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Whatever you've heard, the dawn of the discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls dates back to only a century or so after the last of them were deposited in their caves. Ancient reports survive from the early centuries of the Common Era which speak of Greek and Hebrew scrolls found in jars out in the desert east of Jerusalem. The early church father Origen apparently used some of these sources in the preparation of his multilingual text of the Hebrew Bible known as the Hexapla. Reports of scrolls in desert caves occasionally crop up in surviving inscriptions until the 8th Century CE. Since at least some of these discoveries reached and influenced early Christian Biblical scholars like Origen, we can only speculate about their limited impact on the final development of the text of the Bible.

Let's fast forward to the 1890's. Solomon Schechter, a popular and clever scholar of Talmud at Cambridge University was confronted with a mystery: suddenly, fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts were popping up among recent university library acquisitions all over Britain. The texts were medieval copies of much older works, mostly from the so-called Apocrypha,a body of religious literature partially preserved in the Catholic Bible, but not in the Hebrew or Protestant Bibles.

Schechter's dilemma: where did the texts originate? Fortunately, the clues all led to one site already known to scholars-the mysterious genizah, or attic storeroom for old texts located at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Built in the 10th Century CE, the Ben Ezra Synagogue had been collecting the great works of Jewish religious writers for a millennium, including original documents written by the illustrious Moses Maimonides, who led the synagogue community from 1177-1204. In 1897, Schechter found himself in the airless, filthy attic of the synagogue where sacred discoveries awaited him: over 100,000 paper fragments, including portions of the apocryphal Book of Ben Sira,and a mysterious, incomplete body of material he called Fragments of a Zadokite Work. The latter proved to be a medieval copy of a much older text recording the formation and the views of a Jewish sectarian group from nearly 2,000 years before Schechter's time. Solomon Schechter had discovered a copy of one of the greatest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the so-called 'Damascus Document, more than 50 years before bedouin and scholars found the "first editions" of the work in the Judean Desert.

Fifty years later: three shepherds of the Ta'amireh bedouin tribe roamed the western cliffs facing the Dead Sea near a spring called Ein Feshka and near an old ruin known locally as Qumran. It was a late afternoon in the winter of early 1947. Jum'a Muhammed was scrambling up the rocky cliff path to bring down some of his overly adventurous goats. On his way up, he noticed two crevices in the cliff. He threw a rock into one and heard pottery break. Immediately dreams of treasure filled his imagination. He told down to his cousins, who took a look. Two mornings later, the younger cousin, Muhammed Ahmed al-Hamed, nicknamed "the Wolf," squeezed his way into the cave while his companions lay sleeping hundreds of feet below. After some frantic and probably destructive searching through a row of jars standing around the sides of the cave, "the Wolf" emerged from the cave with what we now know as the Great Isaiah Scroll, a commentary on the Biblical prophet Habakkuk, and a "Manual of Discipline" for the mysterious community whose ancient, ruined village lay only a mile away. To future generations of scholars, this would be the motherlode of scrolls discovery: Cave 1.

Within weeks, the tribesmen would return to gather more scrolls, including another copy of the Book of Isaiah, the War Scroll and the Thanksgiving Scroll. While their dreams of gold and jewels had been dashed, they still hoped for some small gain from selling these worn-out, somewhat odorous scrolls. They made their way to Bethlehem, where local friends sent them over to a cloak salesman named George Shamoun and a cobbler who dabbled in antiquities whose nickname was Kando. For a one-third commission on whatever price they could garner for the scrolls, Kando and Shamoun agreed to look for a buyer.

They found him in the leader of St. Mark's Syrian Orthodox Church of Old Jerusalem. The Metropolitan Samuel had heard the rumors of ancient text discoveries that floated through Bethlehem and Jerusalem in the first part of 1947. The Metropolitan arranged to have Shamoun and some bedouin make the dangerous journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem as the Holy Land was racing towards the war that would give Israel her independence. In the first attempt to show the scrolls, the church's doorkeeper refused entry to the unkempt scroll bearers, since both they and the contents of their bag were just a bit too smelly. Two weeks later, a second meeting was arranged, and the Metropolitan agreed to pay the equivalent of $97 for the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Manual of Discipline (in two pieces) and other scrolls. Now that the Metropolitan Samuel owned the scrolls, he had to go about proving that they weren't fakes. This proved a harder job than he had thought.

In the meantime, another man had been following the rumors about ancient scrolls. E. L. Sukenik of Hebrew University was an outstanding archaeologist and ancient text expert who was intrigued by the possible discovery. In November of 1947, just days before the United Nations Palestine Partition vote that would trigger new levels of violence, Sukenik had managed to acquire the scrolls not bought by the Metropolitan: the War Scroll, the Thanksgiving Scroll and a smaller scroll of Isaiah. About the same time, a colleague of Sukenik's told him of his own visit to St. Mark's Church to examine some ancient scrolls. Ultimately Sukenik got to examine the great Isaiah Scroll himself, and immediately made an offer to Samuel's representative. On the verge of a deal, the Metropolitan delayed a decision on the advice of colleagues. The months drifted by, and the tide of Middle East violence eliminated any chance for renewing the negotiations. E. L. Sukenik had glimpsed the great Isaiah Scroll, but would die five years later without acquiring it and the remaining Cave I discoveries for the new state of Israel.

The Metropolitan Samuel's delay turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. The War of Independence forced him to move the scrolls in his possession first to Beirut and ultimately to Worcester, Mass. in the U.S. Despite his best efforts, there were few interested buyers. In a desperate attempt at publicity, Samuel took the scrolls to the Library of Congress in Washington for display. Fox Movietone newsreels of the era showed the Metropolitan grandly unrolling the great Isaiah Scroll on a long library table. Miraculously, the scroll suffered this and other indignities with comparatively little damage. The reasons for buyer reticence were clear enough. Some scholars still doubted the authenticity of the scrolls. Both prospective private and institutional purchasers shied away from Samuel, who had been declared an outlaw in Jordan. His legal claim to the scrolls was also in question.

With nothing to lose, Samuel took a last shot at a sale: he placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal on June 1, 1954:

MISCELLANEOUS FOR SALE

THE FOUR DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 B.C. are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group. Box F, 206 Wall Street Journal.

With this unlikely gamble, Samuel's luck briefly improved. A reader of the Journal informed the late E. L. Sukenik's son about the ad. The son was none other than the recently retired General of the Israel Defense Forces, Yigael Yadin. Yadin had now returned to his first love, archaeology. The ad told him there was still a chance to redeem a dying wish of his father: to claim the remaining Cave I scrolls for Israel. Yadin immediately got to work on the thorny problems of authenticating the scrolls still owned by Samuel, finding benefactors who would front the purchase price, and fooling the Metropolitan Samuel's agents into believing the purchasers private American investors with no connection to the state of Israel. Within a month, these daunting challenges were overcome. The Metropolitan Samuel was $250,000 richer, and a Mr. Sidney Esteridge, acting secretly as Yadin's agent in the affair, was the new owner of the scrolls. In February of 1955, Israel announced that it had acquired the remaining Cave I scrolls. The "Metropolitan Samuel Trust" for Syrian Orthodox churches briefly grew much richer. Unfortunately, the legal papers were botched, and the purchase price was declared by the IRS to be personal income. Uncle Sam got the bulk of the $250,000. The Metropolitan Samuel, having been duped into selling the scrolls to Israel, emigrated to the United States.

Throughout most of the 1950s into the 1960s, Jordanians and Israelis scoured their respective portions of the Judean Desert, searching for more scrolls. Ultimately, a total of 11 text-bearing caves would be revealed. Cave 3 revealed the unique Copper Scroll, an ancient treasure map locating the site of hidden riches of the Second Temple. Cave 11 yielded the Temple Scroll, the longest, and perhaps most controversial of all the scroll discoveries. As often as not, the local bedouin were the first to discover these caves, exercising their usual scientific skill (or lack of it!) in looting the contents, leaving hundreds to thousands of scraps of scroll material in their wake. The crowning example of this folly was the 1952 bedouin 'discovery' and looting of Cave 4, only 100 meters or so from the ancient site of Qumran, then being excavated by Father Roland De Vaux of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. Not a single complete scroll came from Cave 4 after the bedouin found it. But literally thousands of scraps ultimately were collected, from antiquities dealers, and from the bedouin themselves at an agreed price of up to $5.60 per centimeter of fragment.

These fragments made their way to the Rockefeller Museum in Jordanian East Jerusalem. There Father DeVaux and a small team of scholars with mixed academic skills began to piece the fragments together. After years of fitting pieces together, De Vaux's team determined that they had 500 discrete documents represented in the thousands of Cave 4 fragments. Most of these 500 documents were no more than 10% complete. Needless to say, this made the challenge of analyzing and publishing these fragments all the more difficult. With a small group of young, somewhat inexperienced scholars (none of whom were Jews or spoke Hebrew as a native tongue), De Vaux's task of publication drifted from years to decades in length. By 1990, nearly 20 years after De Vaux's death, only 20% of the fragments had been published. Initial publication efforts by this team sometimes resulted in painful humiliation. Johnny Allegro, one of the first to publish a modest volume of texts assigned to him, was roundly embarrassed when another young scholar in the clique, John Strugnell, published a blistering critique of Allegro's work that was actually longer than the book Allegro had just published!

By contrast, the Israeli program of scroll publication went forward quickly and brilliantly. To be fair, the Israelis had an easier task: their scrolls were complete, not a myriad of damaged fragments. In addition, two of the scrolls were copies of the Book of Isaiah. In addition, the Israeli level of scholarship applied to the challenge of analyzing and publishing their texts assured a far superior product.

The Six Day War of 1967 introduced new opportunities and new complications to the story. Israel's capture of East Jerusalem and its Rockefeller Museum meant that predominantly ancient Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls dealing almost exclusively with issues of Jewish religious interest were returned to the patrimony of the only Jewish state in the region, Israel. Since practically none of the world's nations recognized Jordan's sovereignty over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel's claim to the scrolls (barring a native Palestinian claim) was by far the stronger. Ironically, Israel did nothing with the Rockefeller Dead Sea Scroll collection. It left the entire corpus in the hands of Father De Vaux and his successors for the next 23 years.

Israel's inaction was not without reason. Although De Vaux's team was moving slowly, there were making some headway as of 1967. Israel was also catching international flak for its conquest of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, respectively. Claiming ownership of the scrolls would simply exacerbate an already difficult diplomatic position for Israel. Besides, didn't Israel already have the most important and best preserved scrolls safely stored in the Israel Museum "Shrine of the Book" complex? In short, why rock the boat over thousands of 'leftover' fragments? This feeling was certainly re-inforced when the Israel Defense Forces, with the advice of Professor Yigael Yadin, managed to track down long hidden "Temple Scroll," buried under the floor of one of the Bethlehem dealers of Cave I scrolls, Kando. Yadin would spend much of the rest of his life analyzing and translating this most intriguing of scrolls. For the a discussion of the Temple Scroll and its contents, go forward to Session IV, A Journey Through the Scrolls. To enjoy the farcical adventures of Professor Y(adin) and the mysterious peddler of the Temple Scroll, Mister Z, click <here>.

By the mid-1980's, many scholars had lost patience with the clique that controlled the scroll fragments at the Rockefeller. As noted above, only 100 of the 500+ discrete documents in their care had been published. The confirmation of John Strugnell as scroll editor-in-chief did little to inspire hope that the remainder of the fragments would soon be published. After all, Strugnell had been limping along since the 1950's with a glacial rate of publication himself, showing relatively little generosity in sharing his hoard of texts with Israeli and other scholars. With the beginning of the Palestinian Intifada in 1987, it seemed even less wise than in 1967 for Israel to break the local stranglehold on the texts.

Then, in one dramatic and humiliating stroke, John Strugnell personally broke the deadlock. Strugnell's emotional and alcohol-related problems had long been a poorly kept secret in the professional community. In a 1990 interview published both in Israel and the Biblical Archaeology Review, Strugnell described Judaism as a "horrible religion," the solution to which was "mass conversion." His blatant anti-Semitism now officially exposed, Strugnell was dismissed as editor-in-chief of the Rockefeller Museum scroll fragments, to be replaced by the Israeli scholar Emanuel Tov. Nevertheless, Strugnell, as his small clique of colleagues, was allowed to retain control of the hoard of scroll fragments long ago assigned to him.

To break the clique's monopoly on the scroll fragments, modern scholarship had to call on a new and powerful tool: the personal computer. Back in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Museum Dead Sea Scrolls team developed a concordance of all the non-Biblical texts and fragments, citing each and every word with its exact line location and neighboring words in each text fragment. In 1988, the Rockefeller scrolls editor-in-chief, John Strugnell, under intense pressure to publish the roughly 400 texts still to be released, agreed to produce 30 copies of the concordance for distribution worldwide to members of the clique of scholars who were permitted to work on the scrolls. Strugnell and other members of the clique feared that the concordance might be 'stolen' by a determined outsider who might eventually use the comprehensive concordance to reconstruct all the texts. One man with access to the newly distributed concordance was Professor Ben Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union College, a recognized Dead Sea Scrolls scholar living in Cincinnati. With the help of a talented graduate student and computer buss, Martin Abegg, Wacholder was able to transfer the entire concordance into a PC database, and generate complete and relatively accurate transcripts of the ancient Hebrew fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls so long hoarded by the scholarly clique led by Strugnell. The Biblical Archaeology Society began publishing these transcripts in September 1991. This was the first crack in the "wall" the Rockefeller clique had built many years before to maintain exclusive control of the study and publication of the scroll texts.

Before the year was out both the Biblical Archaeology Society and a holder of a complete set of photographic negatives of the scroll fragments (the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA) announced that they would make these materials available publicly. The Biblical Archaeology Society ultimately published its negatives. By late 1993, the distinguished publishing house E.J. Brill of Leiden had released a complete set of the scroll fragment photos on microfiche. The mysterious scroll fragments, long and jealously guarded by a small group of scholars, were now available to the public.

For me, personally, the "liberation" of the scrolls offered an immediate and satisfying reward. I could now go to the nearby UC Berkeley microfiche library and examine scroll fragments for use in Lehrhaus' advanced Biblical Hebrew course.

It has been repeatedly argued in a number of articles and books that the publication of the scroll fragments at the Rockefeller was deliberately suppressed/delayed for decades by the clique of scholars under pressure from the Catholic Church. The argument goes that the Church feared the fragments contained information that would undermine elements of the core dogmas of Christianity. To save the Church, the documents must be suppressed. The best known work that outlines this intriguing theory is Baigent and Leigh's The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception. Although intriguing and mysterious, the theory has no basis in fact. The real causes for the delay are simple:

(1) The group that formed to organize, reassemble and edit the scroll fragments for publication was small, for many years no more than 15 to 20 people. Many were truly outstanding scholars in the field. Some were painfully unprepared for the challenge.

(2) The thousands of scroll fragments De Vaux and his team collected in the 1950s presented a nearly impossible challenge. Imagine reassembling 500 different jigsaw puzzles from these scrambled fragments when fully 90% of the pieces were missing!

(3) Some of the scholars in the clique focused more on the fame they gained from having exclusive access to their assigned group of fragments. Publishing only bits and pieces over the decades assured one's popularity (or was it notoriety?) over a very long career.

The story of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls would be hilarious if you could just ignore how profoundly important their message is to the modern world. As we enter the 21st century, the process of publishing translations and analyses of all the scrolls is progressing well. It will take most of the next century to fully appreciate what the scrolls tell us about early Judaism and Christianity. However, even at this early date in scrolls research and interpretation, it's clear that their message will enhance rather than undermine our understanding and faith in Judaism and Christianity.

Continue to Part II of this course.