The 20th century may be characterized as the "Century of Manuscript Discoveries". From the Cairo Geniza to the more recent discovery of the Bar Kochba Letters which date to the time of the Second Jewish Revolt, scholars have access to an extraordinary amount of written sources.
The importance of the Scrolls was first realized on November 29, 1947, by the late Professor E. L. Sukenik, Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University. Of interest is the fact that this date corresponds with the vote by the United Nations to partition Palestine. Seven years later, a number of the better preserved Scrolls were purchased for the State of Israel and initially kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this time, the War of Independence of 1948 had caused a separation between Israel and Jordan and the Scrolls that were discovered subsequently were purchased by the Jordanian Government and placed in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. The vast majority of the material placed there was found to be extremely fragmentary.
After the Six Day War in 1967, Yigael Yadin--Sukenik's son--purchased the Temple Scroll for the State of Israel. Other fragments are housed in the United States, at the University of Chicago. Today, the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem houses many of the larger Scrolls. The building itself is a representation of the jars in which the scrolls were found. Its architecture and design also visualize some of the important concepts found in the Scrolls and use white and black to conceptualize the war between the Sons of Light and Darkness.
Most of the Scrolls are in extremely poor condition. The first international
team of scholars, assembled in cooperation with the Jordanian government, spent
years in the painstaking task of reconstructing texts based upon the analysis
of the scripts (paleography) and the identification of literary genres. The
international team began the publication of a number of Scrolls volumes.
In 1967, the Rockefeller Museum came under Israeli rule. However, during the
1960s and 70s, much had remained unpublished. As the original members of the
international team neared retirement age, the practice of passing manuscripts
on to students and colleagues for publication began. In 1991, as the result
of various developments, the international team was reconstituted with about
40 members, with Professor Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University as its Editor-in Chief.
Nevertheless, the influence of the original publication team continued to affect
future scholars, since their unpublished comments and analyses on the Scrolls
fragments were considered by those future scholars who would later take over
the process of publication. During the early part of this decade, all photographs
of the Scrolls, both published and unpublished, were made available to scholars
and the general public. This development resulted in a growing stream of
Scrolls publications.
The year 2001 saw the completion of the publication of the remaining Scrolls manuscripts
This spate of new publications (known as DJD volumes, short for the series published by Oxford,
"Discoveries in the Judaean Desert") has renewed interest in the Scrolls among
scholars and the general public. Conferences,
volumes of studies and exhibitions are taking place at a great rate. One of the
best examples is the major exhibit staged at the
Library
of Congress now accessible online. That exhibition has been in New York, and is now in San Francisco. Major
conferences have been held recently in Jerusalem, Madrid, Groningen, Haifa, New
York and elsewhere. Clearly, the publication of the new material is making a major
impact on the scholarly world.
