BARview: Failure to Publish Dead Sea Scrolls Is Leitmotif of New York University Scroll Conference

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For three days in May, a select group of invited scholars, all experts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, met at New York University to share ideas and discuss common problems.^a

On a light note, New York University’s Lawrence Schiffman opened the sessions attended by nearly 50 academicians from around the world by announcing the rules for the scholarly discussions:

• Let no one answer his companion with obstinacy or address him impatiently, taking no account of the dignity of his fellow.

• Let no one deliberately insult his companion unjustly.

• Let no one speak foolishly.

• Let no one interrupt his companion while speaking.

• Let no one go to sleep during the assembly of the congregation. Let no one leave without reason.

• Let no one expectorate in the assembly.

• Let no one guffaw foolishly or reach out his left hand to gesticulate.

• Anyone who goes about slandering his companion shall be excluded from the pure food.

None of Schiffman’s audience needed to be told that the prohibitions Schiffman paraphrased in the style of Essene laws are contained in the sect’s ancient Manual of Discipline found nearly 40 years ago in Qumran Cave 1.

The ensuing discussions were more serious. They were often impassioned, but the rules were obeyed.

The papers ranged widely: Professor Hartmut Stegemann of the University of Göttingen, West Germany, lectured the group on how to put non-connecting fragments of scrolls in proper relation to one another. Elisha Qimron of Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, called for a new edition of those Dead Sea Scrolls published more than 20 years ago. Johann Maier of the University of Cologne, West Germany, spoke on the relationship of the idealized temple described in the Temple Scroll to actual architectural traditions of the time. John J. Collins of De Paul University, Chicago, discussed the meaning of “apocalyptic” at Qumran.

Harry Orlinsky of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, charmed the group with his personal reminiscences of the acquisition of four of the original Dead Sea Scrolls. They had been brought to the United States by the Metropolitan Samuel, who in 1954 advertised them for sale in a classified ad in the Wall Street Journal. The ad came to the attention of Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who was in the United States on a speaking tour. Through fronts and intermediaries, Yadin negotiated for the purchase of the scrolls on behalf of the State of Israel. When it came time for the actual exchange, Yadin needed someone to authenticate the scrolls, to make sure he was getting the real thing. He needed someone who would not be recognized by the Metropolitan Samuel or his representatives. Yadin called Orlinsky, who had to scuttle plans for a vacation to come to New York at Yadin’s insistence—without knowing why he had been summoned so abruptly. When Orlinsky arrived at the Israeli Consulate in New York, he was given his cloak-and-dagger assignment: Take a cab for several blocks, get out, make sure you’re not followed, cross the street, take another cab to a dusty vault where the scrolls are being kept and identify yourself as Mr. Green. After authenticating the scrolls Orlinsky/Green had to return to the consular offices in the same way, using two cabs.

Ruminating 30 years later, Orlinsky confessed his own suspicions that the Metropolitan Samuel was not fooled—he knew he was selling the scrolls to Israel, said Orlinsky. Jordan had made known its contention that legal title to the scrolls, found in territory controlled by it, remained with Jordan, and that the scrolls had been taken to the United States illegally. Anyone purchasing the scrolls from the Metropolitan Samuel was liable to be sued by the Kingdom of Jordan—anyone, that is, except Israel. To sue Israel would imply recognition, and Jordan would never do this. Orlinsky also pointed to the price for the four scrolls, which was negotiated down to a ridiculously low $250,000. Orlinsky concluded that the Metropolitan Samuel must have known that only the State of Israel would be willing to buy the scrolls.

The leitmotif throughout the three-day New York conference, however, was the fact that after nearly 40 years, a substantial mass of Dead Sea Scroll materials has still not been published and remains inaccessible to scholars generally. According to Professor Stegemann, fragments of approximately 800 scrolls were recovered; 006less than half have been published.

The original Dead Sea Scrolls, seven in number, were discovered in 1947 and surfaced in Jerusalem in 1940. In the ensuing years, scroll materials were found in ten other caves in Wadi Qumran, as well as in caves in a number of other wadis in the Dead Sea area, as a result both of professional archaeological expeditions and of Bedouin searches.

Included in this mass of material were tens of thousands of fragments, principally from a site known as Qumran Cave 4. When recovered in 1952 and subsequent years, these fragments were placed by the Jordanian government in the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem, known since 1967 as the Rockefeller Museum, after its original benefactor.

In the mid-1950s, under the aegis of the Jordanian government, an international committee of scholars was appointed to oversee the publication of these thousands of fragments. Given the auspices under which the committee was appointed, it is not surprising that it included neither Israelis nor non-Israeli Jews.

The scholars who were appointed, however, were men of front-rank, of impeccable, unbiased scholarship and above any suspicion that they shared the anti-Jewish bias of the government under whose auspices they served.^b

The committee operated, and continues to operate, informally, without a secretariat, without written rules or procedures and, indeed since about 1960, without any funding. It is governed, so far as can be ascertained, largely by convention, tradition, collegiality and inertia.^c

The Dead Sea Scroll material under the committee’s jurisdiction was promptly divided among the committee members. These assignments—in the 1950s—may have been the committee’s last substantive act.

Once these assignments were made, the preparation of the texts for publication became the responsibility of the particular scholar involved.^d The individual scholars on the international committee thereby acquired extraordinary proprietary rights in the materials assigned to them for publication. Chief among these proprietary rights is that no one else may see the particular scroll fragments without the permission of the scholar to whom publication rights have been assigned.

Moreover, no time limit whatever is placed on the completion of the assigned task. Today, approximately 30 years after the initial assignments, nearly half of the material from Cave 4 remains unpublished and inaccessible to scholars generally. Much of the other scroll material is also unpublished.

There are other proprietary aspects to these assignments by the international committee:

• A scholar may show his own students the treasured unpublished photographs of the scroll fragments assigned to him, but decline to show them to others.

• A scholar may reassign to his own students (or others) scroll fragments originally given to him for publication; his own students may then publish them, under his direction, as doctoral dissertations.

• A scholar may even will his publication rights on his death; should he die, he may determine who will succeed him.

The inordinate delay in publication of the Dead Sea Scroll materials is usually attributed to two factors: (1) the enormity and complexity of the task; (2) scholarly sloth and procrastination.

Two additional considerations operate to delay publication. The first, ironically, is the high standards these scholars impose on themselves. When a scholar publishes Dead Sea Scroll material, he does not simply publish a photograph. The publication contains the results of the scholar’s study of how the pieces fit together; what the letters actually are (some are faint to the point of disappearance); and what the missing portions of the text might be. He will also comment on the dating, the spelling, the way the letters are written, the characteristics of the language or the dialect, and other qualities of the scroll itself. The publication may contain the editor’s discussion of the particular words in the scroll and their relationship to similar words found in other ancient documents. In addition, the publication will include a translation of the text, as well as a discussion of the content of the scroll and how the content relates to other scrolls, the history of the period and any other relationships that the particular scholar may deem relevant.

Scholars, like other human beings, take pride in their work, and the more dazzling the erudition, the prouder they are. But all this takes time. The trade-off is speed (or time) versus quality. The more time, the better the quality. The scholars preparing the scrolls for publication naturally opt for quality. The scholars waiting to see the texts might prefer less quality and greater speed—then they would at least have the texts to work with.

The case of the English scholar John 066Allegro is the parade example, cited by both sides. Allegro is an original member of the international committee. Allegro promptly published in learned journals the most important texts assigned to him; and in 1968, he published a definitive volume with texts, analysis and commentary that completed the work assigned to him.¹ Almost everyone agrees that Allegro’s analysis and commentary left much to be desired. In 1970, John Strugnell of Harvard published a new analysis and commentary, correcting Allegro’s errors.² Strugnell’s corrections were longer than the original publication (113 pages versus 91). In the standard Dead Sea Scroll bibliography, the listing for Allegro’s volume carries the following notation “This publication must be used with caution … criticism of this volume has been severe.”³

No scholar wants to be the next Allegro. So the scholars take the time to insure the quality. And with the passage of time, as we learn more about the scrolls and as new techniques are developed for extracting more information from them, the greater the possibilities for doing more—and taking even more time.

While members of the committee cite the Allegro example as justification for their own delay, non-committee scholars view the Allegro case differently: At least Allegro got his material out. Now, they say, we have Allegro’s text and Strugnell’s corrections. If Allegro hadn’t published, we would have had neither the text nor the corrections. The final outcome is far better, they say, than the case of the presently unpublished texts that remain unavailable after nearly 40 years.^e

A second factor delaying publication will not be acknowledged by anyone with unpublished scroll material. It is widely cited, however, by non-committee scholars. The insiders, the scholars with the text assignments (T. H. Gaster, professor emeritus of Barnard College, Columbia University, calls these insiders “the charmed circle”), have the goodies—to drip out bit by bit. This gives them status, scholarly power and a wonderful ego trip. Why squander it? Obviously, the existence of this factor is controversial and disputed.

Almost every consideration mentioned above can be illustrated by what occurred at the three-day New York University conference. At every turn, some aspect of the publication problem seemed implicated.

Even before the conference began, it was announced that Morton Smith of Columbia University, a distinguished non-committee member, who has long objected to the failure to publish the Dead Sea Scrolls, would speak on “The Scandals of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” At the last moment, Smith decided to change his topic, however, explaining “I thought to speak on the scandals of the Dead Sea documents, but these proved too numerous, too familiar, and too disgusting.” Instead, Smith re-analyzed an already published fragment of a Dead Sea Scroll text.

The star of the conference was clearly Harvard’s John Strugnell. Strugnell is an original member of the international committee. He has quantities of unpublished material at his command. He is also a superb scholar. Whatever he produces is universally acknowledged to be first-rate. It would surely be unfair to single him out for criticism, especially because, after a hiatus, he is producing important new material at an increasingly rapid pace. He serves as an example here simply because he was there. And he was the only member of the “charmed circle” who was there.

Strugnell spoke on an unpublished Bible-like text that scholars call pseudepigrapha. Composing a text as if it had been written by an ancient author was a common practice at the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. Strugnell’s text, however, was composed as if it had been written by Moses himself, just like the Torah—the Biblical Pentateuch, the five books of Moses.

Strugnell gave everyone in attendance a handout of his transcription of the text. He also passed around the table a photograph of the fragments themselves. Few, if any, of the other assembled scholars had ever seen it. They stared in childlike fascination.

Make no mistake about it. Few scholars could have analyzed this text, in all its myriad aspects, as brilliantly as Strugnell did. But he did have the text, and it was an important and exciting one. Other scholars, like Columbia’s Smith, were consigned to chewing the lettuce a second time.

At the conclusion of Strugnell’s presentation, Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore Hebrew College declared the Strugnell text “of extreme importance.” Strugnell’s paper, Baumgarten observed, “will be the jewel of our conference.” “Fascinating,” said New York University’s Schiffman. “Wonderful,” said Ben Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

The pseudo-Moses text revealed by Strugnell will be published in the proceedings of the conference, because that is where Strugnell has consented to publish it. (He has also agreed to write a less technical version for BAR’s sister publication, Bible Review). He could, if he wished, publish it in an academic journal. Or he could wait until a volume of his 068materials is ready for publication, in five or ten years. The point is not that he would have, but that he could have; the power is his.

Only one other speaker at the conference gave a paper based on what had been unpublished Dead Sea texts. She is not a senior scholar, but a brilliant young Ph.D. serving in her first academic post, at Emory University. Carol Newsom had access to this unpublished material not only because of her brilliance, however, but because she was a student of John Strugnell’s and he gave her access to it. Newsom will shortly be publishing, by leave of her teacher, a book containing these hitherto unavailable texts.

Everyone is pleased that Strugnell has been assigning Dead Sea texts to his graduate students, who will be publishing them under his supervision. Indeed, he is exemplary in this regard. Other scholars are being urged to follow Strugnell’s example. That is an excellent way to get the material out more quickly. Moreover, Strugnell is, of course, making unbiased assignments. Two extremely important texts have been assigned not simply to Jews, but to Israeli Jews—Elisha Qimron and Emanuel Tov.

Nevertheless, the possibility of writing a Ph.D. dissertation based on unpublished Dead Sea Scroll material is available at Harvard, but not at Yale. This fact was not lost on Yale’s Robert Wilson, who chaired one of the conference sessions. Privately, Wilson will express himself with some warmth on the subject. He has not gone public, he says, because it is so unlikely that the situation can be changed.

The scholarly community concerned with the Dead Sea Scrolls—or at least the outsiders among them—waits breathlessly to know when the unpublished texts will be coming out. On this subject, the conference was treated to a report from the only insider there, John Strugnell. The oral announcement that Strugnell would give such a report—it had not been printed in the program—was greeted enthusiastically by the participants, some of whom expressed their pleasure by excitedly pounding on the table.

Among Strugnell’s progress reports was an announcement that the scroll materials that had been assigned to Patrick Skehan, an original member of the committee who died in 1980, had been reassigned pursuant to Skehan’s request to Eugene Ulrich of Notre Dame University.^f

Strugnell’s report on publication progress was followed, as were other sessions, by an opportunity for questions. A question was posed to Strugnell by Ben Zion Wacholder who recently completed an important book-length study, entitled The Dawn of Qumran, on the Temple Scroll and fragments of it already published.⁴ Wacholder, a white-haired concentration camp survivor, is almost totally blind (he can tell time by holding his watch to within an inch of his right eye), so he has perforce almost memorized the contents of the Temple Scroll and its fragments. His interest in 070the subject is understandably keen. He would love to “see”—have read to him, as is his customary method of learning—a still unpublished fragment of the Temple Scroll. Docilely, Wacholder asked Strugnell if he knew whether the unpublished fragment of the Temple Scroll contained any portions of text that were not in the published scroll and its fragments. Strugnell replied that the unpublished fragment did contain additional text, but that the new material probably did not add anything especially significant; he then said, however, that the unpublished fragment was approximately 25 years older than the published texts of the Temple Scroll. Grateful, Wacholder thanked Strugnell for the information.

This kind of occurrence was not an isolated incident. We have already mentioned a conference paper given by John J. Collins of De Paul University. Collins’s paper dealt with the religious character of the Qumran community. Much of his paper was based on a manuscript known as the Damascus Document. The Damascus Document is known primarily from two medieval examples recovered over 80 years ago in a Cairo synagogue. They were published in 1910 by the man who recovered them, Solomon Schechter. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, scholars were astounded to find at Qumran small fragments of seven or eight different copies of the Damascus Document, otherwise known only in its medieval copies. The Damascus Document is probably the most important text in existence for understanding the history of the Qumran community.^g Collins relied heavily on it in his paper. During the question period, Collins acknowledged, however, that he had not seen the unpublished fragments of the Damascus Document from Qumran, discovered over 30 years ago, so his analysis excluded any light these fragments might provide.

In another session, Elisha Qimron spoke of the need for a new edition of the medieval copies of the Damascus Document. But no scholar would undertake this task without having access to the unpublished fragments of the Damascus Document found at Qumran.^h

What is the answer? It seems clear that despite the conscientious efforts of the scholars to whom the scrolls have been assigned for publication—and they are proceeding with all deliberate speed—another generation will pass before their work is completed and published, unless something is done.

The alternative is either to reassign some of the materials, or to publish photographs of the texts and allow any scholar who wishes to work on them. BAR has previously called for immediate publication of photographs of the unpublished texts.ⁱ At the New York University conference, Columbia’s Morton Smith called on his colleagues to request the Israeli government, which now has ultimate authority over those scroll materials, immediately to publish photographs of all unpublished texts so that they will then be available to all scholars. Smith’s suggestion was ignored.

In “BARview: Israeli Authorities Now Responsible for Delay in Publication of Dead Sea Scrolls,” BAR considers Smith’s suggestion.

For three days in May, a select group of invited scholars, all experts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, met at New York University to share ideas and discuss common problems.a On a light note, New York University’s Lawrence Schiffman opened the sessions attended by nearly 50 academicians from around the world by announcing the rules for the scholarly discussions: • Let no one answer his companion with obstinacy or address him impatiently, taking no account of the dignity of his fellow. • Let no one deliberately insult his companion unjustly. • Let no one speak foolishly. • Let no […]