With significant assistance from a computer, two biblical scholars at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati have published a bootleg version of a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The pace of the official publication of the scrolls has been a source of bitter controversy for several years. Many scholars have accused the small group of editors responsible for transcribing the documents of deliberately holding up their publication and restricting access to the manuscripts.
“This is an attempt to break their monopoly,” said Ben Zion Wacholder, a professor of Jewish law at Hebrew Union who, with Martin G. Abegg, a doctoral student there, reconstructed the unauthorized text.
The first of five volumes of A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls was released last week, and the entire text is expected to be out in a year or so. The edition was published by the Biblical Archaeology Society. Hershel Shanks, president of the society and editor of its Biblical Archaeology Review, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the official handling of the scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, which consist of biblical and other manuscripts dating from approximately the first century B.C. through the first century A.D., were discovered beginning in 1947 in a group of caves above the Dead Sea, in territory now controlled by Israel.
In the early 1950’s, responsibility for deciphering the scrolls was given to a small group of editors, and until recently that work has largely remained in the hands of those scholars and their graduate students and close colleagues. In the last year, efforts have been under way to expand the number of researchers on the project and to hasten the scrolls’ publication.
Depending on how the material is measured -- by individual manuscript or by total amount of text, for example -- estimates of how much the editors have already published vary from as low as 20 per cent to as high as 80 per cent.
Mr. Wacholder and Mr. Abegg reconstructed their texts using a concordance assembled in the late 1950’s, the existence of which was not widely known until 1988. A concordance is an alphabetical list of every significant word in a document, together with the words immediately surrounding it and all the places each one appears in the text.
The researchers were able to devise a computer program that took that list and reassembled the words in reasonably coherent order. Mr. Wacholder said the document he and Mr. Abegg produced is a combination of the computer-generated text and additional interpolation based on the researchers’ own knowledge of the scrolls.
When it is complete, the Preliminary Edition will consist of roughly 220 unpublished, “non-biblical” manuscripts from what is known as Cave Four, which held the largest cache of scrolls but also those in the most fragmentary condition. Mr. Wacholder acknowledged that his reconstruction was not perfect.
“But we are sure that it approximates the original,” he added.
Eugene Ulrich, a professor of Hebrew scriptures at the University of Notre Dame, who is one of three general editors on the Dead Sea Scrolls project, agreed that the volume was about “80 per cent accurate.” But he called it a “pastiche” of material that contained very little that was new. He argued that most of the volume’s content had been written about by other scholars or published in part.
As pressure has mounted to increase access to the unpublished scrolls, rumors have surfaced that the editors might be suppressing unpleasant revelations about the beginnings of Christianity.
Mr. Wacholder attempted to put that speculation to rest. “We haven’t seen evidence of that,” he said. “There’s nothing there they couldn’t have published.”