Inside BAR
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Moshe Dayan, Israel’s brilliant, acquisitive and controversial general, amassed an extraordinary collection of antiquities during his military and political career. After Dayan’s recent death, the Israel Museum acquired the collection amidst still more controversy. The story unfolds in “The Dayan Saga—The Man and His Archaeological Collection,” by Leroy Aarons, an American freelance writer now living in Tel Aviv and reporting for, among other publications, Time magazine. Some magnificent examples of the Dayan collection’s many unique treasures are illustrated for the first time in this issue of BAR.
In 1897, 50 years before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, a rabbinical scholar named Solomon Schechter carried back to England 140,000 fragments of ancient manuscripts, long-stored in a Cairo synagogue Genizah (a storeroom for worn-out religious books). Among these fragments were some pieces Schechter called “a Zadokite work.” Called the Damascus Document by later scholars, these fragments were eventually identified as writings of the same Dead Sea sect whose original manuscripts were later found in the Qumran caves. Raphael Levy tells the story of Schechter’s discovery of the Damascus Document in the thousand-year-old Cairo Genizah, in “First ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discoveries.”
Levy has been a newspaperman, filmmaker and public relations executive. His interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls began soon after 1954 when, as public relations director of the United Jewish Appeal, he met Yigael Yadin, who had come to lecture in the United States at the invitation of the UJA. At one point, Yadin suddenly cancelled his remaining UJA appearances and returned to Israel. A year later he explained why—he had rushed back to carry out the secret negotiations that led to Israel’s purchase of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Levy’s interest in the Scrolls and in Solomon Schechter is also partly familial. He remembers that when he was a very young boy, he met Schechter, his grand-uncle. Currently a free-lance writer and communications consultant, Levy has visited the Cairo Genizah collection in England annually for the past six years.
The task Schechter began of identifying and sorting the Cairo Genizah fragments was recently completed by Stefan Reif, Director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah collection at Cambridge University. Reif’s massive task of cataloguing and ongoing preservation is described in a story entitled “Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Preserves 2000 Years of History.”
The authors of Schechter’s find, the Damascus Document, and of the Dead Sea Scrolls, were the Essenes, a sect of Jewish religious zealots who established themselves at Qumran in the second century B.C. But the locale of the sect’s formation is debated. “Essene Origins—Palestine or Babylonia?” presents the two sides of the scholarly argument.
Many scholars believe that the roots of Biblical and, therefore, Western religion lie in Mesopotamia. A preeminent scholar of ancient Sumer and Assyria, Thorkild Jacobsen, has recreated four millennia of Mesopotamian religion in his recently published Treasures of Darkness. In “God Before the Hebrews,” Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, explains the form and outlines the content of Jacobsen’s book, in a review illustrated with artifacts that are ancient embodiments of “The Treasures of Darkness.” Frymer-Kensky is well-known as a scholar of Biblical and ancient Near Eastern religion and law. She has received major academic fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her two-volume work, Judicial Ordeal in the Ancient Near East, is now in press, and she is presently completing two other books, Biblical Cosmology and The Bible and Near Eastern Mythology. BAR readers will remember her earlier article, “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood,” BAR 04:04.
Moshe Dayan, Israel’s brilliant, acquisitive and controversial general, amassed an extraordinary collection of antiquities during his military and political career. After Dayan’s recent death, the Israel Museum acquired the collection amidst still more controversy. The story unfolds in “The Dayan Saga—The Man and His Archaeological Collection,” by Leroy Aarons, an American freelance writer now living in Tel Aviv and reporting for, among other publications, Time magazine. Some magnificent examples of the Dayan collection’s many unique treasures are illustrated for the first time in this issue of BAR. In 1897, 50 years before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls […]
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