Robert Eisenman - Release of The Dead Sea Scrolls

Release of The Dead Sea Scrolls

From about 1986 onwards, Eisenman became the leading figure in the struggle to release and free the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948 to 1956 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker magazine, editing more or less ground to a halt from about 1959 onwards.

This is not to say the Scrolls were not out. The Israelis had been very forthcoming with the first Scrolls that came into their possession from Cave I. It was the Scrolls from later caves discovered like III-XI, which came in after 1948 and Partition and on-site excavations by persons like Dominican Father Roland de Vaux, which were the problem. In 1985–86, Eisenman, who had written his first book presenting, as he called it, “A New Theory of Qumran Origins” in 1983 and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (also known as “the American School") where Cave I Scrolls had first come in and been photographed in 1947–48.

Ostensibly he was to work on a project comparing the Jerusalem Community of James the Just to the Community at Qumran, but while at the American Schools of Oriental Research (then the Albright Institute) he found that there was nothing he could do – all paths being barred to him. Notwithstanding, he and a colleague, Philip Davies of Sheffield University, England, went in to see one of the curators of the Shrine of the Book and were told uncategorically, “You will not see the Scrolls in your lifetime.” Subsequently he came into possession of the complete computer print-out of all the Scrolls in possession of the Israel Antiquities Authority, both those before 1967 and those afterwards at the Rockefeller Museum and, not three years later, a complete photographic archive of all previously unpublished materials from Cave IV all the way up to Cave XI.

He sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the Editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, which created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began in earnest.

During his stay at Oxford University as a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College in 1986–87, a colleague had also passed him a xerox copy of 4QMMT, a document which had been talked about but which no one outside the inner circle had ever been allowed to see. This, too, he freely shared with anyone who wanted to see it as part of the campaign, and, thereafter, it made the rounds.

At this time, too, he brought James Robinson – a colleague of his at Claremont University and the Editor of the Nag Hammadi Codices (a dispute similar to the Qumran one) – into the mix and together they took the decision to publish all the unpublished photographs. This amounted to 1785 plates. The original publication (in microfiche form) was supposed to occur in April, 1991 through EJ Brill in Leiden, the Netherlands.

However, a few weeks before publication, Brill's representative had attended a Scrolls Conference in Madrid, Spain and mistook the uproar there over Kapera’s publication the year before in Poland of the samizdat copy of 4QMMT he had received from Davies for a dispute over freedom of access to the Scrolls generally. Following this, newly-appointed Israeli representatives came to Leiden and talked the Brill publishers out of the Eisenman/Robinson microfiche project and into a newly-conceived one of their own. So Eisenman and Robinson had to fall back on the offices of Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society who were unwilling to go to press before October/November of that year.

While all these things were going on, Eisenman had been invited to become a consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which had become aware that it had in its archive a collection of photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, donated to it by Elizabeth Bechtel. The late William Moffett, its Director, asked whether he thought the Library should open its archive to all scholars. He was projecting this for September, two months before Eisenman's and Robinson’s own projected B.A.S. Edition. Eisenman encouraged him to do so, though he knew the Library would get most of the credit for breaking the monopoly and Robinson and he very little.