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Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Edited by Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C. VanderKam

(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) 2 vols., 1132 pp., $295 (hardback)

It’s difficult to find an appropriate person to review an encyclopedia on a relatively narrow subject. Most of the experts are disqualified because they are contributors. Those few experts who are not contributors are disqualified because they are angry at not having been asked to contribute; their reviews usually consist of little more than picayune criticisms. Since I am not a scholar (and therefore not a potential contributor) but have a passing familiarity with the subject matter, I may be the only person qualified and unbiased enough to review this two-volume set.

I begin with three major criticisms: (1) my name is misspelled on page 558 (but not elsewhere); (2) my name appears on page 896, but this reference was mistakenly omitted from the index; (3) BAR’s role in freeing the scrolls is mentioned a number of times but is referenced only once in the index.

These major criticisms aside, the encyclopedia is what one would expect from a publisher as experienced and distinguished as Oxford University Press. The chief editors, Lawrence Schiffman of New York University and James VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame, are both leading figures in the field. They are supported by a distinguished group of editors and advisers (of whom only one is a woman, although there are many female scroll scholars).

The two volumes aim for comprehensiveness. “Dead Sea Scrolls” is interpreted to include not only the approximately 850 texts found in the caves near Qumran, but a number of other collections from more than 20 sites, ranging from Jericho in the north to Masada in the south, dating over a period of nearly a thousand years, from the fourth century B.C. to the seventh century A.D. The texts also include the finds from the Wadi ed-Daliyeh (the Samaria Papyri), the Bar-Kokhba texts (from the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, found in the so-called southern caves), other texts from Nahal Hever and Wadi Murabba‘at, and Greek and Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts from Hyrcania (also spelled, inconsistently, as Horqaniah; Khirbet Mird).

More than a dozen scholars who figured prominently in the acquisition and research of these materials have their own entries: John Allegro, Roland de Vaux, Jozef Milik, John Strugnell, Yigael Yadin—and, of course, the antiquities dealer Kando, who often served as middleman between the Bedouin who found many of the scrolls and the scholars who purchased them.

Yet there is a glaring omission—the encyclopedia contains not a single picture or illustration, not of the people, not of the sites. Nor are there plans or drawings. It is difficult to discuss the archaeology of a site without at least a plan. And it would put some flesh and bone on the actors if we could see what they looked like. The authoritative entry on paleography (how to date letter forms), by Frank Cross of Harvard University, would have been greatly enhanced by letter charts.

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While we’re talking about omissions: There is, oddly, no entry on Jews or on Christians (although there is an excellent entry by Richard Bauckham of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, on Jewish Christians), nor are there entries for Christianity or Judaism. Are these subjects too broad? Perhaps. Yet with entries on Jesus, John the Baptist and numerous books of the New Testament, as well as a separate entry on the New Testament itself, it is hard to understand why there is no general entry explaining the overall importance of the scrolls for Christianity. Perhaps the editors were afraid of too much repetition, although it didn’t seem to bother them when it came to describing how the scrolls were discovered. That is covered in at least half a dozen entries “Discovery and Purchase,” “Media,” “Scrolls Research,” “Shahin [Kando],” “Yadin” etc.), with variations and inconsistencies of course.

The chief editors are aware that the scrolls (inevitably the editors lapse into a narrower definition—the Qumran scrolls) “have engendered … much controversy.” They also know that “in planning a reference work such as this, there is always a danger that selection of the contributors will reflect the biases of those who organize it.” They want to be fair. I feel their pain. As an editor myself, I know the problem. They have tried, but they have not always succeeded. But fairness in this situation may well be impossible.

The first place I checked for bias was in connection with editor Schiffman’s well-known view that the people of Qumran were not Essenes but Sadducees or a movement of Sadducees, a view with which VanderKam disagrees. Chalk up one for fairness: The entry on Essenes, by Todd Beall of the Capital Bible Seminary, in Lanham, Maryland, briefly considers the issue and concludes that “it is highly unlikely that the Qumran sect was Sadducean.” Next I checked the entry on Sadducees, which I expected to be authored by Schiffman. It wasn’t. Emanuelle Main’s consideration of the issue takes the on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand approach, with no clear conclusion, and does not even cite Schiffman.

What we have in this encyclopedia are mostly mainline views, the judgments of the leaders of the field. What constitutes fairness to those who don’t share such views? If you ignore them entirely, are you being unfair? If they are given a voice of their own, the project is likely to become unbalanced. If you give some minority views a voice, where do you stop? How far out do you go? In some cases the encyclopedia damningly discusses scholars who deviate from mainline positions without allowing them to present their case, and in other instances it has, 064perhaps improperly, ignored them altogether.

Let’s look at some of the “deviants,” from the least to the most “deviant.” Norman Golb holds a chair at the University of Chicago. He has published a large body of work relating to the scrolls, including a major book. To my mind he has some interesting ideas, many of which are wrong but some of which are right. For example, he believes the scrolls came from Jerusalem. Not a bad suggestion. But he also believes that they constituted a library of mainstream Judaism, which is far less supportable. In this encyclopedia, his position is outlined in “Qumran Community,” by Charlotte Hempel of Cambridge University, who then provides “five principal arguments against Golb’s proposal.” Well, my perverse mind would like to hear what Golb has to say about her five principal arguments, especially because at least two of them no longer hold: (1) She says that burials at Qumran are “fairly distinctive.” Since she wrote this, a large cemetery with virtually identical burials has been found near Jerusalem^a and another even larger cemetery—of Nabatean graves!—has come to light southeast of the Dead Sea.^b (2) She says that an ostracon found at Qumran is “thought by some to contain the term yahad, the technical self-designation of the community as found in the sectarian scrolls.” The three words “thought by some” may have been added by a careful editor who knew that this reading of the ostracon is increasingly regarded as incorrect.^c To rub salt in the wound, it was Norman Golb who first mounted a vigorous and lonely protest against the reading yahad, at a conference in Jerusalem celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the scrolls.

Shouldn’t Norman Golb have been given an opportunity to make his case? But if he were, what would you do with Robert Eisenman, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, played a prominent role in effecting the release of the scrolls. He has written widely on the scrolls. But almost no scholar accepts his ideas, especially the suggestion that the character known in the scrolls as the Wicked Priest is the apostle Paul. Yet his ideas have been widely propagated in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, a highly successful popular book on the scrolls written by two journalists, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. Eisenman’s ideas have also been accepted by an important scholarly journalist, Neil Asher Silberman, who is a contributor to this encyclopedia.^d Eisenman’s role in freeing the scrolls is mentioned in the encyclopedia entry “Media,” which intimates that his ideas enabled him to achieve celebrity status. But the only reference to his unorthodox views is a passing mention of him as one of the scholars who “identified members of the Qumran community with personalities mentioned in the New Testament.” In the bibliography to this entry, Eisenman’s books and articles are not cited. The encyclopedia’s index fails to include his name. Similarly, Eisenman’s views are referred to in the entry “Wicked Priest,” by Timothy Lim of the University of Edinburgh, but Eisenman’s name is not mentioned.

Eisenman, like Golb, holds an established academic position. Should his views have been aired and defended? And if they were, should the encyclopedia also consider the views of Barbara Thiering, a retired lecturer at Sidney University School of Divinity, in Australia? Thiering contends that, when read carefully, the scrolls tell us that Jesus was crucified at Qumran, that he survived the crucifixion, that he divorced his wife and remarried, and ended up in Rome, where he died peacefully in about 64 C.E. Thiering’s name does not appear in the index to the encyclopedia, although she is mentioned in the entry “Media.”

Neither Jose O’Callahan nor Carston Thiede appear in the index. They identify some extremely fragmentary Greek texts found in one of the Qumran caves as parts of New Testament texts, including the Gospel of Mark. They are cited by name in the entry on the Gospel of Mark. The entry’s author, W.R. Telford of the University of Newcastle, in England, demolishes their case. The editors gave them no opportunity to defend themselves.

If Thiede and O’Callahan were given a platform, the editors might also be required to include someone, whom I shall leave nameless, who contends that Chinese characters can be found in the scrolls. He has even found a Sinologist from the University of Pennsylvania who has confirmed that some of the signs are indeed similar to ancient Chinese logograms.

You see the problem. Once you start down this road of giving a fair hearing to the “deviants,” where do you stop? Perhaps the editors should have included an article on their views, with brief rejoinders.

However, if a “deviant” view, promulgated by a widely respected scholar, is critically discussed, that scholar should be given an opportunity to make a response. One egregious violation of this rule can be found in an article on the archaeology of Qumran by Magen Broshi, former curator of the Shrine of the Book, the Dead Sea Scroll museum 065in Jerusalem. Broshi concludes rather peremptorily that Qumran was the “Essene monastery we are told about by Pliny the Elder.” This is a reasonable position, but it also has its problems, which Broshi does not acknowledge. He then goes on to outline what he calls “five nonconsensual [not part of the consensus] countertheories concerning the nature of Khirbet Qumran.” He lists them, somewhat insultingly, “in the alphabetical order of their proponents,” as if they were all equally ridiculous. One of the “proponents” is Yizhar Hirschfeld, a highly regarded Israeli archaeologist whose book on Ramat Hanadiv, a site with a structure bearing similarities to Qumran, recently won a prestigious award. Based on his study of similar structures, Hirschfeld believes Qumran was not built to house a religious community but was a kind of country estate. His argument is summarily dismissed by Broshi. Similarly dismissed is the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Humbert, the archaeologist from the École Biblique et Archéologique Française who has been charged with the responsibility of publishing the final report of Roland de Vaux’s excavation of Qumran; he suggests that the site was first built as a country estate, then in the mid-first century B.C. became the seat of the Essenes. Humbert is generally highly regarded and has published his views in an extensive article in the prestigious Revue biblique. I do not necessarily subscribe to the views of either Hirschfeld or Humbert. But once they were discussed—and dismissed—they surely should have been given an opportunity to defend themselves.

If confessions were in order, I suspect I would not be the only reviewer of an encyclopedia to admit to not having read every entry. Of course I read the entries that involved the struggle to free the scrolls. I must say that BAR’s role in this struggle is appropriately acknowledged and fairly recounted in an article by Schiffman, VanderKam and George Brooke of the University of Manchester, in England, and in other articles by Silberman and John Collins, now of Yale University.

Some of the entries I read on other subjects, not surprisingly, were banal and shallow and sometimes even seemed unrelated to the subject of the encyclopedia except in the most tenuous way. Other entries were informative and insightful, although I don’t think this encyclopedia is likely to be compared to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is largely a summary of past scholarship; it does not pretend to break new ground. Nevertheless, if you are doing basic Dead Sea Scroll research, you would be foolish not to check it out.