An Inside—and Outside—Look at the Scrolls

071

Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.

(New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 201 pp., $8.95 (paperback)

Anything that comes from the pen of the great Catholic scholar Father Joseph Fitzmyer is worthwhile. That is certainly true of this slender paperback, despite its quirks.

I’m sure Father Fitzmyer, as well as the Paulist Press, will be embarrassed by the fact that the scroll that takes up about a third of the cover is printed upside down, as anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew will quickly recognize. But it would be entirely wrong to think that this carelessness extends to the contents of the book. Father Fitzmyer is nothing if not a meticulous scholar.

Unfortunately the question-and-answer format does not work well for this book. A series of questions begins “What sort of texts were discovered in Cave X?” going from 1 to 11. Another series begins “What is the [X Scroll]?” This sometimes makes for cold reading. It doesn’t encourage the author to use introductions, transitions or summaries; it doesn’t leave much room for asides. But Fitzmyer nevertheless manages to break out of this mold now and again.

Also jarring is the continuous use of the abbreviation QS; 1QS is the siglum for the scroll known as Serek haYahad (Community Rule) from Qumran Cave 1; at first, I thought that was what was meant by QS, but it soon became clear that was not the case. I next thought QS was a terrible and repeated typo for DSS, the Dead Sea Scrolls, a common abbreviation that Fitzmyer also uses throughout the text. By about page 501 realized QS could not be a typo but rather, as I learned when I finally found it in the list of abbreviations, stands for Qumran Scrolls (as opposed to scrolls found in other wadis that are sometimes included under the rubric Dead Sea Scrolls). It is surely unnecessary to emphasize this in a book for laypeople by dozens of repetitions, especially since the common abbreviation DSS is also used, often in the same paragraph, to signify the same scrolls.

Nevertheless this book is a fine introduction to the scrolls written for the layperson—from their discovery, to their contents, to the recent controversies surrounding them.

For the DSS aficionado, however, this book is especially compelling because Father Fitzmyer is both an insider and an outsider 072who, even on the outside, continues to keep a careful ear to the ground. He even reports a rumor I had not heard as to the source of the photographs of the unpublished scrolls published by the Biblical Archaeology Society in late 1991. They do not come from any of the four depositaries of scroll photographs, Fitzmyer assures us. “Rumor has it that they were part of the estate of the photographer of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, Najib Albina, who brought them to this country.” Not a bad suggestion. Albina was a superb photographer. He is the only person who took pictures of the entire corpus; it has only been photographed once as a whole. Albina did come to live in the United States and has since died. I hasten to add, however, that I myself do not know the source of these photographs that one day figuratively landed on our doorstep.

In the late 1950s Fitzmyer was added to the international team piecing together the fragmentary texts from Cave 4, the mother lode that became the subject of such controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was Fitzmyer who organized the work on the concordance that was used 30 years later to reconstruct transcripts of the unpublished texts by means of a computer. He was present at the creation, so to speak.

He knows and has heard things to which few others are privy. This is his description of how the Cave 4 fragments were taken to Amman during the 1956 war:

“Because of the fear that the Cave 4 fragments might be damaged, the plates of glass with the fragments between them had been boxed up and transported to the Ottoman Bank in Amman, Jordan, where they lay in the damp basement for several months. They were returned to the Jerusalem scrollery in the spring of 1957, and the scholars who had then returned [to Jerusalem] spent several weeks cleaning the mildew from the fragments in an attempt to preserve them. Some of the fragments had been put merely in brown manila envelopes, and they came back in the form of globs of glue, inseparable from the paper, and illegible. Thus a number of the fragments, especially biblical texts, were lost.”

Fitzmyer is scrupulously unbiased, even in political matters. Thus, for example, he refers to the Qumran area and east Jerusalem during the period between 1945 and 1967 as “Jordanian controlled,” since as he observes, Jordanian sovereignty was recognized only by Britain and Pakistan.

When a matter relating to the scrolls is in dispute, as is so often the case, he gives the contentions on both sides and often leaves it at that. On the other hand, he does not shrink from judgment and gives it to us straight out when he has one:

“[The] delay in publishing the Cave 4 materials … can only be called scandalous … Between 1960 and 1975, those 584 texts of Cave 4 should have been published … Those to whom [the Cave 4 texts] were entrusted for publication have not come through, and as a result of recent developments they are being taken away from such persons and entrusted to others.”

“Another factor in the delay of publication has been the doling out of these important fragmentary texts to graduate students for their doctoral dissertations at Harvard University by team members who are now professors there. Instead of publishing the fragments that were entrusted to them as established scholars, they have been spending their precious time directing such dissertations of students to whom the texts had not been entrusted. The scandalous delay is thus compounded by an inequity. One has to be a graduate student of these professors at Harvard University in order to be privileged to publish such texts.”

“The hidden concern to safeguard one’s turf,” Fitzmyer says, “created a monopoly.”

Fitzmyer calls Professor Robert Eisenman’s reading of the so-called pierced messiah text “tendentious”: “[It] shows how the reading and interpretation of a Qumran text can be manipulated by somebody who has pre-judged the matter in support of a pet thesis.”

Of Professor Ben Zion Wacholder’s proposal that the Temple Scroll was written in about 200 B.C. and later became the book referred to in the Damascus Document as “the sealed book of the Law” and, as such, the basis on which all other sectarian texts from Qumran depend, Fitzmyer says: “This is an intriguing suggestion, but one encumbered with too many problems to be convincing. I know of no one who agrees with Wacholder’s thesis.”

Of J. T. Milik’s suggestion that part of the Book of Enoch found at Qumran is a Christian substitution in the text of Enoch previously known to us, Fitzmyer says, “This thesis, propounded with great erudition and elaborate discussion, has been espoused by no other scholar I know of today. Yet it took Milik over fifteen years to produce that study. What he should have been content to do was publish the 4QEnoch texts with the photographs, his diplomatic transcription, English translation, and brief notes on readings.”

As to whether the Vatican tried to suppress the scrolls: “The whole idea of a Vatican conspiracy to suppress the scrolls … is ludicrous nonsense. The only involvement the Vatican ever had with the DSS … was not an effort to suppress [them], but to acquire them from the Bedouins at a time when foreign funds were needed.”

On the question of whether something in the scrolls will undermine Christian faith: “That the Teacher of Righteousness of the Qumran community may have taught something similar to what Jesus taught is not really troubling to any mature Christian.”

Speaking of certain writers who have suggested that the Qumran texts threaten Christian faith, Fitzmyer states: “In all of this tendentious writing, one detects the thought that, if things turn up in the [DSS] that are similar to Christian teaching or to Jesus of Nazareth, then it calls in question something that is either valued by Christians or regarded by them as unique. What is mystifying in such thinking is that such mavericks believe that Christians are unwilling to admit that Christianity emerged from a Jewish matrix.”

Fitzmyer concludes by quoting Time magazine: “The only Christians whose faith the scrolls can jolt are those who have failed to see the paradox that the churches have always taught: that Jesus Christ was a man as well as God—a man of a particular time and place, speaking a specific language, revealing his way in terms of a specific cultural and religious tradition. For Christians who want to know more of that matrix in which their faith was born the People of the Scrolls are reaching a hand across the centuries.”

To assure that I do not conceal what may be regarded as a bias of my own in evaluating this book, I must disclose that Fitzmyer does comment approvingly of my role in securing the release of the scrolls: “In the U.S.A. much of the [recent] interest [in the scrolls] has been owing to the pressure put on scholars and institutions by one person, Hershel Shanks, the editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review and the Bible Review and head of the Biblical Archaeology Society of Washington, DC. In article after article since at least 1985 Shanks has prodded the dawdling scholars who are responsible for publication to release the materials.” On the other hand, “At times, however, Shanks’s rhetoric has verged on the excessive.”

Fitzmyer also charges me with a “gratuitous allegation” in my statement that “the only rule imposed on Pere de Vaux in appointing the Cave 4 team]—hardly necessary to articulate was that the team include no Jews.” Fitzmyer then goes on to explain, “No Jew would have been permitted to enter East Jerusalem at that time!” This hardly contradicts my allegation that the rule was imposed on de Vaux. Moreover, I did not allege, as have some others, that Pere de Vaux was anti-Semitic. Finally, the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment in Jordan at this time is reflected in a cute story that Fitzmyer tells. On one occasion in 1958 when Fitzmyer sought permission from Arab policemen in Jericho to go to Qumran, they checked his identity papers. Not realizing that Fitzmyer understood Arabic, one policeman remarked to the other that Fitzmyer had a “half-Jewish name,” but finally let him go.

Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.

(New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 201 pp., $8.95 (paperback)