From: IQTI400@INDYCMS.IUPUI.EDU (macphil)
Subject: Re: Looking for Dead Sea Scrolls
Organization: IUPUI
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 14:19:10 GMT

In article <kirkm.1duj@hotcity.COM>
kirkm@hotcity.COM (Kirk Marcroft) writes:
 
>I heard about a year ago that photo's of the Dead Sea Scrolls were to be
>released to the public to be put in a book........
>Does any know any thing about it?
>
>
>
>
>Thanks
 
 
There were a number of articles in mainstream press about availability
of the scrolls and here is an article which didn't receive as much
attention and is far more fascinating:
 
 
 
 
Copied sans permission.
 
Source:  headline story; Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, September 4, 1991
 
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                   What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?                   |
|                                                                    |
|   The Scrolls are leather and papyrus manuscripts that are the     |
|   oldest known copies of the Old Testament, other religious        |
|   writings and laws; written in Hebrew and Aramaic, some are only  |
|   fragments.                                                       |
|                                                                    |
|   Written:  Between 200 B.C. and 50 A.D.                           |
|                                                                    |
|   Discovered:  In 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea in what is now  |
|   the Israeli-occupied West Bank; others were found later at       |
|   nearby sites.                                                    |
|                                                                    |
|   Significance:  Among the most important discoveries in modern    |
|   archeology, they have enabled scholars to push back the date     |
|   of a stabilized Hebrew Bible to no later than 70 A.D. and to     |
|   clarify the relationship between early Christianity and          |
|   Jewish religion traditions.                                      |
|                                                                    |
|   Controversy:  Many of the scrolls have not been published and    |
|   all but a small group of scholars have been denied access to     |
|   the scrolls.                                                     |
|                                                                    |
|   Housed at two sites:  Shrine of the Book and the Rockefeller     |
|   Museum in Jerusalem.                                             |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
 
A personal computer has enabled two American scholars to write a
dramatic new chapter in the Dead Sea Scrolls controversy, a long-running
tale of academic politics and intrigue that reads like a spy novel.  The
editor of Biblical Archaeology Review has announced that on Wednesday
his journal will issue the initial volume of what he says will be the
first complete edition of the scrolls, hailed as the greatest
archeological find of the 20th Century upon their discover in Palestine
beginning in 1947.  The new computer-generated version is, in effect, a
bootlegged copy of the scrolls because the material was never released
by the tightly knit group of scholars that has monopolized access to the
ancient Hebrew manuscripts for decades.  Hershel Shanks, the journal's
Washington-based editor, has charged that this group has denied others
access to important sections of the scrolls.  His intention in issuing
the new edition, he says, is to circumvent their controls and to make
the texts available to a wide audience.  "We need a little <glasnost>
here," Shanks says.  "All scholars should be able to explore these
documents, which lead back to our common cultural roots."  According to
Shanks, the scrolls have been so carefully guarded that even the two
American researchers who supplied him with the computer-generated texts
previously unpublished scrolls have never examined the originals or even
seen photographs of them.  Shanks' scholarly allies were able to
overcome that obstacle, he says, through an inventive use of modern
electronics and some old-fashioned hard work.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were
recovered from caves near the Dead Sea, in a remote part of Palestine
then ruled by Britain and subsequently occupied by Israel.  About 2'000
years earlier, the documents, handwritten in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic
on parchment, evidently had been deposited there for safekeeping.  Some
scrolls, chiefly biblical texts, were quickly made public and are on
display at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum in West
Jerusalem.  But many others were deposited at the Rockefeller Museum in
East Jerusalem and their publication entrusted to a small committee of
scholars from various institutions around the world.  The international
academic community anxiously awaited release of the manuscripts, since
the documents came from a part of the world where Judaism had developed
and dated to the era when Christianity was born.  Indeed, the portions
of the scrolls already published have shed important light on the
development of those religions.  But about 200 key Dead Sea Scrolls
texts have never been released.  Because of the secrecy surrounding the
scrolls, their exact number is known to few outside the committee.  Over
the decades, photocopies of a few texts have been leaked to outsiders
and circulated through a kind of biblical-scholars' underground.  But
none of those earlier, unauthorized releases approximates in scope or
significance Shanks' edition.  Shanks says the texts he is about the
publish at $25 a volume, could help resolve some thorny issues in the
interpretation of the scrolls, including the question of their
authorship.  Most scholars think they were produced by the Essenes, a
small sect of Jewish monks.  Others assign the scrolls to authors within
mainstream Judaism, and a few researchers claim they were produced by
early Christians.  The texts were liberated (or pirated--parties to the
controversy judge the act differently) by Ben Zion Wacholder, a
professor of Talmud studies and rabbinics at Hebrew Union College in
Cincinnati, and his associate, Martin Abegg, a biblical studies graduate
student turned computer hacker.  Scholars estimate that the Dead Sea
Scrolls were written by ancient scribes over a period of several hundred
years.  Abegg reports that his desktop Macintosh computer took less than
15 minutes to reconstruct them.  Before the computer could work its
magic, Abegg spent months typing into it the contents of "A Preliminary
Concordance to the Hebrew and Aramaic Fragments," a five-volume
reference work about the scrolls.  A concordance is a word list,
something like a dictionary.  But instead of definitions, it provides
examples of the contexts in which words are used in a particular
literary work.  The Dead Sea Scrolls' concordance lists every usage of
every word that appears in the previously unpublished manuscripts,
including the words that flank it on either side and the name of the
scroll where it appeared.  The concordance was published privately with
the approval of the scrolls' committee for use by the small group of
scholars allowed access to the scrolls.  When the library at Hebrew
Union College acquired a copy, about a eyar ago, Abegg realized he could
use it, with the help of a computer, to break the embargo on the
scrolls.  Abegg explains that he programmed his computer to recognize
overlaps between the concordance's "word strings," as hackers call the,
and to assemble those into larger groupings.  For instance, consider
the following hypothetical entries from a concordance to the Bible:
 
Created:  God created the Heavens and the Earth
God:  In the beginning, God created
 
Abegg's computer would instantaneously recognize that the last two words
of the second entry are the same as the first two words of the first
entry.  It would then electronically splice those two word strings,
producing the opening sentence of the book of Genesis:  "In the
beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth."  Similarly, Abegg's
computer took strings of words from the scrolls' concordance and joined
them into sentences.  Then the computer linked those sentences into
larger and larger units, ultimately reconstructing virtually all the
scrolls.  Wacholder and Abegg brought the computer's handiwork to
Shanks, who has been crusading in the pages of his journal for wider
access to the scrolls.  Shanks says he plans to publish Wacholder's and
Abegg's version of the scrolls in five volumes, the first of which is
being released Wednesday at a news conference in New York.  "The computer
program was a relatively simple one, but I had to learn to type Hebrew
backwards, which isn't easy," Abegg says.  "Hebrew is written from right
to left, but my computer only accepts words when they are typed into it
from left to right."  Wacholder says he gave Abegg the OK to produce a
computer-generated version of the Dead Sea Scrolls after being
frustrated in repeated attempts to obtain access to them through
conventional scholarly channels.  Last year, he says, he asked the
Rockefeller Museum for microfilm copies of texts he needed for his
research.  Wacholder's request was denied despite his standing as an
internationally recognized authority on the period in which the scrolls
were composed.  Nearly blind, the 67-year-old Wacholder can recite the
Bible by heart.  "The small group of scholars who control the scrolls
have fallen into an ethical trap the Talmud calls '<kula sheli>'"
Wacholder says.  "You say to them, why don't we share these wonderful
manuscripts which are, after all, mankind's common heritage?  But they
reply, '<Kula sheli>-it's all mine.'"  When informed by the Tribune of
Wacholder's and Abegg's plan, Emile Puech, a member of the committee
that controls access to the scrolls, expressed outrage.  "We'll sue!"
Puech said, speaking by phone from Jerusalem.  "What they are doing is a
violation of international law."  Eugene Ulrich, another scholar who
serves on the international scrolls committee, seemed more than angered
by this new twist in the Dead Sea Scrolls' saga.  "It's bizarre," said
Ulrich, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.  "But
then, everything about the scrolls has been bizarre, beginning with the
group that wrote them and continuing through recent controversies."  One
of those occurred late last year, when Ulrich and other committee
members ousted their chairman, John Strugnell, a professor of Christian
origins at Harvard.  For years, Strugnell had had the final word on who
would be allowed to see the scrolls.  Then, last November, he gave an
interview to an Israeli newspaper in which he repeatedly attacked
Judaism.  Asked what it was about Judaism that bothered him, he replied,
"The fact that the survived when it should have disappeared."  Shanks'
publication of the new edition of the scrolls is certain to heighten the
debate over how to best make them public.  From Jerusalem, Peuch said he
fears the unconventional methods employed by Wacholder and Abegg will
result in the circulation of defective texts.  That is the chief reason
given by members of the committee for not releasing the scrolls:  They
have said that deciphering the handwriting of ancient scribes is
difficult and time-consuming, and that premature release of the scrolls
would only burden future generations of biblical scholars with
inaccurate texts.  Abegg and Wacholder reject that argument.  They note
that they scribes who produced the scrolls often quoted biblical verses.
Abegg and Wacholder compared the versions of those verses reconstructed
by their computer with those in the Bible itself.  They claim their
versions coincide with the originals almost 95 percent of the time.  On
the basis of that sampling, they conclude that their edition of the
scrolls is accurate to a similar degree.  Abegg and Wacholder note the
only way Peuch's and Ulrich's committee can effectively question the
accuracy of their computer-generated texts is by allowing impartial
researchers to compare them with the originals.  Wacholder and Abegg say
that is all they want:  The release of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, so that
scholars everywhere can form their own ideas on the meaning of the
priceless documents.
Newsgroups: misc.wanted