More than five decades after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Middle East, scholars celebrated the publication of nearly all those ancient documents

Christian Century, Dec 12, 2001

More than five decades after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Middle East, scholars celebrated the publication of nearly all those ancient documents. "It's a very happy moment that we can say today that all this is completed," said Emmanuel Tov, a professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University who spearheaded the final stages of the publication effort.

Tov spoke November 15 at New York University. About ten years earlier, a scholarly monopoly on scroll research was broken when at least two institutions published photographs of unpublished scrolls and fragments, putting them into the public domain. Under the auspices of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Toy and his team of some 100 scholars have published 28 volumes of the 900 scrolls and commentaries that date between 250 B.C.E. and 70 C.E., according to the Associated Press. Two more volumes are near completion and will join the others in Oxford University Press's series "Discoveries in the Judean Desert." The scrolls, written primarily in Hebrew and Aramaic, were discovered between 1947 and 1956 on the western shores of the Dead Sea about nine miles south of Jericho.