me to the scrolls back in 1986. The first time I talked to him after the publication by Ben Zion and me was at the book exhibit at the SBL meeting in Kansas City. He walked up to me and simply quoted part of Isaiah 1:2 in Hebrew: Banim gidalti v’romumti, which is roughly, “I have raised up children.” And he left it at that. He was doing a very Rabbinic thing. He wanted to lead me on to his point, but without being specific. It took me by surprise. I recognized that it was from Isaiah, but that’s all. Only in my hotel that night did I realize his point. It is in the completion of the verse, “v’hem pashu vi, “And they have rebelled against me.” I was crestfallen.

That’s where Emanuel and I were in the fall of 1991. That’s all changed, however. I just handed into Emanuel an index of names in the Scrolls that I worked on the last two years. Emanuel is now my editor in chief and we are very good friends.

And here’s something that brought the whole thing full circle: Last spring Emanuel asked me if I would be willing to concord the entire corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So I began with the concordance and I end with the concordance. It’s rather fitting, I think.

The monopoly over access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was broken in 1991. One of the key events in that breakup was the publication of Dead Sea Scroll texts that had been reconstructed by computer from a concordance. We will here detail this important, but little known, incident—but first, a little history. By 1960, the eight-man Dead Sea Scroll publication team had some remarkable achievements under its collective belt. The team had already transcribed all of the thousands and thousands of scroll fragments in their possession—estimated at between 15,000 and 25,000. Transcription is the first step in the publication […]