By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

When the monumental exhibition Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Ancient Times opens at the Cincinnati Museum Center on Nov. 16, Midwesterners won’t just view the scrolls and 600-plus artifacts from ancient Israel. They’ll also learn about Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s role in protecting, processing, and disseminating knowledge about one of the 20th century’s greatest archaeological finds.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition, created by the Israel Antiquities Authority from the collections of the Israel National Treasures, comes to Cincinnati from Discovery Times Square in New York and The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
The presenting sponsor for the exhibition here is the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati.

“Especially coming to the Midwest, it’’s a tremendous accomplishment,” says Dr. Nili Fox, a professor of Bible at HUC’s Cincinnati Campus. Fox is also director of the archaeology center at the Skirball Museum at HUC and co-director of Tel Dan excavations in Israel.

“We don’t yet know what scrolls they’re sending,” she says of the Israel Antiquities Department. “It will be at least 10 and they’re not necessarily whole scrolls. They could be little fragments as well, but from 10 different texts. They can’t be on display for more than three months, so they rotate them.”

Fox says that more than half of the exhibition will feature archeological objects of ceramic and stone that date to the Israelite period, the period of the monarchy.

“Actually much of it is pre-Dead Sea Scrolls time period,” she says.

“What they’re trying to do and I think they’re doing it very successfully, is to contextualize the Dead Sea Scrolls so that the visitor travels through time and gets a good background of what came before. Those (artifacts) preceded the Dead Sea Scrolls by anywhere from 1,000 or more years.”

Also on display are artifacts from late antiquity, the period of the scrolls.

Unique to Cincinnati, the exhibition will feature an additional section devoted to the story of HUC and its connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Dr. Jason Kalman, associate professor of classical Hebrew literature and interpretation at HUC, worked with the exhibition’s curator to write the narrative for the section about HUC. Kalman is the author of the new book, Hebrew Union College and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He and Fox sit on the exhibition’s Cincinnati advisory committee.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls were the biggest archaeological discovery in certain ways that Jewish studies was going to see, and biblical studies for that matter,” Kalman says. “It was certainly among the greatest manuscript discoveries of all time.”

In 1947, a shepherd discovered the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ultimately 972 scrolls were found.

Before the scrolls were found, the oldest copies of the complete Hebrew Bible dated to the 10th and 11th centuries.

“With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the assumption of their antiquity, this moves the dates for the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible back by another thousand years,” he says. “So it gave us another thousand years of evidence of transmission of the Hebrew Bible.”

Before 1952, the first scrolls were published relatively quickly, Kalman says. By and large, Jewish academics had access to the material and could offer comment.

However, when the academic team was assembled beginning in 1952 after the discovery of Cave 4, membership was restricted to those connected to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in east Jerusalem, under Jordanian control.

“The restrictions on the team were that they would have first rights to edit and publish the fragments that had been found,” Kalman says.

A project that the academics thought might take two or three years stretched into decades.

Kalman says HUC’s connection to the scrolls spans from 1948 to 1993, after which the Israel Antiquities Authority made the documents available to everyone.

For most of those years, the connections were secretive.

They began with HUC’s president, noted archeologist Dr. Nelson Glueck.

“In ‘48, he (Glueck) was brought into the Dead Sea Scrolls story in part because he had feet firmly planted in two worlds,”

Kalman says. “In the 1930s he had served as the director of The American School for Oriental Research in Jerusalem. His other foot was firmly planted in Hebrew University. Hebrew University’s president, Judah Magnes, had been Glueck’s mentor when he was still in the United States.”

Dr. Harry Orlinsky, a professor at HUC’s New York campus, helped Hebrew University secure a portion of the scrolls.

The first scrolls were found by Bedouins who sold them to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer; from there they passed though hands of dealers who did not want them sold to the emerging Jewish state.

In 1954, an ad showed up in the Wall Street Journal offering four scrolls for sale to an educational institution.

“Through a middle man, Israel sets up an opportunity to buy the scrolls,” Kalman says.

“Orlinsky takes on the identity of a man named ‘Mr. Green’ and sneaks off to the bank vault with his appropriate handlers to check that the scrolls are the originals.”

Orlinsky was able to authenticate the scrolls for Israel to complete the transaction.

Kalman adds that Orlinsky was among the first scholars to write and publish about the scrolls.

The remaining scrolls that would come under Israel’s possession — the Cave 4 Cache — had been acquired by the Palestinian Archaeological Museum with money from the Jordanian government.

“At that point, the area where the scrolls are found (in the 1950s) and eastern Jerusalem all belong to Jordan,” Kalman says.

In 1967, when Israel captured east Jerusalem, it included the Palestine Archaeological Museum, now known as the Rockefeller Museum, and took control of the Cave 4 Cache at that site.

Israel agreed to preserve the publishing and editing agreements that had been in place when it captured the museum; access of Jews or any other academics to the Cave 4 scrolls would remain restricted.

However, Israel was concerned about the long-term care of the scrolls. After the Six-Day War, Glueck visited Israel to check on HUC’s students and campus in Jerusalem. Avraham Harman, then president of Hebrew University and director of the Shrine of the Book, offered Glueck a deal: in exchange for $10,000 from HUC, Hebrew University would provide HUC with a security copy of the scrolls to be stored at HUC’s library in Cincinnati under complete confidence. At the point when the scrolls would be made available, HUC faculty would receive access to the materials six months ahead of others.

Glueck accepted the deal and HUC became the first of four institutions around the world to hold security copies of the scrolls. Based on all the archival evidence Kalman has seen, HUC kept this promise.

But through a separate process, HUC Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics Dr. Ben Zion Wacholder and his student, Dr. Martin Abegg, published four unauthorized volumes of the Dead Sea Scrolls Cave 4 Cache in the 1990s, using a concordance of the scrolls — printed volumes assembled from a card catalog produced for private use by members of the original Cave 4 editorial team. The editor-in-chief of the editorial committee, Harvard Prof. Dr. John Strugnell, gave Wacholder permission to make a copy in 1989.

According to Kalman, the original team had produced a card catalog of key words in the scrolls so they could relate one fragment to another. Abegg quickly figured out that he could reconstruct the text from data in the concordance rapidly by computer.

“They publish the first volume in ‘92 with the help of the Biblical Archaeology Society and its editor-in-chief and publisher, Hershel Shanks,” Kalman says. “On one hand it brought acclaim, on the other it brought criticism from those who were given the task of publishing the original materials because they were, in essence, scooped.”

By the early ‘90s, Kalman says, it was known in scholarly circles that HUC had a security copy of the scrolls.

“One of the accusations that had come out was that the reconstructions hadn’t been reproduced from the concordance but that Wacholder and Abegg had been allowed to look at these (photographic) negatives, which the college was holding supposedly in secret with the promise that no one would have access to them.”

Kalman believes the pair were never granted permission to see the materials and never saw them until after their initial release.

Once Wacholder and Abegg’s reconstruction was out and available for scholarly use, the Israel Antiquities Authority had little reason to maintain the tight control it had over the original materials; it began to release them in 1993.

The section of the scrolls exhibition dedicated to HUC will include negatives from HUC’s security copy, a ceramic Qumran jar from a Dead Sea Scrolls cave that is part of the Skirball collection at HUC, and hopefully, the computer Wacholder used for his reconstruction.

“It’s an important reminder of the connection between Cincinnati and scroll scholarship that took place — even though most people weren’t aware of it — and the chance to revisit our own past,” Kalman says.

 

Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith In Ancient Times will be on exhibition at Cincinnati Museum Center from Nov. 16 through mid April. For individual tickets, call 513-287-7001 or go to www.cincymuseum.org. Also at the website is an extensive list of programs related to the scrolls for children and adults. For group tickets to the exhibit, call 800-733-2077.