David Harris

Emanuel Tov’s (seen here) student, Martin Abegg, while a graduate student in the mid-1980s, developed an interest in the then-unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls while taking a class taught by Bible scholar (and now director of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication project) Tov. Then Abegg stumbled upon a scholar’s goldmine: a concordance to the secret scroll fragments, from which the text of the fragments could be reconstructed. In the accompanying article, Abegg describes how he made the difficult decision to publish, without authorization, his reconstructions of the scroll fragments.