Missing: Have You Seen These Scrolls?

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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 Sea Scrolls publication project, respectively—neither was keen on discussing the issue.

So what portion of the total number of fragments is now gone? In other words: How considerable a loss is this?

Some 30 years after the alarm was first sounded, our team (the authors and Martin S. Stomnås) set out to look for missing Dead Sea Scroll fragments.² We use the term “lost” to refer to scroll fragments that are thought to be either destroyed, stolen, misplaced, or simply missing.

Already in 1960, five fragments were reported stolen from the Palestine Archaeological Museum (known as the Rockefeller Museum since 1967). They included a large fragment from a Samuel scroll, three fragments from a Daniel scroll, and a fragment from a non-biblical scroll named Beatitudes. Reflecting on the loss of the Samuel fragment many years later, Strugnell seemed surprisingly relaxed: “It didn’t matter. I mean, it would be nice for a museum to have the Samuel [fragment], but we’ve got the pictures. … That’s better than the original.” ³ Despite the evident loss, the problem with stolen fragments, at least to Strugnell, seemed marginal. To this day, there are rumors about other thefts.

When scroll scholar Stephen A. Reed conducted his massive cataloging project at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem and the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, California, he noted that several fragments were missing from the plates (manuscripts grouped and mounted in between plates of glass) at the Rockefeller Museum, including several with Cave 5 material.⁴

In his brief annotations, Reed sometimes pondered the whereabouts of the missing pieces: “Missing at 024Rockefeller, possibly at Shrine of Book,” or, more often, just “Shrine?” Building on his work, our preliminary investigation indicates that the Cave 5 manuscripts are neither at the Rockefeller nor at the Shrine of the Book. No one seems to know where they are.

Throughout Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, the official publication series for the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are hundreds of brief notes about lost fragments. Phrases like “cannot be found in the Rockefeller Museum” or simply “missing” or “lost” abound. Most of these pieces are indeed very small, but they add up to quite a substantial lot.

Volume 33 of the series is a special case. It consists mostly of small, unidentified fragments. Notably, almost every single one of the 41 entries includes a disclaimer about fragments that could not be located. In total, this adds up to about 450 missing fragments. Such disclaimers are consistently followed by a comforting sentence stating that in most cases the missing pieces have been identified, but their present location is not known. We suspect that most of these fragments have been moved to other plates, but there doesn’t seem to be any record of such interventions.

Our database currently lists more than 1,000 Dead Sea Scroll fragments that are missing. We do not believe that all of these pieces are actually lost, but there seems to be no easy way to find out. Thankfully, other scholars helped us locate a handful of fragments after we posted them on Twitter. And notably, some of the manuscripts that Reed couldn’t find in the early 1990s have since turned up—for instance 2QRutha, a Ruth manuscript from Cave 2.

Dead Sea Scroll scholars face a paradox: Even today, 30 years after the controversial crusade by Hershel Shanks to “free the Dead Sea Scrolls,” ^a most scholars still do not have full access to the tens of thousands of scroll fragments that have been discovered. The leading online respository for the scrolls, the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, is incomplete, and its long-anticipated replacement, the Scripta Qumranica Electronica platform, is still in an intermediate stage of development.⁵ As scholars gain full access to these online collections, perhaps more “missing” scroll fragments will resurface.

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 […]