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A struggle for control of the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls between the Israeli Dead Sea Scroll oversight committee and chief scroll editor John Strugnell may end with Strugnell’s removal before these words appear in print.
According to committee member Shemaryahu Talmon of Hebrew University, Emanuel Tov, also of Hebrew University, has now been appointed associate editor of the Dead Sea Scroll publication team. Others describe the position as co-editor-in-chief. Tov, who is now on a sabbatical in Holland, claims not to know about the appointment. According to committee member Jonas Greenfield, the committee is still looking for a proper English title for Tov; “Associate Editor-in-Chief,” says Greenfield, does not have the ring of equality with Strugnell that the committee wants Tov’s position to have.
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Tov, the author of the latest volume in the official Dead Sea Scroll publication series, was appointed without obtaining Strugnell’s approval. Strugnell was simply “informed” of the appointment. “He can’t do very much about it,” according to a highly knowledgeable source.
Although Tov is now associate editor, Strugnell is still chief editor. However, according to Talmon, “Strugnell is not in charge of Tov.”
“The question of the chief editor is now pending,” Talmon said in a telephone interview.
According to an Associated Press report, “Strugnell said he would fight Tov’s appointment, which he called an ‘alarming attempt by Israeli scholars to claim credit for the research.” However, the influential Ancient Manuscript Committee of the American Schools of Oriental Research ASOR is sending a letter to Amir Drori, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, approving Tov’s appointment. The ASOR committee, which includes some of the most powerful people in the field, has authorized the publication of this letter in ASOR’s quarterly journal, Biblical Archaeologist.
On numerous occasions Strugnell has been critical of the Antiquities Authority and its director. According to some reports, Drori and Strugnell are barely speaking; on one occasion, Strugnell even threatened to sue the Antiquities Authority.
Acknowledged as a brilliant scholar even by his most vociferous detractors, Strugnell’s administrative skills are widely questioned. More recently, Strugnell has exposed himself not only as anti-Israel, but also anti-Semitic.
Despite this disagreement, Strugnell and the Israeli oversight committee agree on one thing: Photographs of the unpublished Dead Sea Scroll texts will not be released. They will remain inaccessible to scholars generally until they are published by the editors to whom they have been assigned.
According to Talmon, the Israeli oversight committee took over after a “path had been charted [not to release the photographs].” The Israeli oversight committee will try to do a better job by “doling out [the texts] to more people [to edit and publish].” However, they will not make availahle to scholars generally photographs of 067unpublished texts.
This decision, unfortunately, affects the accessibility even of published texts. No one at the Scrollery, where the original texts are kept in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum, can tell which texts have been published and which have not been published. There is no complete catalogue of the scrolls and no one even knows for sure which texts have been assigned to whom. In order to prepare a catalogue of the texts, the Israelis have had to ask the editors themselves to identify the texts that have been assigned to them. Strugnell attributes much of the disarray in the Scrollery (“impenetrable chaos,” he calls it) to the “ignorant interventions” of the Israeli custodians, although he concedes that these interventions may have been “with the noblest of intentions.”
Steven A. Reed, of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, in Claremont, California, has been attempting to prepare a catalogue of all the texts. Strugnell promised that this catalogue would be available by July 1989. It now appears that it will be at least another year and a half before it will be completed, provided funds are available.
Moreover, some now question whether the catalogue, if it is ever completed, will be available to everyone. In the past, the inadequate catalogues of the scrolls that were prepared by the team of editors have been kept secret by them. Only when BAR obtained a copy of one of these catalogues were we able to identify over 50 unpublished texts that had been assigned to J. T. Milik.
The easiest way to prepare a catalogue would be to publish photographs of all the texts and then to key identifications to numbers in that edition. As improvements are made, supplements could be issued, but always keyed to the numbers in the photographic edition. This cannot be done, however, because no one in charge is willing to allow photographs of the unpublished texts to be included in such an edition.
Having to distinguish between published and unpublished texts enormously complicates the task of cataloguing and accessibility. Imagine how easy it would be to work with the texts if there were a complete photographic record of all the texts that anyone could refer to. All kinds of indexes, periodically updated, could be prepared from this basic benchmark. Moreover $100,000, offered by an American philanthropic foundation, has been available for this purpose. But both Strugnell and the Israeli oversight committee agree that this offer should be rejected.
Strugnell and the Israeli oversight committee disagree, however, over control of text assignments to scholars who will then have monopolistic rights to any text thus assigned. The Israeli oversight committee now wants to control these assignments. In April 1990, the editors were advised that they could make no further assignments without the approval of the Israeli oversight committee.
J. T. Milik thereafter refused to assign the fragmentary texts of the Manual of Discipline from Cave 4 to a very prominent American scholar, Joseph Fitzmyer, because, Milik said, he was advised by a member of the Israeli oversight committee that he, Milik, no longer had the authority to give the texts to Fitzmyer. Fitzmyer said he could prepare the texts for publication within a year. But Milik said he couldn’t give them to Fitzmyer.
Since then, however, Strugnell has made assignments without the approval of the Israeli oversight committee. According to Talmon, that will happen “no more.”
The oversight committee has not taken up Fitzmyer’s request for the Cave 4 Manual of Discipline texts, however. When asked whether the committee invites scholars to make requests for scroll assignments, Talmon replied, “No.” When asked why not, he replied, “Why yes?”
