First Person: Publishing Every Last Fragment

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The Dead Sea Scrolls editors don’t want us to miss a word

The publishers of the Dead Sea Scrolls are kind enough to send me copies of the official folio volumes as they come off the press. The series is known as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, or DJD for short. I am holding in my hand what surely must be one of the most unusual volumes ever published by the Oxford University Press. It is DJD 33.^a Its contents are labeled “Unidentified Fragments.” It is the editio princeps of what the editors (Dana M. Pike and Andrew C. Skinner) call the “castaways,” the “bits and pieces,” scroll fragments so small that no one knows what they are.

The editors do make an arbitrary decision, though: No scrap will be published unless it contains at least one word (or enough of a word to guess what the complete word was). Most of the pieces are just that, a fragment smaller than a fingernail, with a word or part of a word on it—380 pages of this, never before officially published. The volume also includes other fragments that have been published in earlier DJD volumes because they were once thought to be part of other documents. But while studying them the editor decided that they couldn’t be properly linked to those documents—another 50 pages of now-unidentified fragments.

The idea is that perhaps some scholar in the future will be able to identify the document to which a particular fragment belongs. I wonder. Will this ever happen? I suspect that a stronger motivation for this project was the desire to publish the entire, entire corpus, no matter how small and indeterminate the fragments might be. But, still, that’s a laudable aim. The scholars who identify one or more of these nearly 3,000 fragments deserve medals.

I had another thought as I ruminated on the strange book in my hands: I am not an acquisitive man. I don’t own any antiquities. I don’t want to own them. But, still, a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls … not for me, mind you, but for some public institution.

My mind drifted. What would be an appropriate fragment? (I noted that some of the fragments that were published here had already been lost; only the photographs remain.) I leafed through the book. It almost jumped out at me. A single word on a tiny fragment: YHWH, Yahweh, the personal name of the Israelite God. Not once, but several times. Was this simply coincidental? Or is it that the name is used so often in these religious documents that it would be expected to appear (and survive) frequently? Or is there some deeper significance?

That’s not the only word. “Israel” also makes its appearance on several occasions.

Imagine what one of these fragments would look like, how it would be treasured, on the wall of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC), in Claremont, California; or the Harvard Semitic Museum, in Cambridge; or the Jewish Museum, in New York; or the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, in England.

Then I awoke from my torpor. The ABMC doesn’t collect original documents and wouldn’t want these fragments; the other institutions might feel the same way. Besides, the Israel Antiquities Authority would never give up so much as a scrap, especially if it contained one of these magic words. Better for me to get back to work. We’ve got a magazine to put out.

The Dead Sea Scrolls editors don’t want us to miss a word