Sea Scrolls Scholar Wins Copyright Case

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a scholar who spent years reconstructing one of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls has a copyright to his work, ending an eight-year legal battle that pitted the scholar against the prestigious Biblical Archaeology Review, its editor and two California professors.

In a unanimous ruling, a three-member panel of the court upheld a lower court decision that professor Elisha Qimron’s work on the only letter found among the approximately 800 Dead Sea Scrolls was creative and deserving of a copyright.

The Biblical Archaeology Society, publisher of the Biblical Archaeology Review, printed without Qimron’s knowledge a bootleg version of his work in 1991 to accompany a collection of more than 1,700 photographs of scroll fragments. Qimron sued the society, along with review Editor Hershel Shanks, Robert Eisenman of Cal State Long Beach and James Robinson of Claremont Graduate University.

Shanks said at the time that he published the work as part of his crusade to broaden access to the scrolls, which for decades after their discovery were accessible only to a small team of editors that included Qimron.

The court ruled that Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society should pay Qimron about $50,000. Eisenman and Robinson were not held responsible for paying the fine.

“Qimron’s work was . . . not merely technical, ‘mechanical,’ ” the court said in its 32-page decision. “These were the fruits of a process in which Qimron used his expertise, specialty and imagination, exercised judgment and considered several options . . . these clearly indicate Qimron’s original contribution.”

During the trial, experts testified that Qimron had to reconstruct about 40% of the text of the letter, written by the leader of the Judean Desert sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls to a Jewish leader in Jerusalem. The letter is considered one of the more important pieces of the scrolls, because it lays out the sect’s beliefs and how they differed from mainstream Judaism.

“I think that justice won,” Qimron said Wednesday. “What the court has said is that reconstructing scrolls is creative work and nobody can take such a work and publish it in his name.”

Reached by telephone at his home in Long Beach, Eisenman said he had expected the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court’s ruling. He said he and Robinson have suffered professionally because of the case.

“The case shifted attention away from the act of publishing 1,785 photographs of the scrolls that broke the monopoly over the scrolls, and punished opposition scholars like ourselves by tying us up in a court case for eight years,” Eisenman said. “Opposition scholars were tarred with this brush of having used other people’s works. We have been unjustly maligned.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls, considered one of the greatest archeological finds of the last century, were discovered in 11 caves along the Dead Sea from 1947 to 1956. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek on animal skins and papyrus, they are fragments of biblical and non-biblical texts, including the oldest version of every book of the Hebrew bible except the Book of Esther. They are held by the Israeli Department of Antiquities.

In opposition to mainstream scholarly thinking on the scrolls, which holds that they are pre-Christian documents, Eisenman maintains that they were Christian documents that warranted a reinterpretation of that religion.

In a statement released Wednesday, Shanks said he and the review “respectfully disagree with the decision of the Israel Supreme Court” that Qimron had copyright over the reconstruction of the letter’s text from 70 fragments.

“Our publication . . . was done in the context of our effort to free the scrolls from a generation of secrecy, an effort that was ultimately successful,” Shanks said. “Today, Dead Sea Scroll research is burgeoning and flourishing.”

In fact, an international team of 60 scholars from Israel, the U.S. and Europe has published 30 volumes of the scrolls. The last nine volumes are due to be published in another year, according to Emmanuel Tov, director of the editing project.