The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

our endeavours’. The letter continued:

Surely your original commission was to publish these materials as quickly as possible for the benefit of the scholarly community as a whole, not to control them. It would have been different, perhaps, if you and your scholars had discovered these materials in the first place. But you did not; they were simply assigned to you…

…The situation as it now stands is abnormal in the extreme. Therefore, as mature scholars at the height of our powers and abilities, we feel it is an imposition upon us and a hardship to ask us to wait any longer for the research availability of and access to these materials forty years after their discovery.²⁷

Eisenman and Davies expected Strugnell to refuse their requests. Strugnell, however, did not bother to reply at all. On 2 May, therefore, Eisenman wrote to Amir Drori — who earlier that year had renewed the international team’s monopoly with the publication deadline of 1996. Eisenman enclosed a copy of the letter to Strugnell, mentioning that it had been posted to both of Strugnell’s addresses, at Harvard and in Jerusalem. Of Strugnell’s failure to reply, he wrote: ‘Frankly, we are tired of being treated contemptuously. This kind of cavalier treatment is not really a new phenomenon, but is part and parcel of the process that has been going on for 20-30 years or more…’²⁸

Since Strugnell would not grant access to the Qumran material, Eisenman requested that Drori, exercising a higher authority, should do so. He then made two particularly important points. As long as the international team continued to control the Qumran texts, it would not be sufficient merely to speed up the publication schedule. Nothing short of free scholarly access would be satisfactory — to check the international team’s conclusions, to allow for variations in translation and interpretation, to discern connections the team themselves might perhaps have overlooked:

We cannot be sure… that they have exhausted all possible fragments in relation to a given document or that they are putting fragments together in proper sequence. Nor can we be sure if the inventories are in fact complete and that fragments may not have been lost, destroyed or overlooked in some manner or for some reason. Only the whole of the interested scholarly community working together can assure this.²⁹

The second point would appear, at least with hindsight, to be self-evident. The international team insisted on the importance of archaeology and palaeography. It was on the basis of their supposedly accurate archaeological and palaeographical studies, as Eisenman had explained, that dates for the Qumran texts had been posited — and accepted. Yet the texts themselves had been subject only to carbon-dating tests in use at around the time of the scrolls’ discovery — tests which were very clumsy and consumed much manuscript material. Lest too much text be lost, therefore, only some of the wrappings found in the jars had been tested. These confirmed a date of around the beginning of the Christian era. None of the texts had been tested by the more recent techniques of Carbon-14 dating, even though Carbon-14 dating had now been refined by the newer AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy) technique. Little material would now be lost in the process and greater accuracy could be achieved. Eisenman therefore suggested that Drori exercise his authority and perform new, up-to-date tests. He also recommended that outsiders be brought into the process to keep it fair. He concluded his letter with a passionate appeal: ‘Please act to release these materials to interested scholars who need them to proceed with professional research without prejudice and without distinction immediately.’³⁰

No doubt prompted by Drori, Strugnell, in Jerusalem at the time, at last replied on 15 May. Despite the fact that Eisenman’s letter to him had been posted to his address at both Harvard and Jerusalem, he blamed the delay on its having been sent to ‘the wrong country’.³¹

According to BAR, ‘Strugnell’s imperious reply to Eisenman’s request for access displays extraordinary intellectual hauteur and academic condescension.’³² In it, he declares himself ‘puzzled’ as to why Eisenman and Davies showed their letter to ‘half the Who’s Who of Israel’. He accuses them of not having followed ‘acceptable norms’ and refers to them as ‘lotus-eaters’, which, in Strugnell’s Mandarin, presumably denotes Californians, though why this term should apply to Philip Davies at Sheffield is an open question. Strugnell contrives not just to deny Eisenman’s and Davies’s request for access, but also to dodge each of the salient points they had raised. He advises them to take as their example the way ‘such requests have been handled in the past’ and go through established channels — ignoring the fact that all such requests ‘in the past’ had been denied. He also complains that the print-out Eisenman and Davies had used to cite reference numbers of photographic negatives was old and out of date. He neglects to mention that this print-out, not to mention any new one, had been unavailable to non-members of the international team until Eisenman put it into circulation.³³

Eisenman responded to Strugnell’s brush-off by going as public as he possibly could. By the middle of 1989, the issue had become a cause celebre in American and Israeli newspapers, and, to a lesser degree, was picked up by the British press as well. Eisenman was extensively and repeatedly quoted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine and Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine. He stressed five major points:

1. That all research on the Dead Sea Scrolls was being unfairly monopolised by a small enclave of scholars with vested interests and a biased orientation.

2. That only a small percentage of the Qumran material was finding its way into print and that most of it was still being withheld.

3. That it was misleading to claim that the bulk of the so-called ‘biblical’ texts had been released, because the most important material consisted of the so-called ‘sectarian’ texts — new texts, never seen before, with a great bearing on the history and religious life of the 1st century.

4. That after forty years, access to the scrolls should be made available to all interested scholars.

5. That AMS Carbon-14 tests, monitored by independent laboratories and researchers, should immediately be conducted on the Qumran documents.

As was perhaps inevitable, once the media had begun to sensationalise it, the affair quickly degenerated, with Eisenman being misquoted on two separate occasions, and a barrage of invective coming from both sides. But behind the clash of egos, the central issue remained unresolved. As Philip Davies had written in 1988:

Any archaeologist or scholar who digs or finds a text but does not pass on what has been found deserves to be locked up as an enemy of science. After forty years we have neither a full and definitive report on the dig nor a full publication of the scrolls.³⁴

5. Academic Politics and Bureaucratic Inertia

Early in 1989, Eisenman had been invited to present a paper at a conference on the scrolls to be held at the University of Groningen that summer. The organiser and chairman of the conference was the secretary of the journal Revue de Qumran, the official organ of the Ecole Biblique, the French-Dominican archaeological school in Jerusalem of which most of the international team were members or associates. According to the arrangement, all papers presented at the conference would subsequently be published in the journal. By the time of the conference, however, Eisenman’s conflict with the international team, and the ensuing controversy, had become public. It was not, of course, feasible to retract Eisenman’s invitation. He was therefore allowed to present his paper, but its publication in Revue de Qumran was blocked.[3]

The chairman of the conference was deeply embarrassed, apologising to Eisenman and explaining there was nothing he could do — his superiors, the editors of the journal, had insisted on excluding Eisenman’s paper.¹ Revue de Qumran had thus effectively revealed itself, not as a