Secrecy Keeps Controversy Over Dead Sea Scrolls Alive

The Dead Sea Scrolls controversy over secrecy and delays in publication continued to unfurl this week amid some promises of speedier action.

For its second issue in a row, the bimonthly Biblical Archaeology Review examined the topic, charging that the team of about 20 scholars given publishing rights “has now become more an obstacle to publication than a source of information.”

Hershel Shanks, editor of the magazine published in Washington, called for opening the unpublished materials to research by any scholar who wishes to see them.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls, which include the oldest manuscripts of Old Testament books and the writings of a monastic Jewish sect based near the Dead Sea, were found in caves by Bedouins in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The writings have intrigued scholars for the possible light they may shed on the period when Christianity was born and rabbinic Judaism started to form.

Broken Sections, Fragments

About half the scrolls, mostly in broken sections and fragments, remain to be described in published works and even their photographic plates are subject to restrictions by the scholars assigned to them.

In fact, all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on microfilm in Claremont at the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research.

But James A. Sanders, president of the center and a scholar who published a volume on the Psalms Scroll years ago, said that he is honor-bound by the designated scholars to limit access.

“I’m very sympathetic to scholars,” said Sanders, who agreed that the history of the scrolls’ research often has been an embarrassment to scholarship. “But the other side of the coin is that if they just published photos of the pieces, that could be misleading. A lot of those fragments have to be readjusted,” he said.

Restrictions on such access was recently attacked by Robert Eisenman, chairman of religious studies at Cal State Long Beach. In letters to John Strugnell of Harvard Divinity School, the new team director for scrolls publication, and Amir Drori, who heads Israel’s Department of Antiquities, Eisenman charged that only certain favored scholars were allowed to see the materials.

Drori told the Associated Press in Jerusalem this week that he has set up a program to require annual progress reports and got agreements to publish everything in seven years. Biblical Archaeology Review said the 1996 target date was a “hoax and a fraud” because it did not say what would happen if scholars failed to meet deadlines.

Plan of Operation

But Drori, the former commander of troops in Lebanon during Israel’s 1982-85 invasion, said: “For the first time, we have a plan, and if someone does not complete his work on time we have the right to deliver the scrolls to someone else.”

Strugnell, now working at the French-run Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, disclosed that an unpublished letter in the scrolls from the sect’s leader, the “teacher of righteousness,” to Jerusalem’s high priest should be out by year’s end. “That’s a top priority,” he told Associated Press.

However, Eisenman said that letter is an illustration of the secrecy surrounding much of the research. Its existence was generally unknown until Strugnell first described it at a conference of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars in 1985, Eisenman said in an interview. A “pirated” photocopy of the letter and its translation has circulated among some scholars since then.

The Anchor Bible commentaries also were affected by the delays and secrecy. In 1972, biblical scholar Delbert Hillers of Johns Hopkins University completed what he intended as the most thorough, comprehensive volume on the Old Testament Book of Lamentations.

But he later learned he had to revise it because he and scholars were unaware that much earlier chapters of Lamentations had been available for years in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Those particular chapters have finally been issued, and Hillers was expected to have his revision finished by year’s end, according to Doubleday, publisher of the biblical commentaries.