Tuesday, October 21, 2008

ANOTHER REVIEW of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the New York Jewish Museum, this one in the New York Jewish Weekly. It rambles, but onto interesting topics. For example, this discussion of de Vaux's field notes:
... An ongoing controversy over unpublished archaeological documents still holds up a more definitive answer to this arcane academic debate. If it seems like a rerun of the original controversy surrounding the publication of the scrolls 20 years ago, that’s precisely the point critics are trying to make.
“I’m sorry to say it’s true,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeological Review. “If you dig and don’t publish, it’s destruction.”
Shanks led the campaign to get the Dead Sea Scrolls published in their entirety over two decades ago. Until then, the scrolls were kept in the hands of a close-knit group of scholars affiliated with de Vaux, a French Dominican priest and archaeologist at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. But de Vaux’s field notes from his excavations at the Qumran site, near where the scrolls were found, in the 1950s, remain unpublished. In an odd twist, it’s these papers that scholars — who mostly defend newer variants of de Vaux’s increasingly challenged Essene-sect hypothesis — argue might vindicate their ideas.
“What you have is the same exact thing as [the controversy that surrounded the publication of] the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Jodi Magness, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll archaeologist who defends de Vaux’s original Essene theory. “But it’s worse because it’s longer.” The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, but only a quarter of them were published shortly thereafter. It wasn’t until Shanks led his battle in the 1980s that the remaining texts that were finally published in full by the early-1990s.
But other critics say that those whose theory is increasingly under challenge are feeding it to the press. They also point to more practical impediments: de Vaux’s field notes were never properly organized nor written according to today’s publishing standards; a lack of money; and political pressure from the Israeli, Jordanian, French and American governments who have said in the past that any publication regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls — found at Qumran, in the West Bank — should wait until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is settled. “All we can do is wait patiently,” said Pnina Shor, head of the conservation department at the Israel Antiquities Authority. The body now safeguards the Dead Sea Scrolls and lends them to international exhibits.
The Ecole Biblique, which de Vaux headed until his death in 1971, has in fact published the first two volumes of four that comprise de Vaux’s field notes. Jean-Baptiste Humbert, the successor to de Vaux, said in an interview from Jerusalem that the third volume will be published within the next three months and the fourth and final one “within a year after that.”
Still, he said his most ardent pursuers — who largely defend one of several variants of de Vaux’s theory — will not find much evidence in them to support their theories. He increasingly sides with the newer ideas about who might have used the texts. “Everyone inside the Ecole Biblique, we separate from the Father de Vaux interpretation,” he said. “The Dead Sea Scrolls could not have been the library of the people at Qumran.”