Don’t expect the final report on the excavation of Qumran any time soon. Probably never.
The latest effort to prepare and publish a final report is sliding into oblivion. It may already be there. “We are not writing any final report. It is not on the program,” admits Mme Pauline Donceel-Voûte, the scholar who was supposedly preparing the report.
Père Roland de Vaux of the French École Biblique in Jerusalem, who directed five seasons of excavations in the 1950s, died in 1971 without writing a final report. In the late 1980s, aroused by public concern over the lack of publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the École Biblique engaged Robert Donceel, a Belgian archaeologist, to prepare a final report based on de Vaux’s extensive notes, photographs and artifacts from the dig. Donceel, according to sources at the École, brought his wife, Pauline Donceel-Voûte, into the project; contrary to the contract, she has taken it over (“usurped” was the word used by a responsible École Biblique scholar) and has come up with an interpretation of the site that has won little favor (“stupid” was the word he used).
Mme Donceel claims that the École Biblique promised her husband all sorts of assistance, but when he came to Jerusalem none was provided. She stepped in to help him. Originally, she had no intention of becoming involved in this project. She has been “in the limelight,” she says, only because she speaks better English than he. Most of the work is his, she says.
Relations between the Donceels and the École Biblique have descended to the point where the two sides are barely speaking to one another. The last contact, we were told, was over a year ago.
In the meantime, the École Biblique accuses the Donceels (or Mme Donceel-Voûte) of refusing to return artifacts and other materials from the dig that they (or she) took out of the country. The École Biblique has asked the Israel Antiquities Authority for help in getting everything back. The school admits that it doesn’t even know what was taken; Mme Donceel never gave the school a list, but it is believed that it would include over 6,000 items.
Mme Donceel denies the charge, although conceding that items were taken from Jerusalem to Belgium for restoration because “it was too expensive in Jerusalem.”
At this point, the Donceels don’t even answer mail from the École Biblique. “They are always asking when I will send the report. I have already sent it. What do they want?” she asks. “It is impossible to write a final report. They don’t have the coins.
They can’t find the excavation notebooks. The site has been restored twice [so we don’t know what it was like when excavated]. It’s useless.”
If she does publish something, it will cover the entire Jericho area, she says. But this is not what the École Biblique wants. “They don’t seem to know what they want,” she says.
In the meantime, the École Biblique has published a folio volume of 538 photographs and 48 plans from the excavation, as well as de Vaux’s locus-by-locus summary of the dig based on his excavation notebooks.d This summary is being translated into English by Stephen Pfann, a member of the international team of Dead Sea Scroll editors and director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity, and is expected to be published in 1997.
The insufficiency of de Vaux’s preliminary reports and published lectures on the excavation is, according to seasoned Israeli archaeologist Ronny Reich, “certainly the reason why scholarship based on archaeological data and conclusions is limited, in spite of the importance of the discovery and the vast volume of studies published on the texts … The publication of the full report is of extreme importance.”e
