Posted on 11/16/2001 1:24:02 PM PST by Asmodeus
Associated Press
November 16, 2001
Last of Dead Sea Scrolls About Ready to Publish
NEW YORK -- Half a century after the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls was found in desert caves, archeologists celebrated the near completion of the publication of the ancient texts.
"It's a very happy moment that we can say today that all this is completed," Emmanuel Tov, the project's editor in chief, said Thursday at the New York Public Library.
"After 54 years of excitement, expectation, tribulation, much criticism and a little praise, with the help of much inspiration and even more perspiration, the publication has been finalized." The scrolls, which date from 250 BC to AD 70, were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves overlooking the western shores of the Dead Sea.
For decades, access to the complete scrolls was tightly guarded by a small group of international scholars. After the release of bootlegged copies of some of the texts and an archive of scroll photographs, a new group of nearly 100 scholars took charge of the scrolls in 1991. Tov, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was named to head the project, pledging to expedite its publication.
The 900 scrolls and commentaries in 37 volumes were primarily written in Hebrew and Aramaic on more than 15,000 leather and papyrus documents. They were found near the ruins of the ancient settlement Hirbet Qumran, nine miles south of Jericho in the West Bank.
They are believed to have been written by the Essenes, an austere, insular Hebrew sect.
Scholars consider the scrolls a treasure of Jewish history and religion. They provide insights into what the Hebrew Bible looked like more than 2,000 years ago. They also contain prayer texts, biblical interpretations, fragments of poetry, compositions on wisdom and various sectarian documents.
Tov and his colleagues said that nothing in the scrolls is likely to shed a negative light on Judaism or early Christianity as once was thought possible. Tov said Jesus was not mentioned in the scrolls, noting that most of them were written before Jesus was born.
The work "leads us to believe that the Bible went through many stages of changes," Tov said.
Tov's team, overseen by the Israel Antiquities Authority, has issued 28 volumes; two more are in their final stages. They are published by Oxford University Press under the general title "Discoveries in the Judean Desert."
One scroll contains a Hebrew song of thanksgiving that Tov and his colleagues dedicated to New York City in honor of its steadfastness following the Sept. 11 terror attacks: "Bless the one who wonderfully does majestic deeds, and makes known his strong hand."
In the mid 90s I was struck by the Scrolls bug and began reading a great many books relating to the scrolls, history & archeology of the levant, and the historical Jesus. These books were hard & soft back copyrighted from the 50s to '96. The collection includes most of the modern day scholars as well as those from the fifties. Many of these books are out of print. A few of the authors: Thiede, Morton Smith, Wise-Abegg-Cook, Golb, Burrows, Eisenman, Shanks, Silberman, a Whiston translation of Josephus, Mansoor, Edmund Wilson, several of Allegro's books including the "mushroom" book, Pagels, Vermes, Baigent & Lee, Brandon(2), Lohse, Moscati, Chiera, Frankfort, Albright(3).
I also have 11 volumes on the Crusades including Runciman, Salidin, Anna Comnena diary, and one on the Albegensian crusade.
I also have 17 volumes by non-scholastic authors including Hancock, Cremo, Stichin, Baigent & Lee, Gardner, Knight & Lomas.
Would someone please buy all these books from me?
Except that the scrolls were not "discovered" by the scholars; they were almost all discovered by Bedouin Arabs.
Regarding the cabals - the motivation ascribed to the Catholicism, ie the truth of the scrolls will destroy Christian doctrine, holds no water IMHO. There is plenty of evidence to question Biblical truth, if one so desires. However, I do believe that the original scroll researchers "conspired" to withold access. Not because of doctrinal controversy, but merely hubris stemming from their exclusive academic position.
Not in this day and age it isn't. By this time next Christmas, prepare for "The Scrolls Done Gone," an unauthorized sequel to the Dead Sea Scrolls, told from the view of a half-Roman brother to one of the Essenes.
"As I recall, it reads like much of the Kennedy assassination stuff."
Excellent analogy. As I recall the authors attemped to present St. Paul as the false teacher described in the scrolls. Most of their "evidence" was rather spotty and open to multiple interpretations. It was really nothing more than a vicious attack on the Vatican and Christianity in general.
More in the nature of scholarly quibbles than serious disagreement:
1. The text of each of the books of the Hebrew Bible was certainly fixed by the time of Jesus, but there were a handful of books whose status (in the canon or not) was still being debated until about 170 C.E. (Song of Songs made it in by one vote; Ben Sirach stayed out by an almost-as-close vote; a few others were also in dispute for a while).
2. I am no scholar of the Christian Scriptures, but in the parts I have read, Jesus refers to "the law (torah) and the prophets (nevi'im)"; I've never seen a reference to the "writings" (q'tuvim).
Bump for the outstanding Metzger books.
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