- NEW YORK (Reuters)
- The modern technology of e-mail and laser printing speeded up the publication
of complete volumes of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the archeological
finds of the 20th century, scholars said on Thursday.
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- The scrolls and fragments, providing insights into what
the Hebrew Bible looked like 2,000 years ago, were discovered in caves
between 1947 and 1956 on the shores of the Dead Sea and the decades since
have been spent in painstaking and controversial research and conservation
for their eventual publication.
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- Professor Emmanuel Tov, editor-in-chief of an international
committee on the Dead Sea Scrolls, announced the publication of 37 large-sized
volumes at a news conference in the New York Public Library. He added that
an additional 15 volumes were also ready for publication.
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- ``Modern technology was very important to our team,''
said Tov, who has headed the project since 1990. ``We decided to make the
camera copies ourselves, e-mail was absolutely necessary and I could not
have done this in 10 years without e-mail.''
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- Tov said he worked in a small office at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem with desktop computers and laser printers. Digital photography
and multispectral imaging enabled scholars to read what was not previously
visible on the fragments.
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- The volumes of scrolls, translated from writings in Hebrew,
Aramaic, Greek and Latin dating from 250 B.C. to 70 A.D., were published
by Oxford University Press under the title ''Discoveries in the Judean
Desert.''
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- TRIBULATION
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- ``I'm pleased to be able to announce to you that the
publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been completed,'' Tov said in remarks
that he will also deliver Monday in Denver, Colorado at a conference of
the Society of Biblical Literature. ''After 54 years of excitement, expectation,
tribulation, much criticism and a little praise, with the help of inspiration
and even more perspiration, publication has been finalized.''
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- Ten years ago, the end of the project was far from completion
because the scrolls were under the control of a handful of scholars who
were reluctant to share them. Under Tov and the Israel Antiquities Authority
the pace quickened.
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- Hundreds of the documents were found near the Dead Sea,
the best known are the Qumran scrolls which were discovered in 11 caves
near the ruins of an ancient settlement at Hirbet Qumran, 9 miles south
of Jericho, which is now part of the West Bank.
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- Reading of the scrolls did not shake Judaism or Christianity
as some scholars had anticipated, but there was debate over the years over
why they did not mention Jesus Christ. Tov explained that it was probably
too early for Jesus to appear in the literature.
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- ``Don't forget that all the scrolls written prior to
the year zero could not have mentioned him,'' Tov said. ``So you are left
only with the scrolls from zero to around 70. Then don't forget the New
Testament itself was not written in the year zero or the year one, or two
but the first writings were in the middle of the first century so it wasn't
yet written up.''
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- One of the scrolls, containing a Hebrew song of Thanksgiving,
was dedicated in New York Thursday to ``Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the
Great City of New York'' to commemorate heroism in response to the Sept.
11 hijacked plane attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
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- ``The scrolls are of enormous historical value not only
to scholars but to those of us who feel that history is prolonged, to give
us the opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of people 2,000
years ago and that we have to look at the world in a new light every day,''
said Richard Sheirer, director of the mayor's Office of Emergency Management,
accepting the scroll on behalf of the city.
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