More Computer-Generated Scrolls

A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four; Fascicle Two

Reconstructed and edited by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992) xix + 309 pp., $67.50

When Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg published the first volume of previously unpublished Qumran texts that they had reconstructed on the basis of a concordance to chose texts, the New York Times (September 5, 1991, p. A1) used the word “bootleg” to describe their work. The Times went on to characterize their edition as “an end run around the scholarly blockade.” The same day, the Washington Post (p. A1) referred to Wacholder and Abegg as “renegades” and quoted Wacholder as saying, “Now I am an old man… It is a painful thing to have so close something so rare. But I realized that if I waited, I would long be dead.”

Wacholder, a professor at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and Abegg, his graduate student, based their work on the preliminary concordance of unpublished nonbiblical texts from Cave 4 that Raymond E. Brown, William G. Oxtoby and I had composed on cards in the “Scrollery” of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem between 1957 and 1960. Those cards were then photographed in the 1980s and made available to editors of the Cave 4 texts; a copy was deposited at Hebrew Union College (along with a few other institutions) for safekeeping, and Wacholder and Abegg—with the aid of a computer—proceeded to reconstruct texts from it.