BAS Publishes Fascicle Two of DSS Transcripts

The Biblical Archaeology Society has recently published Fascicle Two of A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four reconstructed and edited by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg, both of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Like Fascicle One, published last year,^a the volume presents texts in their original languages as reconstructed, with the help of a computer, from a concordance to the scrolls prepared in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Joseph Fitzmyer, Raymond Brown, William Oxtoby and J. Teixidor. Despite initial scholarly skepticism, this method of reconstruction has been found to be about 98 percent accurate.^b Moreover, it has permanent value because the scholars who prepared the transcripts in the late 1950s (John Strugnell, J.T. Milik and other members of the original team of editors) worked from the original scroll fragments and therefore could sometimes detect details not shown in any photograph. Many of the scrolls have subsequently suffered some deterioration, and so this reconstruction is the only way to retrieve these lost portions of the texts.