Dead Sea Scroll Concordance Now Available for Use by Scholars
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, a concordance of the non-Biblical texts from Qumran was prepared, under the supervision of the team of editors, by four then-young scholars, Joseph Fitzmyer, Raymond Brown, William Oxtoby and J. Teixidor. The concordance was kept secret by the team of editors, however, and was made available only to select scholars, principally those on the team. A few years ago, a purloined copy was offered for more than $300 to one of the scholars (Fitzmyer) who had worked on it but who was not a member of the team of editors.
Recently, the cards on which the words of the concordance were written have been arranged for printing by a young German scholar, Hans-Peter Richter, and a limited number of copies of the concordance have been privately printed under the direction of Professor Hartmut Stegemann of the University of Göttingen. But these copies too have received very limited distribution. The reason, according to one scholar who was allowed to use the concordance for his own work in Biblical philology, is that the team of editors fears that an unauthorized person might reconstruct an unpublished text by using the concordance!
According to chief editor John Strugnell’s introduction to the concordance, copies of the concordance “will be distributed only to a few scholars and institutions who are involved in the edition of the not yet published Qumran texts.”
Nevertheless, the librarian of the Harvard Divinity School, Louis Charles Willard, has advised us that the copy of the concordance deposited in his library is available for use in the library.
The Baltimore Hebrew University Library also has a copy, presumably because one of its faculty members, Joseph Baumgarten, has been assigned to edit the Damascus Documents. The Baltimore Hebrew University librarian advises us that this copy too is available to outside scholars when it is in the library. At press time, however, Professor Baumgarten has it.