PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : After 30 Years of Yearning, We Saw the Texts Suddenly Appear

We are students of texts that are sacred to millions of people seeking the essence of humanity’s religious heritage. We are delighted that the Dead Sea Scrolls, intended for the Essene savants, have become a subject debated on the street.

What has delighted us most is that barely three weeks after the appearance of our “A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls,” the Huntington Library in San Marino, despite threats of lawsuits and heated criticisms from biblical scholars and Israeli authorities, decided to make available its cache of photographs of the ancient texts. All scholars, not merely those supposedly competent and designated to work toward a “definitive interpretation” of the scrolls, will now be able to present their understanding of the documents.

What has disappointed us is that in the hoopla surrounding the announcement of our book, its essence has been completely bypassed. We are not publicity seekers.

At the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature last November, we presented some new hypotheses regarding Essene theology and the integrity of certain texts. As is common in Dead Sea research, the unknown contents of unpublished scroll manuscripts were used to challenge our ideas.

When we returned to Cincinnati, it occurred to us that we might be able to test our ideas if we could computer-generate the scrolls using the available word lists of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the shelves of the Hebrew Union College library. The experiment proved successful.

Suddenly, texts for which we had yearned 30 years appeared on the page, word by word, line by line, and occasionally paragraph by paragraph. Frequently, with aid of our knowledge of scripture and the published scrolls, the text lit up, revealing its context as well as ideology. We became aware that the texts of the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls could be virtually reconstructed from the library’s concordance.

What started as a manual experiment--cutting and pasting lines on the computer screen--became a determined effort. Each key word, embedded in its context and indexed by reference to a manuscript, fragment, column and line, was entered into a data base.

All this toil was solely for our own personal use. It was only little by little that we became aware of the larger ethical question of a handful of individuals treating these priceless documents as personal property to be bequeathed to heirs and favored students.

Our publication ended 40 years of censorship imposed by this clique of scholars. For the first time, we used relatively new computer technology to reconstruct ancient Jewish writings. But the media and the scholarly community have ignored the words that make up our book.

Without so much as a glimpse at our volume, reputable scholars have concluded that since the word lists we used to generate the scrolls were reputedly 20% erroneous, the completed book must be only 80% accurate. Some of these controllers of the ancient texts threatened to sue us.

Although we remain confident in the technical accuracy of our computer-generated version, we are excited by the prospect of having access to the Huntington’ photographs. What we have called “preliminary” will now, with this photographic testimony, become a definite edition of the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls. Imperfect as this edition might be, it will, provided we have the necessary funding, make available the complete works of the non-biblical texts found in the caves of Qumran 40 years ago.

Meanwhile, our modest volume reveals a great deal that has not been known. It makes available the Essene calendars--what have been titled the “Priestly Courses” ( Mishmerot Hakohanim )--charting time from what the sect reckoned as the creation of the universe. One of these calendars claims to give precise dates of the Judean rulers of the second and first centuries B.C.E. Other texts present what may be called the sect’s Mishnah (exegesis of biblical law). The scrolls can now shed new light on the roots of Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.

According to the latest reports, Israel’s Department of Antiquities is calling for a December conference in Jerusalem. The happy result could be the official release of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the world.