The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Battle for the Scrolls

CHAPTER 7

The publication of the Scrolls had slowed to a trickle after 1960. By then, several members of the editorial team had dispersed—some, like Cross and Strugnell, to demanding academic positions. By 1972, some signs of impatience were beginning to appear. At the behest of Geza Vermes, professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford, Oxford University Press demanded a timetable for publication. Only Cross, Strugnell, and Skehan responded, all promising to submit their material by 1976. The promises went unfulfilled, which is not to say that they were not made in all sincerity. In 1977, on the thirtieth anniversary of the first discoveries, Vermes stated famously that “unless drastic measures are taken at once, the greatest and most valuable of all Hebrew and Aramaic manuscript discoveries is likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century.”1

By this time, de Vaux was dead, and had been replaced as editor-in-chief by Pierre Benoit O.P., a gentle New Testament scholar who was ill-fitted for the job. He resigned in 1985, two years before his death. At this point he was replaced by John Strugnell. Strugnell’s tenure as editor-in-chief, which lasted a mere five years, ushered in the most turbulent period in the biography of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

John Strugnell

Strugnell had been something of a child prodigy when he became the youngest member of the editorial team in 1954, at the tender age of twenty-four. He had a remarkable facility for ancient languages. He was reputed to be second only to Milik in deciphering fragmentary texts. He had a distinguished career as a professor, first at Duke University from 1960 to 1967 and then at Harvard University, where he trained many of the leaders of the emerging field of “intertestamental literature,” which morphed into “Second Temple Judaism” in the latter part of the twentieth century. He had less facility, however, for the practical things of life (such as driving a car). While his speech was elegant, his appearance was often disheveled. Despite his phenomenal learning, he was never the sole author of a book. His reluctance to publish was largely a result of perfectionism. His longest publication before 1985 was a scathing review of a volume of fragments from Cave 4, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, volume 5, which had been published by Allegro in 1968. The review ran to more than a hundred pages. Already by the early 1970s, it was apparent that Strugnell suffered from manic depression, compounded by alcoholism. His condition deteriorated when his marriage ended in 1974.

He might seem, then, to have been an odd choice for the role of editor-in-chief of a daunting project in 1985, but unless the Israel Antiquities Authority had been willing to go outside the circle of the original editors, the options were limited. Frank Moore Cross, at the height of a very distinguished career as Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Semitic Languages at Harvard, where he supervised more than one hundred doctoral dissertations, did not want the job. J. T. Milik, who by this time had left the priesthood and married, also suffered from alcoholism, and was arguably in worse shape than Strugnell. (Milik was eight years older.) Whatever Strugnell’s problems, he knew the corpus of the Scrolls intimately. Nonetheless, in view of his own inability to publish, he was hardly the person to expedite the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He did, however, try. It was he who first invited Israeli scholars to collaborate in the editing process. His collaboration with Elisha Qimron led to the momentous presentation of 4QMMT in 1984, which revolutionized the study of the Scrolls. (He had enlisted the cooperation of Qimron already in 1979.) Other Jewish scholars who were now brought into the process included Devorah Dimant, of Haifa University, Joseph Baumgarten, of Baltimore Hebrew College, and Emanuel Tov, who would eventually become editor-in-chief. (Other, non-Jewish, scholars were also added to the team, notably James VanderKam in 1989.) Only one volume of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert appeared during Strugnell’s tenure (only 2 volumes had appeared in the much longer tenure of his predecessor), but his modest expansion of the editorial team would eventually bear fruit.

Somewhat ironically, the presentation of 4QMMT, which was one of Strugnell’s major contributions to the study of the Scrolls, was one of the factors that led to the upheavals at the end of his tenure. Prior to this disclosure, it was possible to believe that all the most important texts had already been published. Now it was evident that this was not so, and the scholarly community, and also the media, became increasingly insistent that the rest of the corpus be made public.

Another development of the 1980s which was intended to advance the cause, and actually did so, also added to popular discontent. Cross and Strugnell began to assign unpublished works to their graduate students at Harvard, as topics for their dissertations. (This development happened long after my own time as a student at Harvard. There was not even a course on the Scrolls when I studied with Strugnell there in 1969–72.) These students did excellent work, and several went on to become leading scholars in the field (Carol Newsom, Eileen Schuller, Sidnie White Crawford, among others). A few other very young scholars from other institutions were also entrusted with editing texts. This advanced the publication of the texts, but it also bred resentment, not only among senior, well-respected, scholars like Geza Vermes but also among scholars like Norman Golb and Robert Eisenman, who suffered the added frustration that their views were not respected in the scholarly community. In 1989, Eisenman and Philip Davies, a prominent but contentious British scholar, sent a well-publicized request to Strugnell to see certain scrolls. The request was denied, and the denial was also well-publicized. Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), now regularly devoted the pages of his journal to a persistent campaign for the release of the Scrolls. Strugnell became defensive. “It seems,” he said on an ABC newscast, “we’ve acquired a bunch of fleas who are in the business of annoying us.” Shanks responded by putting a photo of Strugnell on the cover of the March/April issue of BAR. The cover, including the photo, was covered with large fleas.

Yet another well-intended move had unintended results. In 1988, some thirty copies of a concordance to the Scrolls that had been compiled in the 1950s were made and distributed to various academic institutions to facilitate the work of scholars. One of these copies was at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Martin Abegg, who was completing his PhD there under the direction of Ben Zion Wacholder, set about reconstructing the texts from the concordance with the aid of a computer. In September 1991, the first fascicle of reconstructed texts was published by Shanks’s Biblical Archaeology Society. The ethics of this action was debated in the New York Times and Washington Post. From the viewpoint of the official editors, it was an act of theft. Shanks responded that the texts rightly belonged to the public. The editorial writers tended to accept the latter argument.

By this time Strugnell’s tenure as editor-in-chief was drawing to a close. In October 1990, Emanuel Tov was appointed to serve as co-adjutor editor-in-chief. Eugene Ulrich was appointed co-editor for the biblical scrolls. The critics were not appeased. The Scrolls were still under tight editorial control. In November 1990, however, Strugnell’s position became untenable, when an interview he gave to an Israeli journalist, Avi Katzman, was published in the newspaper Ha’aretz (November 9, 1990). A modified version was printed in BAR in the January/February 1991 issue. In this interview, Strugnell declared himself an “anti-Judaist” and made negative remarks about the Jewish religion. Judaism was “a horrible religion” which should have disappeared through conversion.

Strugnell had always been quaintly old-fashioned in his theology. (He once argued that the ascension of Jesus to heaven was an empirically established fact, because the disciples had seen him depart in an upward direction.) He took a perverse delight in being politically incorrect, whether the subject was the Vietnam war, feminism, or theology. He liked to bait his liberal friends, and they reacted indulgently. No one took him very seriously on these matters. Many Christian scholars were critical of the Israeli takeover of the West Bank. And undoubtedly many Christian theologians remain supersessionist, that is, they think that Judaism has been superseded by Christianity, despite disavowals by Church authorities, although few are so indiscreet as to say so. The statements in the interview, however, went beyond anything that his friends could have anticipated. His manic depression and alcoholism were no doubt contributing factors, and he was goaded on by Katzman. In a later interview with Shanks, in BAR July/August 1994, he disavowed responsibility for the formulation of his remarks in the Ha’aretz interview, and expressed his position as a belief in the superiority of Christianity rather than a judgment on Judaism. Strugnell had a strong record of helpfulness and collaboration with Jewish students and young scholars, including several Israelis. It was he who first brought Jewish scholars into the editorial team. Eighty-five scholars signed a letter to BAR offering a qualified defense, not of the sentiments expressed in the interview, but of the man. “While we find these remarks abhorrent, it is our understanding that they were made at a time when he was seriously ill. We cannot know how much his illness influenced what he said.” They remained “deeply grateful to a man who has contributed so much to the study of ancient Judaism.” Several of the signatories were Jewish.

Not everyone was so indulgent. One prominent scholar reputedly declared that Strugnell had “drenched the Scrolls in the blood of the Holocaust.” Editorial writers at the New York Times rushed to the moral high ground. The decision to remove Strugnell from his post as editor-in-chief had apparently been made even before the interview with Katzman. Now it was inevitable. He was replaced by a triumvirate of Emanuel Tov, Eugene Ulrich, and Émile Puech. Eventually, Tov would assume primary responsibility for the publication process. Strugnell was hospitalized on his return to the United States and he was placed on medical leave from Harvard. He would yet make some significant contributions to the edition of major texts (4QMMT, which did not appear until 1994, and a lengthy wisdom text called 4QInstruction). But his career, and his health, were essentially ruined.

It is to the great credit of a number of Jewish and Israeli scholars, including Emanuel Tov, and the young Israeli couple, Hanan and Esther Eshel, that they continued to befriend Strugnell after this debacle, and to show understanding for his condition. He had been kind and helpful to them, and they remained loyal to him. He received strong support from former students and friends who genuinely abhorred the sentiments expressed in the interview. Even Hershel Shanks, who insists with some justification that Strugnell was “an intellectual anti-Semite,” came to speak of him as “a Christian gentleman,” who continued to meet Shanks and dine with him when the editor came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, even though Shanks had played a major role in ruining his life. Strugnell was a flawed character, to be sure, but he was never malicious. That is more than could be said for some of his most vocal detractors. He died in 2007.

The Huntington Library

The eventual decision to make photographs of the Scrolls available to anyone who wanted to consult them came about through a strange chain of events. Elizabeth Hay Bechtel, a Californian philanthropist, had made significant financial contributions to the publication of the Scrolls. Consequently, in the early 1980s, she obtained two sets of photographic negatives of the Scrolls. One she deposited in the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC) at Claremont, which she had funded. The other, she kept for herself. Subsequently, however, she had a severe falling out with the director of the ABMC, James A. Sanders, and deposited her second copy of the Scrolls in the Huntington Library, a prestigious institution that specialized in Renaissance Literature and in English and American history. In making the donation, Mrs. Bechtel asserted her right of ownership and placed no restrictions on access. This took place in 1982. The Scrolls were remote from the dominant interests of the Library, and they attracted little attention there.

When the triumvirate of Tov, Ulrich, and Puech assumed responsibility for the Scrolls, however, they were concerned that a set of photographs lay beyond their control. In July 1991, Ulrich wrote to William Moffett, who had become librarian of the Huntington in 1990, asking for the return of the set of photos that had been deposited at the Huntington.2 The request had the opposite effect from what was intended. On September 22, 1991, Moffett announced that the photos of the Scrolls were available to any authorized reader at the Huntington. The announcement was met with protests from the editors and from the Israel Antiquities Authority. Tov wrote to the librarian that he had a legal and moral obligation not to release the photographs. The director of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Amir Drori, declared that the Huntington’s action was “not ethical.” The news media, however, sided with the Library. William Safire, in the New York Times, called the IAA officials “insular jerks.” On October 27, 1991, the IAA dropped its resistance and lifted all restrictions on access to the Scrolls.

The Eisenman-Wise Affair

The lifting of restrictions, however, did not bring an end to all controversy. About a year later, Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise published a book entitled The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered. The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for Over 35 Years (Rockport, MA: Element, 1992). Eisenman had become prominent in the campaign for the release of the Scrolls. “As a result,” he wrote in the Introduction to the book, “photographs of the remaining unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to him. These began coming to him in September of 1989. At first they came in small consignments, then more insistently, until by the autumn of 1990, a year later, photographs of virtually the whole of the unpublished corpus and then some, had been made over to him.” The source of these photographs has never been disclosed.

Eisenman proceeded to take two actions with this material. On the one hand, he prepared a facsimile edition of all unpublished plates. At first, this was to be published by E. J. Brill of Leiden, but ten days before the scheduled publication in April 1991, Brill withdrew from the project. Hershel Shanks leaped into the breach. In November 1991, the two-volume Facsimile Edition was published by the Biblical Archaeology Society. By that time the restrictions on access to the Scrolls had been lifted, but the Facsimile Edition made photographs readily available to scholars who did not have easy access to them. It was published under the names of Eisenman and James M. Robinson, a senior New Testament scholar who had played a prominent role in breaking a similar monopoly on the Coptic texts from Nag Hammadi several years earlier, but who never worked on the Scrolls. The Introduction emphasized that this edition was in no way definitive. It consisted of a collection of photographs, without commentary, and the editors claimed neither credit nor responsibility for the way the fragments were grouped in the photos. The bulk of the photographs were said to go back to the early years after discovery, and did not reflect later work by the official editors. Eisenman and Robinson wrote that they were not privy to the source of the photographs, but that they were satisfied that they did not come from their home institutions, California State University at Long Beach, the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity of Claremont Graduate School or the latter’s sister institution, the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center at Claremont. Nor, they added, did they come from the Huntington Library.

Eisenman also set to work on a critical edition of selected texts. Since he himself claimed no competence in epigraphy or work with manuscripts, he enlisted the help of Michael Wise, then an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. Wise was a student and protegé of Norman Golb, but Golb was not directly involved in this project, although Wise apparently consulted him at various points. According to the Introduction to The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, “two teams immediately set to work, one under Professor Eisenman at California State University at Long Beach and one under Professor Wise at the University of Chicago. Their aim was to go through everything—every photograph individually—to see what was there, however long it took, leaving nothing to chance and depending on no one else’s work.” Most, if not all, of the transcriptions were completed by Wise’s group at the University of Chicago. In fact, some of the texts included in the volume, such as the controversial “Son of God” text, 4Q246, had already been published in part. A Polish scholar Zdzislaw J. Kapera, had published Strugnell and Qimron’s reconstruction of the halachic treatise, 4QMMT (see chapter 4) in his journal, The Qumran Chronicle, but had desisted from distributing it after he was rebuked at an international conference in Madrid in March 1991. Other texts had been the subject of lectures by scholars to whom they were assigned. The readings and translations in The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered were somewhat hastily done, and many would be corrected later, but they drew the attention of scholars to several interesting texts that had not been previously discussed.

The book was controversial for several reasons. The Introduction propounded the view of Eisenman, which was not shared by Wise, that the Scrolls provide “a picture of what Christianity actually was in Palestine,”—a violent, militant, messianic movement. (The German translation of the book was entitled Jesus und die Urchristen, “Jesus and the Original Christians.”) It implied that the texts had been “withheld” because they would undermine the traditional view of Christianity as a peaceful movement, and also the “official” scholarly view that the texts should be ascribed to the Essenes. The most controversial aspect, however, concerned the ethics of publishing these texts at all without the permission of the editors to whom they had been assigned. More specifically, several scholars charged that Wise and Eisenman had made use of the work of those editors, which they had available in the form of hand-outs or, in the case of 4QMMT, of a pirated edition, and, in effect, had plagiarized them.

The Wise-Eisenman volume appeared a few weeks before a major international conference in New York, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and held at the Blood Center. This conference had been organized by Norman Golb with the assistance of Michael Wise and others.3 The schedule called for a panel discussion on the ethics of publishing scholarly texts. Golb had envisioned that this panel would roundly condemn the “hoarding” of the Scrolls by the official editorial team prior to 1991. Now, however, the Wise-Eisenman book became the center of discussion. A group of nineteen scholars, including members of the official editorial team, published a letter in the newspapers denouncing the new book. Some prominent scholars, including Tov and Ulrich, refused to attend the conference. In the ethics panel discussion, Lawrence Schiffman delivered a blistering critique of Wise and Eisenman. He insisted that his criticism did not stem from the fact that they had published texts that were assigned to others. Rather, the central point of criticism was that “credit is not sufficiently given to all of the scholars whose work was used in preparing the volume.”4 In several cases, he charged, “the authors depended on handouts distributed at conferences, the existence of which they appear to hide from the readers in order to portray themselves as producing the editio princeps of the text in question.” He cited three examples, most significantly MMT, where the authors misread John Strugnell’s handwriting in one case. Norman Golb responded to “this intemperate attack” on Wise and Eisenman, and questioned the motives of the critics: “While claiming that they are in no way opposed to the publication of Qumran texts by others, the signers of the document … attempt to discourage precisely such publication by those whose views on Qumran origins differ radically from their own.”5 He offered his personal attestation of the fact that Wise and the graduate students under his direction had studied the photographs independently. (Schiffman had not denied that they had done original work, but claimed that they had also used the work of other scholars without fully acknowledging it.) Wise pointed out that the new edition of 4QMMT differed from the Strugnell-Qimron edition at dozens of points, and actually regarded it as two texts. He also noted that the subtitle of the book (“documents withheld for over 35 years”) had been imposed by the publisher. Heated discussion followed. (The irony of the name of the building, the Blood Center, did not go unnoticed.) After the panel, a few scholars met with Wise with a view to resolving the conflict. At the end of the conference, Wise issued a statement that he had come to understand the position of his critics more fully. “I regret the impression, unintended by me, which emerges from the introduction concerning the degree to which some parts of the work were done independently. I am sorry that the documentation for certain portions of the book for which I was responsible was incomplete, and that I did not more fully express indebtedness to colleagues whose work I consulted … It is moreover regrettable that I did not have adequate input into the final form of the book, and that is something that should not have happened.”6 In response, the scholars who had signed the public statement of condemnation retracted it.

Since fuller editions of many of the texts in question appeared in the next few years (several by Émile Puech), the importance of the Wise-Eisenman volume was short-lived. Nonetheless, it contains some interesting readings, and is still worth consulting. Some scholars, notably Puech, continue to regard it as a work of plagiarism and refuse to cite it. Wise was denied tenure at the University of Chicago, but he has subsequently written several important studies on the Dead Sea Scrolls.⁷

The Qimron-Shanks Lawsuit

When Zdzislaw Kapera published the composite text of 4QMMT, he had been threatened with a lawsuit by the Israel Antiquities Authority. He apologized, and refrained from further distribution. When Hershel Shanks published the same text in his Publisher’s Foreword to the Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Eisenman and Robinson, however, Elisha Qimron sued in an Israeli court. Shanks, in his Foreword, had acknowledged that the transcription was the work of Strugnell, and that the commentary was his work “with a colleague,” but he did not mention Qimron’s name. He later claimed that the reason for the omission was that he did not want to appear harshly critical of a young, untenured, scholar, but he admits that practically no one believes this.8 Eisenman and Robinson were included in the lawsuit, but Shanks had accepted primary responsibility.

The Israeli court asserted its right to try the case, on the grounds that three copies of the book had been mailed to Israel. It promptly issued an injunction prohibiting the defendants from distributing the reconstructed text. Consequently, it was omitted from the second edition of the Facsimile Edition. The trial took place in February 1993. The court found in Qimron’s favor, and awarded him a total of 100,000 New Israeli Shekels (more than $40,000) as compensation for loss of earnings and mental distress. (He had requested between three and four times that amount.) Shanks appealed, but the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the decision. Since Shanks had to pay Qimron’s lawyer’s fees as well as his own, in both courts, the trial cost him in excess of $100,000.

The lawsuit was remarkable in several respects. An ancient text cannot be claimed as personal property by a modern scholar. The merits of this case rested on the extent of Qimron’s creativity in reconstructing the text. If it could be shown that the reconstruction was entirely accurate, it would not be protected by copyright. But in fact, while Qimron played an important role in the interpretation of the text, he seems to have played only a very minor role in reconstructing it. The photographic record of the Scrolls shows that the text had been substantially reconstructed by 1961, long before Qimron came on the scene. Qimron only cited two cases where he had made relatively minor adjustments. Accordingly, it would seem that the main credit for reconstructing this scroll should go to John Strugnell, who did not join the lawsuit. When this was pointed out in a review by Florentino García Martínez, a highly respected authority on the Scrolls, who taught at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the University of Leuven, in Belgium, Qimron demanded an apology for defamation of character and threatened to utilize “all legitimate means at his disposal to redress this wrong,” but he subsequently dropped the matter. Nonetheless, the official edition of 4QMMT in Discoveries in the Judean Desert, volume 10, which appeared in 1994, was copyrighted in Qimron’s name alone, without derogating from the rights of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The judgment of the Israeli court has been widely discussed, and legal opinions are sharply divided about it.9 It seems unlikely that an American court would have reached the same decision. Most scholars can attest that the potential financial income from editing a volume or from lecturing on the Dead Sea Scrolls seldom reaches the amount awarded to Qimron, much less the amount he claimed. It might well be argued that his reputation for litigiousness has hurt his subsequent career far more than Shanks’s unauthorized publication of MMT, which could be viewed as free publicity.

The irrepressible Shanks still tweaked Qimron’s nose one more time. After the official publication of 4QMMT in 1994, Shanks requested and obtained permission from Oxford University Press to reproduce the text and translation in the Biblical Archaeology Review. Qimron threatened to have him held in contempt of court, and prevailed on Oxford University Press to send Shanks a letter, protesting that his request for permission to republish the text had been disingenuous. In this case, too, Qimron eventually decided to let the matter lapse.

Rafael Golb

There would be yet another lawsuit relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most bizarre of all. On November 19, 2010, the New York Times reported on page A24 that Rafael Golb, son of Norman Golb, was convicted in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan of establishing e-mail accounts pretending to be Lawrence Schiffman, and sending messages to university officials in which Schiffman supposedly confessed to plagiarism. Golb, a fifty-year-old real estate lawyer in New York, with a PhD from Harvard, said that the e-mails were merely parodies, but that he believed that Schiffman had plagiarized the work of his father Norman. (Schiffman and the elder Golb disagree on most issues relating to the Scrolls.) Golb had allegedly also sent e-mails in the name of other scholars, and sometimes anonymous e-mails, complaining that exhibitions of the Scrolls did not adequately represent the views of his father. (The father has been consistently and vocally critical of museum exhibits on the Scrolls, in blogs and letters to board members.) The younger Golb was present at the conference in the Blood Center in New York in 1992, when Schiffman had taken the lead in criticizing the work of Wise and Eisenman. His motivation has not been articulated, but it would seem to arise from a concern to defend his father’s views and to discomfit his perceived opponents. At the time of writing he has appealed his conviction.

Why the Fury?

Two famous sayings come to mind in rehearsing these disputes. One is Henry Kissinger’s dictum that academic disputes are so bitter because there is so little at stake. The other is Edmund Burke’s judgment on the French revolution: “vanity made the revolution; liberty was only the excuse.”

There can be little doubt that scholarly, and unscholarly, egos played an enormous role in the most heated disputes. Editors who were reluctant to make texts available to other scholars were guarding their position of privilege, even if they honestly believed that open access would lead to the proliferation of nonsense by incompetent headline seekers. Those who pressed most vocally for the release of the scrolls were not free of self-interest, either. There were reputations to be made and standing in the scholarly world to be achieved. Scholars set great store by claims to have been the first to publish something, even though the significance of the achievement may not be universally appreciated. Heated debates sometimes gave rise to personal animosities, and these contributed to some of the most bitter controversies. It should be said, however, that the acrimonious disputes involved only a small number of people at any time. Most scholars in the field have good collegial relations and only a limited appetite for controversy.

That said, the release of the Scrolls was unequivocally a good thing. Despite the dire warnings of the official editors, chaos did not result. There has been wild speculation on occasion, to be sure, but the marketplace of ideas has a way of eventually separating the wheat from the chaff. The whole episode can serve as a lesson for the way future discoveries should be handled. The privileges of editors to whom material is assigned cannot be extended indefinitely. Scholarship is best served by making material available promptly in provisional form rather than waiting for supposedly definitive editions that might take a lifetime to produce.

The reason why the Scrolls, more than other notable discoveries such as the Coptic codices from Nag Hammadi in Egypt, caught the imagination of the public is due to the fact that they come from a time and place of exceptional importance in the history of the Western world. As primary documents from Judea in the time of Jesus, they offer a window on the context in which Christianity was born, if not directly on the movement itself. More directly, they give us an unprecedented view of what Judaism was like before the destruction of Jerusalem and the rise of the rabbinic movement. Like all archeological discoveries, they provide raw data, unedited by later authorities, and consequently offer the hope of insight into how things really were before the church and the synagogue constructed their official genealogies. The stakes, then, for both Judaism and Christianity are considerable, since the new discoveries potentially place official accounts in question and undercut the authority of religious authorities.

Several attempts have been made to exploit that potential and to use the Scrolls as evidence against the veracity of traditional Christianity, and to a lesser extent, of traditional Judaism. The most widely known of these attempts is that of the English writers Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, in their 1991 book, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, who darkly hinted at a Vatican conspiracy to suppress the truth. They accepted the view of Robert Eisenman, that the Scrolls represent messianic Judaism, including the Jesus movement, in the first century CE, and that this movement was vastly different from the way it is portrayed in the Gospels. Far from being peace-loving, it was xenophobic and militant. Eisenman’s views were also endorsed by another popular writer on subjects relating to Near Eastern Archeology, Neil Asher Silberman, in his 1994 book, The Hidden Scrolls. Neither Baigent and Leigh nor Silberman were scholars trained in this material, and their judgment was utterly at variance with that of the scholarly community. Scarcely any scholar has found Eisenman’s reading of the Scrolls persuasive at all. (Neither does any reputable scholar give any credence to the rumored “Vatican conspiracy.”) But Eisenman’s work has garnered attention, because it is a dramatic representation of the kind of conflict between received tradition and new discovery that for many people is the lure of archeology. If he were proved right, it would show that the great religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity were built on misrepresentations of their origins. This possibility was obviously appealing to writers who sought to attract public attention. No one sells books by showing that what we believed all along turns out to be true.

But for better or worse, the Scrolls do not overturn either Judaism or Christianity in this dramatic fashion. They show that some ideas of early Christianity (e.g., that the messiah could be regarded as son of God) were not unprecedented. Some scholars have been a shade defensive about this, but in fact scholars have always known that the early Christians adapted Jewish and other ideas in various ways. Of course the Scrolls do not confirm any particular set of religious beliefs either. They show that certain forms of Judaism were already well attested in the first century BCE, and that the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible goes back to pre-Christian times, even if other forms of the text were also known around the turn of the era. The fundamental claims of divine revelation on which both Judaism and Christianity are based, however, are not so easily confirmed or disconfirmed by any historical discovery.

The Scrolls are not great literature, with the arguable exception of the religious poetry of the Hodayot or Thanksgiving Hymns, and, of course, of the biblical texts. Neither do they contain any great new religious insights that might transform modern theology. The core of the corpus is made up of sectarian writings. While these writings are not as xenophobic or hate-filled as Eisenman and his followers would have it, they reflect the views of religious extremists, who tried to separate themselves from the world. There is a reason why this movement did not survive, and why its tenets were not taken up by mainline Judaism. They were simply too extreme to have enduring appeal.

Nonetheless, the Scrolls are of extraordinary historical importance. Before their discovery, we had no literature in Hebrew or Aramaic from Judea in the period between the Maccabees and the Mishnah. The Scrolls fill out our knowledge of Judaism in this period in countless ways. Despite the sectarian ideology of much of the corpus, it also includes much material that is reflective of the common Judaism of the time. Much of the debate about the Essene hypothesis has been fueled by conflicting desires to see the Scrolls as marginal and negligible, on the one hand, or as representative of mainline Judaism on the other. Neither of these categorizations can be sustained in isolation. The sectarian movement reflected in the Scrolls was marginal, insofar as it was a movement that died out and had no discernible influence on later Jewish tradition. But it was not completely isolated, and the writings found in the caves are illuminating in many ways for the Judaism of the time.

As scholars have increasingly recognized in the last quarter century, the Scrolls are documents of ancient Judaism. Despite sensationalist claims, they are not Christian, and do not witness directly to Jesus of Nazareth and his followers. Nonetheless, they illuminate the context in which Jesus lived, and in which earliest Christianity took shape. While the Scrolls sometimes provide parallels to particular ideas in the New Testament, more often they provide a foil. The ways of the Teacher of Righteousness and of Jesus were alternative paths in the context of ancient Judaism, different ways in which the Jewish tradition might be appropriated and different interpretations of its scriptures.

All the Scrolls have now finally been delivered to the light of day. The biography of the corpus is still in its adolescence. Its early years have been turbulent, but we may hope that it will benefit from mature scholarship in the years ahead.