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Missing: Have You Seen These Scrolls?

By Årstein Justnes, Signe M. Hægeland

It may seem suprising, but 75 years after the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, we still don’t know how many scroll fragments there are in total. Published references to the number of recovered fragments vary considerably—from 25,000 to more than 200,000. Even more worrisome, not an insignificant number of those fragments seem to have been lost. Writing for Jerusalem Report in December 1991, journalist Felice Maranz listed ten large fragments as missing, among them portions of the books of Daniel and Samuel.1 When she questioned John Strugnell and Emanuel Tov—the former and current editors-in-chief of the Dead […]

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Footnotes

1. Martin Abegg, “Hershel’s Crusade, No. 1: He Who Freed the Dead Sea Scrolls,” BAR, March/April/May/June 2018.

Endnotes

1.
“The Case of the Missing Scrolls,” Jerusalem Report (December 26, 1991).

2. Visit our project at lyingpen.uia.no.

3.
Weston W. Fields, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 239.

4.
Stephen A. Reed, The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs and Museum Inventory Numbers, SBL Resources for Biblical Study 32 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994).

5. See deadseascrolls.org.il for the Digital Library and sqe.deadseascrolls.org.il for the new platform.