What are the oldest known fragments of the Hebrew Bible worth? On the antiquities market, pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls might go for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—or more. In spiritual and publicity value, such artifacts may seem priceless, especially if the buyer is an educational institution with a religious orientation.
But for some scholars, the purchases are more a cause for concern than for celebration. Will such acquisitions by academic institutions, even though they are made legally, help drive up the market for looted antiquities and rare artifacts? And is the boost to scholarship really worth the large sums of money those fragments cost?
Last month, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, revealed that it had acquired three scroll fragments, along with a stylus that might have been used by the scribes who created the ancient documents. The news follows an announcement last fall by Azusa Pacific University, near Los Angeles, that it had obtained five fragments along with several other rare biblical artifacts, including first-edition King James Bibles.
Some details of the acquisitions, including just how much they cost, have not been made public. But the purchases put Azusa Pacific and Southwestern Baptist in very select academic company. The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute owns some fragments. Few if any other American academic institutions have Dead Sea Scrolls in their collections. (Princeton Theological Seminary, which has been reported to have fragments, says it does not.)
The acquiring institutions say they are trustees for pieces of a collective cultural heritage, and that coming into possession of those fragments is not just excellent publicity but a genuine lift for their academic programs in Bible languages and archaeology.
Preserved in a Bank Vault
As significant objects go, it’s hard to beat the appeal of the scrolls. They came to light in the 1940s and 1950s in a series of caves on the shores of the Dead Sea, near the ancient city of Qumran. Remains of close to 900 scrolls have been identified. Dating back as far as 250 B.C., they contain portions of most of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians know as the Old Testament)—the oldest versions ever found—written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, mostly on vellum. The scrolls also feature important sectarian writings.
Most of the known scrolls are now in the hands of the Israeli authorities and private collectors. The fragments now finding their way to the market have been owned by one family for decades, according to Weston W. Fields, executive director of the Jerusalem-based Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, which for almost 20 years has helped support the publication and study of the scrolls.
Mr. Fields said that the family has legal ownership of the fragments, and it deposited them in a bank vault in Zurich in the 1960s as the political situation in the Middle East deteriorated. “There’s nothing at all illegal about what they’re doing,” Mr. Fields said. “It’s like a 401(k) program that kicked in” as family members have needed money for various reasons.
Both Azusa Pacific and Southwestern Baptist consulted with Mr. Fields about the authenticity of the scroll fragments they were seeking to buy. They also wanted to know whether the asking prices were fair. “My answer to both of them was yes, they’re in the ballpark of being fair,” Mr. Fields said, adding that Southwestern Baptist is still in negotiations with the sellers to acquire more fragments. (The seminary confirmed to The Chronicle that talks are still under way.) “In terms of the whole deal, it’s millions of dollars, not hundreds of thousands—put it that way.”
Too High a Price?
Some scholars feel queasy at the thought that universities will shell out that kind of money in these hard-pressed times, even for objects as symbolically and historically important as pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls. On his blog, Robert R. Cargill, a Biblical archaeologist, imagined “a race of archaeological one-upmanship,” in which institutions compete to scoop up high-profile objects in order to boost their academic reputations.
Mr. Cargill is the institutional technology coordinator of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, and the chief architect and designer of UCLA’s Qumran Visualization Project. “Universities are charged with educating people, not acquiring cool artifacts,” he said in an interview. “If someone gives a university something, OK. But universities should spend the bulk of their money on educating students and not on cheap public-relations ploys in an attempt to increase credibility overnight with the purchase of an antiquity.” Mr. Cargill also worries that high-profile acquisitions will encourage would-be looters to see what else they can dig up and put on the market.
Eric M. Meyers, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University, got a call from a Southwestern Baptist trustee, asking whether it was wise to buy the fragments on offer. He advised the trustee that any such purchase should be approached with caution, in part because of concerns about looting but also because of the cost. “The prices were out of sight—not in the tens of thousands, but moving on up,” he said. “Really a lot of money for small fragments.”
L. Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist, said he could not reveal just how much money was changing hands in the transaction. But he told The Chronicle that a donor had made a gift specifically for the purchase. “The money that was given to this had no hope of going to the building of a new dormitory or something like that,” Mr. Patterson said. “You have to get people to give to what touches their hearts.”
Fear of Unintended Consequences
One note of caution came from inside Southwestern Baptist itself. Steven M. Ortiz is an associate professor of archaeology and biblical backgrounds and director of the Charles D. Tandy Archaeological Museum there. He also directs the seminary’s participation in excavations at Tel Gezer, a site near Jerusalem that dates back to the Iron Age. Although he is satisfied that the fragments “have been legally acquired or removed from the State of Israel,” he still advised the administration against the purchase because of what he calls “the climate of looted artifacts. ... I did suggest that they should not pursue this,” he said.
Now Mr. Ortiz describes himself as torn. “I also realize the value of these, and acquiring them does allow us to create a center of research,” he said. Southwestern Baptist already has strong Bible and language programs, he says, and he thinks that the scroll fragments will attract scholars and generate more interest in the study of biblical artifacts and manuscripts.
Faith and school pride are also at stake. “One, because we’re a confessional school, a seminary, this represents God’s word. Two, because we’re Texans, there’s a sort of pride in having these objects here in Fort Worth,” Mr. Ortiz said. “We’re not going to have a big biology department, but because of the scrolls, we can become leaders into the research of biblical texts, and the scrolls give us energy.”
Sharing Through Publication
But the impact goes far beyond institutional prestige, said Robert R. Duke, an assistant professor of undergraduate biblical studies at Azusa Pacific. “We may be the ones that have the piece of paper that says we are the owners, but we need to see ourselves as the preservers of something that is important to all of us,” he said. “An acquisition like this is wonderful for APU, and for me to be even geographically this close to them is exciting. But for me at least, when it comes to the scholarship, the most important thing is to see how the Dead Sea Scrolls give great resources to both Jewish and Christian scholars."Both Azusa Pacific and Southwestern Baptist say that they plan to have their fragments carefully documented and properly published for researchers to study. “I’m so eager to get these fragments into the hands of scholars,” said James H. Charlesworth, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at Princeton Theological Seminary, who is working closely with Azusa Pacific. “It’s a marvelous step in the right direction, because these aren’t people who are trying to hide the scrolls.”
It’s not clear how much scholars are likely to learn from the Azusa Pacific and Southwestern Baptist fragments. “Not a heck of a lot” is the assessment of Mr. Meyers at Duke. From what he has heard so far, “there are no bombshells in this.” Mr. Ortiz at Southwestern says that most of those fragments are known to scholars but that they have not been adequately photographed and published for study.
Southwestern’s president, Mr. Patterson, sees the acquisition as a step forward not just in prestige but in academics. The acquisition, he says, will move his institution toward the revival of its archaeological program. “There was a time when most of the larger seminaries had archaeological programs,” he said. “That has gone by the wayside, of course.” With Mr. Ortiz on the faculty and the scroll fragments giving some stature to the seminary’s collection, Mr. Patterson would like to hire another archaeologist, establish a Ph.D. program, and perhaps find other biblically significant sites to excavate in the Middle East—money permitting, of course.
He also described himself as “almost ecstatic” to have a fragment of the Book of Daniel among the acquired pieces; he believes its dating confirms that the book is prophetic literature rather than backward-looking history, as many interpreters read it.
Mr. Charlesworth of Princeton and Mr. Fields of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation call part of the Azusa Pacific purchase—a fragment of Deuteronomy 27—particularly intriguing. They think it may settle an old debate about where a central worship point was to be located—Mount Ebal, which Mr. Charlesworth says was known as “the hill of curses and offense,” or, as this fragment has it, Mount Gerizim, home to the Samaritan community,
The scrolls do, of course, have terrific publicity value, and Mr. Patterson doesn’t downplay it. He points out that whenever portions go on display, as some of Israel’s holdings did recently in an exhibition in Toronto, they draw record crowds. (Southwestern will house its fragments in museum space attached to a new chapel it is constructing, and Azusa Pacific plans to sell tickets to an exhibition showcasing its new holdings this spring.)
Mr. Fields agrees that the attention that comes with the scrolls can mean a lot, in several ways. “The publicity value of having some Dead Sea Scrolls is worth more than it’s possible maybe to estimate, both from the financial standpoint but also from the standpoint of value to donors in a religious context,” he said. “Because these, after all, are 2,000-year-old fragments, no matter what their size, of the most precious book to the most religious people in the world.”
