First Person: Publishing Every Last Fragment

The Dead Sea Scrolls editors don’t want us to miss a word

The publishers of the Dead Sea Scrolls are kind enough to send me copies of the official folio volumes as they come off the press. The series is known as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, or DJD for short. I am holding in my hand what surely must be one of the most unusual volumes ever published by the Oxford University Press. It is DJD 33.^a Its contents are labeled “Unidentified Fragments.” It is the editio princeps of what the editors (Dana M. Pike and Andrew C. Skinner) call the “castaways,” the “bits and pieces,” scroll fragments so small that no one knows what they are.