The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

Postscript

The story of the scrolls is, needless to say, unfinished. The plot continues to unfold, taking new twists and turns. Much has happened since this book appeared in Great Britain in May 1991. By the autumn, things had built to a climax, and the scrolls were the subject of front page coverage, as well as editorials, in such newspapers as The New York Times. Even as the American edition of our book is being prepared for publication, other books and articles are appearing in print, conferences are being convened, media attention is intensifying, various protagonists are issuing new statements.

In May, the Israeli ‘Oversight Committee’ granted to Oxford University a complete set of photographs of all scroll material, and a centre for scroll research was established under the auspices of Gaza Vermes. Access, however, was still rigorously restricted, still denied to independent scholars. Interviewed on British television, Professor Norman Golb of the University of Chicago queried the purpose of such a centre. Was it, he asked, simply to be a centre of frustration?

On 5 September, the American press reported that two scholars at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder and one of his doctoral students, Martin G. Abegg, had ‘broken the monopoly’ of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Using the concordance prepared by the international team in the 1950s, they had then employed a computer to reconstruct the texts themselves. The results, said to be 80 percent accurate, were published by the Biblical Archaeology Society under Hershel Shanks. The surviving members of the international team were predictably furious. Professor Cross inveighed against ‘piracy’. ‘What else would you call it,’ the deposed John Strugnall fulminated, ‘but stealing?’ On 7 September, however, an editorial in The New York Times endorsed Wacholder’s and Abegg’s action:

A more electrifying revelation was soon to follow. On 22 September, the Huntingdon Library in California disclosed that it possessed a complete set of photographs of all unpublished scroll material. These had been entrusted to the library by Betty Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation, who had commissioned them around 1961. Having learned of the photographs’ existence, members of the international team had demanded them back. The Huntingdon had responded with defiance. Not only did the library make its possession of the photographs public but it also announced its intention of making them accessible to any scholar who wished to see them. Microfilm copies were to be offered for as little as ten dollars. ‘When you free the scrolls,’ said William A. Moffett, the library’s director, ‘you free the scholars.’

Again, of course, members of the international team kicked up a rumpus, this time more petulant than before. Again, there were charges of ‘theft of scholarly work’. One independent professor replied, however, that most people ‘… will regard [the Hunting-ton] as Robin Hoods, stealing from the academically privileged to give to those hungry for… knowledge.’

Amir Drori, head of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, accused the Huntington of sundry legal transgressions — even though the photographs had been taken long before the scrolls passed into Israeli hands as spoils of war. Magen Broshi, director of the Shrine of the Book, spoke darkly of legal action. The Huntington stood its ground. ‘There’s either freedom of access or not. Our position is that there should be unfettered access.’ By that time, release of the photographs was already a fait accompli, and any attempt to reverse the process would have been futile. ‘It’s too late,’ the Huntington declared. ‘It’s done.’

On 25 September, the Israeli government gave way, carefully distancing itself from Drori’s and Broshi’s pronouncements. Drori and Broshi were said to have been ‘speaking as individuals, not as representatives of the Israeli government.’ Yuvel Ne’eman, Israel’s Minister of Science, issued a press statement asserting that

In the meantime, at 11:05 that morning, Robert Eisenman’s name had gone down on record as that of the first scholar formally to request and obtain access to the Huntingdon’s photographs of scroll material. The battle for access had been won. There still remains, however, the process of dismantling the ‘orthodoxy of interpretation’ promulgated for the last forty years by the international team.

By the time the events chronicled above had hit the headlines, Eisenman had begun to pursue his research on other fronts as well. In 1988, he had pointed out that the excavations at Qumran were far from complete, far from exhaustive. The surrounding terrain is, in fact, ideal for the preservation of manuscripts, and virtually all experts in the field agree that there are more discoveries to be made. It is not just possible, but probable, that additional scroll material still exists, buried under landslides and rock-falls. Many caves have yet to be excavated properly — that is, through the rubble of fallen roofs and down to bed-rock. Other caves, previously explored only by the Bedouin, have to be explored anew, since the Bedouin tended to overlook some concealed documents and to leave behind many fragments; and, in any case, officially sanctioned Bedouin excavations effectively ceased with the 1967 war. There are other sites in the general vicinity of Qumran that have yet to be thoroughly explored. Nine miles to the south, for example, on the shores of the Dead Sea, at a place called En el-Ghuweir, an Israeli archaeologist found Qumran-style graves and the ruins of a Qumran-style (albeit smaller) residence.¹ It is certainly reasonable to suppose that the caves in the nearby wadis, hitherto unexcavated, may also be repositories for scrolls.

With these facts in mind, Eisenman determined to embark on his own archaeological explorations. His primary objective was, of course, to look for additional scroll material. Such material might — as proved to be the case with the ‘Temple Scroll’ — be entirely new. But even if it duplicated material already in the hands of the international team, it would render pointless any continued suppression. Quite apart from the prospect of additional scroll material, however, Eisenman wanted to build up as complete a picture as possible of the population in the entire region, from Qumran on south towards Masada. There might have been, he concluded, other Qumran-style communities. In consequence, he undertook to look for evidence of any other kind — evidence of water control, for example, such as terraces, aqueducts and cisterns, which might have been constructed to sustain livestock and support agriculture.

To date, Michael Baigent has accompanied Robert Eisenman and his team of archaeologists and volunteers on two exploratory expeditions, in January 1989 and in January 1990. In the first of them, they concentrated on the excavation of a cave roughly a mile south of Qumran, some 500 feet up the cliff. The cave opened into a series of chambers extending at least eighty feet back into the rock. Part of the interior had a smooth floor made of palm fronds and packed mud. No scrolls came to light, but a number of Iron Age remains were found — a juglet, an oil lamp, and, uniquely, an arrow shaft and arrowhead in perfect preservation after 3,000 years. The expedition proved, for the first time, that some at least of the caves around Qumran had been inhabited — not just used as temporary refuges during brief periods of danger, but occupied on a more permanent basis.

The second expedition endeavoured to explore as much as possible of the Dead Sea coast south of Qumran and the adjacent cliff-face. The purpose of this undertaking was to compile an inventory of all hitherto unexplored caves that might warrant subsequent exhaustive excavation. Dividing itself into small teams, the expedition searched some thirteen miles of cliff, rising precipitously as high as 1,200 feet. Apart from caves, there were found the remains of artificial terraces and walls, of constructions for water control and irrigation — all attesting to human inhabitation and cultivation. Altogether, 137 habitable caves were located and subjected to preliminary examination without excavation. Of these, 83 were deemed worthy of systematic excavation: they will become the focus of future archaeological activity.

Of particular and revolutionary importance to any such activity will be a new system of ‘high-tech’ ground radar known as ‘Subsurface Interface Radar’ (SIR). We had been discussing with Eisenman the likelihood of there being other caves in the vicinity of Qumran and along the shore of the Dead Sea, as well as of caves, rooms, cellars, passages and/or other subterranean structures under the ruins of Qumran itself. De Vaux, the only person to attempt any excavation of the actual site, never looked for anything of the sort, never really probed beneath the surface. Yet it is virtually unknown for a construction of the kind attested to by the Qumran ruins not to have underground chambers, passages, dungeons or escape tunnels. It is generally acknowledged that something of the sort must indeed exist. But some fairly major excavations would be necessary, involving much trial and error and probably damage to the site.

The prospect, therefore, of finding anything under Qumran seemed, a priori, doomed in advance by the magnitude of what would have been entailed. But in the autumn of 1988 we chanced on a newspaper article about a ‘secret burial vault’ of possible relevance to Shakespearean scholars, found under a church near Stratford-on-Avon. What interested us about this article was the fact that the vault had apparently been located by a species of underground radar scanning system, operated by a firm based in the south of England.

The possibilities offered by SIR proved exciting indeed. It was a terrestrial equivalent of a ship-based sonar recording system. The apparatus was portable. When moved at a constant speed over the ground, it produced a computer-generated image of subterranean features. The image in turn was produced through the building up of a profile of ‘interfaces’ — that is, points at which earth or rock or any other substance of density and solidity gave way to air. The entire system was thus ideal for locating underground caves and cavities. At the very least, it would register interfaces 30 feet below the surface. Under good conditions, it could penetrate as deep as 120 feet.

The manager of the company that operated the radar proved keen to help. He had, it transpired, read and enjoyed the books we had previously published. The prospect of his equipment being employed at Qumran intrigued him. He even offered to come along on an expedition and operate the apparatus himself. As a result of this offer, Eisenman’s 1990 expedition made a special point of noting sites warranting investigation by radar. We are now waiting for permission from the Israeli government to bring the equipment into the country and employ it at Qumran.

The Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947 were not the first such ancient texts to come to light in the Judaean desert. Indeed, there are reports of such texts being found as early as the 3rd century a.d. The theologian Origen, one of the early Church Fathers, is alleged to have made one such discovery. According to the Church historian Eusebius, Origen found several different versions of Old Testament texts, some of which had been lost for many years. He is said to have ‘hunted them out of their hiding places and brought them to light’.² One version of the psalms, we are told, ‘was found at Jericho in a jar during the reign of Antoninus, Son of Severus’.³ This reference allows us to date the discovery to somewhere between a.d. 211 and 217.

More intriguing still is a letter dating from some time shortly before a.d. 805, written by Timotheus, Patriarch of Seleucia, to another ecclesiastic:

Similar discoveries have continued to occur through the centuries, up until modern times. One of the most famous is that of Moses William Shapira, an antique dealer with a shop in Jerusalem in the late 19th century.⁵ In 1878, Shapira was told of some Arabs who, on the run from the authorities, had sought refuge in what is now Jordanian territory, on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. Here, in a cave at Wadi Mujib, directly across the Dead Sea from En Gedi, they were reported to have found a number of old bundles of rags which they tore open, hoping to find valuables of some kind. They found only a number of dark leather scrolls. One of the Arabs took these away with him and later claimed that possession of them had brought him luck. This was said to be his reason for not wanting to sell them — or for raising the price.

Shapira, who sold antiquities to European collectors and museums, was intrigued. Through a sheik with whom he was friendly, he managed to purchase what purported to be the entire corpus of material. This comprised fifteen strips of parchment, each about three-and-a-half by seven inches in size. After studying his acquisition for some weeks, Shapira realised that what he had was an ancient version of the Book of Deuteronomy, one which differed markedly from the established biblical text.

In 1883, after a number of vicissitudes and consultations with experts, Shapira brought his scroll fragments to London. He was preceded by great excitement and extensive coverage in the press. British experts pronounced the fragments genuine, and translations of them were published in The Times. The Prime Minister, William Gladstone, came to see them and discussed their possible purchase with Shapira. A sum of £1 million was apparently mentioned — a staggering figure for the time.

The French government sent a prominent scholar, one of Shapira’s old enemies, across the Channel to examine the fragments and compile a report. Shapira refused to let the Frenchman inspect the fragments closely or to handle them. The Frenchman was allowed only a cursory look at two or three fragments. He was then reduced, by Shapira’s intransigence, to spending two days looking at two additional fragments on display in a glass case, jostled by other visitors to the museum. Out of spite, and a probably justified exasperation, the Frenchman at last pronounced the fragments to be forgeries. Other scholars, without even bothering to look at the fragments, echoed this conclusion, and the affair quickly degenerated into farce. Shapira had effectively ruined himself. Repudiated and discredited, he shot himself in a Rotterdam hotel room on 9 March 1884. His scroll fragments were purchased by a London antiquarian book-dealer for £105s.

Since then, they have disappeared — though they might conceivably still turn up in someone’s attic or among the belongings of some private collector. According to the last attempt to trace them, they may have been taken to Australia with the effects of a dealer in antiquities.

A number of modern authorities — including Allegro, who made a special study of Shapira — have become convinced that Shapira’s fragments were probably genuine. Had they been discovered this century rather than last, Allegro maintained, they would in all likelihood have proved to be as valid as the material found at Qumran.⁶ But in the late 19th century, egos, scholarly reputations and vested interests were as much ‘on the line’ as they are today. As a result, something of potentially priceless value has, almost certainly, been irretrievably lost.

At the same time, discoveries such as Shapira’s continue to be made. Thus, for example, in the late 1970s, when we ourselves had little more than a cursory knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other such documents, we were telephoned by a friend from Paris, a collector of antiques. He asked if, on virtually no notice, we could meet him at a restaurant in London, not far from Charing Cross. Michael Baigent, who’d done much professional photography, was particularly requested. He was asked to bring a camera along — and keep it hidden.

Baigent found our associate in the company of three other men — an American collector, a Palestinian dealer and a Jordanian engineer. He accompanied them to a nearby bank, where they were ushered into a small private room and two wooden chests were produced, each locked with three padlocks. ‘We don’t know what’s in these chests,’ one of the bank’s officials said pointedly. ‘We don’t want to know what’s in them.’ The officials then left, locking Baigent and his four companions in the room.

A telephone call was made to Jerusalem and some sort of permission was obtained. The Jordanian engineer then produced a bunch of keys and proceeded to open the two chests. Inside, there were literally hundreds of thin cardboard sheets, each holding (attached by adhesive tape!) a dozen or so fragments of ancient parchment and/or papyrus. The fragments obviously spanned a considerable period of time, derived from a number of diverse sources and had been inscribed in several different languages — Aramaic, for example, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. As might be expected of so eclectic and haphazard an assemblage, not everything was of value. Many of the fragments proved subsequently to be worthless — receipts and documents pertaining to ancient commercial transactions that might have been ferreted out of some archaic rubbish tip. But there were others as well.

The collection had come to London through the clandestine scroll market active in Jerusalem and Bethlehem during the 1950s and 1960s, and had been brought out of Israel during, or shortly after, the 1967 war. It was now supposedly being offered for sale to a certain unnamed European government, for an alleged price of £3 million. Baigent was asked to make a selection of photographs, to be displayed as samples of what was available. He took approximately a hundred photographs. But there were hundreds of sheets and, altogether, upwards of two thousand fragments, most of them relatively large.

In the dozen or so years since this incident, we have heard nothing further about the collection. If a sale was indeed negotiated, it was done so quietly, with no public announcement of any kind. Alternatively, the entire collection may still be sequestered in its London bank, or in some other similar depository elsewhere, or amongst the treasures of some private dealer.

Transactions such as the one to which we’d been peripherally privy were not, we subsequently learned, at all uncommon. During the course of the next decade, our research was to bring us into contact with an intricate network of antique dealers and collectors engaged in subterranean scroll traffic. This network is international and deals on a scale comparable to that of networks trafficking in paintings or gems. Hundreds of thousands of pounds can be produced on virtually immediate notice and be transferred on the basis of a handshake.

Two factors have conducted to the dissemination of the underground scroll market. One was the action of Yadin and the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, when the dealer known as Kando was held for interrogation and forced to divulge the existence of the ‘Temple Scroll’. Not surprisingly, this action upset the existing ‘truce’ and fostered a profound mistrust between Israeli and Arab dealers. As a result, much material found by the Bedouin, which would ordinarily have passed into Israeli hands, now finds its way illegally to Amman or Damascus or even further afield. From there, it passes to the West via such routes as Turkey or the Lebanon.

A second spur to the subterranean scroll market was a law instituted under the auspices of UNESCO, according to which any antiquities smuggled out of a country must be returned to their point of origin. This law was made retroactive. In consequence, individuals who had invested large sums in scroll material, or hoped to obtain large sums for scroll material, could not afford to make their holdings public. In effect, the law drove the clandestine traffic in scrolls even further underground — and, of course, caused a dramatic increase in prices.

How does the underground scroll trade operate? Much of it is controlled by certain families well known in the antique trade, who supply many of the legal antiquities on sale in Israel and abroad. During the course of the last half-century, these families have established their own intelligence networks, which maintain close contacts with the Bedouin and keep abreast of all rumours, whispers, legends and reported discoveries of antiquarian interest. When a potentially fruitful site is located, the land will be rented for a year and a large black Bedouin tent — ostensibly a domicile — will be erected. At night, excavations will be conducted under the tent. When all antiquities of value have been removed, the tent will be dismantled and its occupants will move on. A similar process occurs in towns, and particularly in Jerusalem, which has proved especially fertile territory. Sites will be rented for short periods or, if necessary, purchased. If a house does not already exist, one will be constructed. The occupants will then excavate downwards from the cellar to bedrock.

Through such procedures as these, much scroll material has found its way into the hands of private collectors and investors. This material entirely circumvents the world of ‘official’ archaeology and biblical scholarship. Indeed, the world of ‘official’ archaeology and biblical scholarship often does not even realise it exists. Unknown to the academics, there is at present a substantial quantity of Qumran and related material in the hands of collectors or for sale. We ourselves know of numerous fragments. We know of a well-preserved copy of one Qumran text, called the ‘Book of Jubilees’. We know of a handful of letters by Simeon bar Kochba. And there are substantial grounds for believing that other documents — documents of a much more explosive nature, utterly unique and undreamed of by the world of scholarship — also exist.

In the course of the next few years, major developments can be expected from any or all of three distinct quarters. The most obvious of these, needless to say, is the Qumran material itself. Now that the entire corpus of this material is readily accessible, independent scholars, without preconceptions, without axes to grind and vested interests to protect, can get to work. The international team’s ‘orthodoxy of interpretation’ has already begun to come under attack; and as this book has demonstrated, the supposed archaeological and palaeographical evidence with which they support their position will not withstand close scrutiny. In consequence, we can expect a radical revision of the process whereby dates have been assigned to a number of particularly important texts. As a result, new contexts and interpretations will emerge for already familiar material. And new material will emerge in perspectives that would have been cursorily and high-handedly dismissed a few years ago.

At the same time, there is also the possibility, enhanced by each new archaeological expedition Eisenman and his colleagues undertake to Qumran and the shores of the Dead Sea, that wholly new material may come to light. This possibility will be further enhanced — now that the Israeli government has granted permission for its use — by deployment of the ‘Subsurface Interface Radar’ system.

Finally, there is the clandestine scroll market, which may at any moment cough up something of unprecedented consequence — something hitherto kept secret, at last released into public domain. As we have said, such material exists. The question is simply if and when those who hold it decide it can be divulged.

Whatever the quarter or quarters from which new material might issue, fresh and, in some cases, very major revelations are bound to be forthcoming. As this occurs, we can expect ever more light to be shed on biblical history, on the character of ancient Judaism, on the origins of both Christianity and Islam. One should not, of course, expect a disclosure of such magnitude as to ‘topple the Church’, or anything as apocalyptic as that. The Church today, after all, is less a religious than a social, cultural, political and economic institution. Its stability and security rest on factors quite remote from the creed, the doctrine and the dogma it promulgates. But some people, at any rate, may be prompted to wonder whether the Church — an institution so demonstrably lax, biased and unreliable in its own scholarship, its own version of its history and origins – should necessarily be deemed reliable and authoritative in its approach to such urgent contemporary matters as overpopulation, birth control, the status of women and the celibacy of the clergy.

Ultimately, however, the import of the Qumran texts resides in something more than their potential to embarrass the Church. The real import of the Qumran texts resides in what they have to reveal of the Holy Land, that soil which, for so many centuries, has voraciously soaked up so much human blood — blood shed in the name of conflicting gods or, to be more accurate, not very dissimilar versions of the same God. Perhaps the documents yet to be divulged may confront us a little more inescapably with the scale and pointlessness of our own madness — and shame us, thereby, at least by a degree or so, in the general direction of sanity. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer a new perspective on the three great religions born in the Middle East. The more one examines those religions, the more one will discern not how much they differ, but how much they overlap and have in common — how much they derive from essentially the same source — and the extent to which most of the quarrels between them, when not precipitated by simple misunderstanding, have stemmed less from spiritual values than from politics, from greed, from selfishness and the presumptuous arrogance of interpretation. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all, at present, beset by a resurgent fundamentalism. One would like to believe – though this may be too much to hope for — that greater understanding of their common roots might help curb the prejudice, the bigotry, the intolerance and fanaticism to which fundamentalism is chronically prone.

17 January 1991

13 October 1991