Dead Sea scrolls publication
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a significant collection of approximately 900 ancient texts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, discovered in caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956. These scrolls include a range of works, with about a quarter consisting of biblical texts from the Hebrew Bible, while the remainder encompasses theological, liturgical, and community-related writings. The publication of these scrolls has a complex history, beginning in the 1950s with the release of complete manuscripts, but quickly becoming a contentious issue due to the slow pace of publication and access to the texts.
In 1991, a pivotal moment in the publication process occurred when scholars and advocates called for broader dissemination of the scrolls, leading to changes in the translation team and the start of new publishing efforts. Notably, the Biblical Archaeology Review began releasing texts from Cave 4, which contained a large number of manuscripts, enhancing scholarly access. As a result, academic research into the scrolls has expanded, providing insights into groups outside of mainstream Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. The ongoing official publication continues through the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series, ensuring that these ancient texts remain a vital resource for historians, theologians, and scholars worldwide.
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Subject Terms
Dead Sea scrolls publication
The Event Dispute over the control and publication of many previously unpublished scrolls
Date Available beginning in 1991
Manuscripts of the Dead Sea scrolls were made available to all people with the requisite language skills to read them.
The Dead Sea scrolls are a group of approximately nine hundred Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in bluffs overlooking the western shore of the Dead Sea. Of these scrolls, very few were found complete and intact. Approximately a quarter of them were of books in the Hebrew Bible (only Esther is not represented) or other texts considered scriptural by some groups but not others. The rest are extra-biblical texts treating topics such as theology, worship, life in a religious community, war, and the future. The earliest publications, which appeared in the 1950’s, were of complete or nearly complete manuscripts. The remaining texts, usually more fragmentary, were assigned to a small group of distinguished scholars to piece together, edit, and translate. These scholars, once they had invested time in the painstaking work of editing the manuscripts, understandably also wanted to publish the earliest scholarly discussions of them.
A dispute arose over the pace of the publication of the scrolls, and it came to a head in 1991. Most parties agreed that the pace had been too slow and that the scrolls needed to be distributed more broadly. In the late 1980’s, Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), began pushing for making photos of the scrolls generally available. In 1990, authorities in Israel, where the scrolls were being kept, dismissed the translation team and appointed Emanuel Tov as the new head of the translation project. He, in turn, appointed a new team of sixty translators.
In 1991, the BAR began publishing the texts from Cave 4, the cave with the largest number of manuscripts. These texts were reconstructed by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg, professors at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, from a concordance of manuscripts in Cave 4. The concordance—which listed all the words in the manuscripts along with the name of the book and the number of the page and line in which they appeared—was produced in the 1950’s but not published until 1988. Next, the publisher of the BAR issued a two-volume collection of photographs of the unpublished scrolls. About the same time, a donor secured two sets of photographic copies of the scrolls from the Jerusalem Department of Antiquities and gave one set to Claremont University and the other to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The library soon made available its photographs to all qualified scholars. Since then, several scholars have published their own studies. The official publication of the scrolls continues, however, in the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series published by Oxford University.
Impact
The speed with which the Dead Sea scrolls became available to all scholars was increased after 1991, and the scrolls have revealed information about groups outside of Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.
Bibliography
Eisenman, Robert, and Michael Wise. The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of Fifty Key Documents Withheld for over Thirty-five Years. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
Martínez, Florentino García. The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English. 2d ed. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1994.