Two American professors have released a secret text of the Dead Sea scrolls, ending a four-decade monopoly by a small band of scholars who had jealously guarded the ancient parchments in a Jerusalem museum.
A majority of the 2,000-year-old scrolls had been languishing in unpublished form since their discovery in 1947 by a bedouin in the caves of Qumran in what was then Jordan-occupied Palestine.In publishing the first of five proposed volumes Wednesday, two professors from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, broke the lock of the tightly knit scholars who maintain the scrolls at the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, said Hershel Shanks, the editor of "Biblical Archaeology Review."
According to Shanks, 500 scrolls unearthed in Cave 4 of Qumram were turned over by Jordanian officials to the museum, then called the Palestine Archaeological Museum, with a stipulation that they not be turned over to "anyone who is circumcised."
Until the publication of the bootleg volume, only about 20 percent of the Dead Sea scrolls had been published with the rest remaining inaccessible to Biblical scholars at large.
But the American scholars, Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg, found an ingenious way to reconstruct the text.
By acquiring a copy of the scrolls' concordances - a list of words and phrases on file cards that describe where certain words appear in the original - the scholars used a desktop computer to string a text together.