Releasing of the Last of the Dead Sea Scrolls

LAST September, a scholarly logjam that had lasted for decades finally broke. A bitter dispute between students of the Dead Sea Scrolls appeared to be ended, although a new dispute may have begun.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947 and in the years that followed. They were of great value in demonstrating the essential accuracy of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures and in shedding light on religious conditions in Palestine when Jesus was on earth. (Isaiah 40:8) While some manuscripts were published reasonably quickly, in 1991 almost 400 manuscripts were still unpublished and unavailable to most scholars. Many felt, like Professor Ben Zion Wacholder, “frustrated by the realization that at the current rate of publication we shall all be dead when the corpus of Dead Sea texts become available to the world.”

But that situation changed last September. First, Professor Wacholder and an associate, Martin Abegg, announced that they had ingeniously used a computer to reproduce the closely guarded texts. Then, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, U.S.A., announced that they had photographs of the original manuscripts and would make these freely available to reputable scholars. Evidently, a number of photographic copies of the scrolls had been made to ensure their preservation. Sets of photographs had been stored in different locations, and eventually one ended up in the Huntington Library.

One scholar called this turn of events ‘the scholarly equivalent of breaking down the Berlin Wall.’ Official editors called both the publication of the computed text and the releasing of the photographs ‘stealing.’ Likely, the argument about ethics will rage for years. Meantime, it appears that many additional scholars will finally be able to consult the whole body of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[Picture on page 32]

Representation of a commentary on Habakkuk, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls