Israelis Grant Wider Access to Dead Sea Scrolls

Overseers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the objects of an unholy tussle over who may see and write about them, announced a plan Sunday to grant wider access to photographs of remaining unpublished fragments.

But the liberalized rules did not include permission to use photos for publishing a complete text of scroll manuscripts.

The move by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, caretakers of the original scrolls, seemed designed in part to restrain other institutions from handing out the material for anyone to study and publish while its own scholars are left behind.

The Huntington Library in San Marino, in a move that shook up the universe of biblical studies, announced in September that it would open access to its photographed copies of the scrolls.

“We want to promote scholarship,” said Emanuel Tov, the chief editor of the current scroll research team of the Antiquities Authority. Eighty percent of the original find has been published over the past 40 years. Authorized scholars poring over the remaining 20% have been slow to produce their findings, leading to criticism that the monopoly held in Israel has obstructed rather than enhanced research.

Eugene Ulrich of the University of Notre Dame, the chief American editor of the scrolls publication project, hailed Sunday’s announcement as “a welcome clearing of public confusion regarding the scrolls’ status.” And James Sanders, president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, where one of four photographed sets of the scrolls is housed, said, “Let’s celebrate at least the open-access policy . . . that now allows scholars to use and quote from the documents.”

But Hershel Shanks, editor of the Washington-based Biblical Archeological Review and a longtime crusader for open access, said the authority’s new policy is too little too late because of its limit on publication.

Unfortunately, the authority “has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th Century,” Shanks said.

Shermiyahu Talmon, a scholar in Israel, conceded that the Huntington Library’s decision to free up their copy of the photographs “pressured us to move faster.”

Tov said that other institutions in possession of photographs have agreed to the rules set by the Antiquities Authority that permit only “bona fide scholars” to study the scrolls “for their own use and not for the production of a text edition.” In addition to the Huntington and the manuscript center in Claremont, they are the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and Oxford University Center for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.

“Scholars may turn to the Israel Antiquities Authority or to the aforementioned institutions with a request to see any of the photographs,” a statement from the overseeing group said. But researchers have to promise not to use the photos for producing a complete text.

“We still have our own scholars, who have been working one, two and three years, to protect,” said Tov.

William A. Moffett, director of the Huntington, said Sunday that the library has “succeeded in forcing the Israeli government to back down” from its strict policy of controlling all access to the scrolls. But he said scholars “won’t tolerate” anything less than “the unequivocal, fundamental principle of intellectual freedom. . . . I expect the (antiquities) team will have to make further concessions.”

Moffett added that the Huntington could not accept the authority’s policing of who can publish scroll texts “because we are not ourselves publishing these materials, and we don’t know what scholars who have access may do with them. . . . That’s none of our business.”

The scrolls, which were found in caves near the Dead Sea by shepherds between 1947 and 1956, came into Israel’s possession when the Israeli army took control of East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East War.

The 2,000-year-old documents shed light on possible origins of Christianity as well as Judaism as practiced at the time Rome ruled what was then known as Palestine. Israeli authorities have sought to allay suspicions that remnants of the scrolls contain explosive religious information that might upset worshipers of either religion. “We are not trying to keep secrets,” Tov said.

Williams reported from Jerusalem and Chandler from Los Angeles.