BAS Reprints Facsimile Edition of Scroll Photographs

A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, published by BAS last November^a and then temporarily banned from distribution by an Israeli court,^b is once again available to the public. The new printing includes an entirely new publisher’s foreword that has no attachments to it. One of the original foreword’s 22 attachments—a photocopy of a Hebrew transcription of the 120-line text known as MMT as it was published in a Polish journal—is the basis of the lawsuit brought against the Biblical Archaeology Society by Ben-Gurion University professor Elisha Qimron, one of the editors of MMT. Because the Israeli court’s temporary injunction applies only if the photocopy of MMT appears in the two-volume set, the ban does not apply to the new printing. The new printing retains every photograph of the original printing as well as the index that keys the photographs to the plate numbers in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.

Prepared, with an introduction, by Professor Robert H. Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach, California, and Professor James M. Robinson of Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California, the two-volume work contains 1,787 photographs, nearly all of which show previously unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.