A research library will give scholars access to photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, ending the virtual monopoly by a select few who controlled the archaeological treasures for 40 years.
The decision by the Huntington Library in this Los Angeles suburb was to be announced Sunday. It overjoyed scholars who believe the world deserves access to vital historical documents but dismayed those who feel their years of work on the scrolls are being stolen from them.The 800 animal-skin scrolls, most in fragments, were recovered from caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and the early 1950s. They are stored at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem under the control of Israeli antiquities authorities.
Written by a Jewish sect during the time of Jesus, the scrolls contain the oldest known copies of the Old Testament and other biblical writings and invaluable information about the period that spawned Christianity and modern Judaism.
The Huntington, one of the world's leading research libraries, will allow qualified scholars worldwide to have unrestricted access to microfilm of 3,000 photographic negatives of the scrolls' fragments, library director William A. Moffett said Friday.
Until now, access to 500 scrolls was limited to a small group of scholar-editors with exclusive authorization from Israel to assemble the jigsaw puzzle of fragments, and to translate and publish them. Other academics long complained that access was too limited and publication too slow.
Other groups published the other 300 scrolls.
Only 100 of the 500 scrolls held by the scholars' group have been published in the past 40 years, said Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington.
He said access has been controlled by a "small cartel of monopolists."
Philanthropist Elizabeth Hay Bechtel persuaded Israel in 1980 to allow the scrolls to be photographed by Robert Schlosser, the Huntington's chief photographer, to protect copies from war and natural disaster.
One set of negatives went to the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, Calif., which Bechtel founded. She entrusted a second set to the Huntington, which became the owner when she died in 1987.
The library's action is "an unequivocal statement of the importance of freedom of information" and deals a blow against secrecy that "breeds inefficiency, corruption, bitterness and paranoia," said Moffett, the library director.
"I don't know if it's a case of piracy, unscholarly behavior, theft or what, but it's certainly contrary to the agreement" in which Israel allowed the scrolls to be photographed, said John Strugnell, the scrolls' former chief editor who teaches Christian origins at Harvard University.
"This work is still our work. We haven't finished it yet," said Strugnell, who was fired as editor last year after calling Judaism "a horrible religion."
Shanks said Strugnell and his colleagues "have controlled the scholarship in an entire field of study. Imagine what a researcher must feel when he's trying to understand the intellectual history of a period and someone says, `Here is a vast collection of extraordinarily significant documents, but you can't see it.' "
Strugnell and Eugene Ulrich, a University of Notre Dame theologian and an editor of the scrolls, insisted access to the scrolls was more open than Shanks contends. Strugnell said "incompetent" scholars were denied access.