First Person: Dead Sea Scroll Mystery

This is about what may be the last remaining mystery of the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls: One of the critical breakthroughs that freed the Dead Sea Scrolls from the small publication team that had been assigned to publish them and failed to do so in 40 years was BAR’s 1991 two-volume publication of thousands of photographs of still-secret scroll fragments from Qumran Cave 4.

Where did these photographs come from? We got them from Professor Robert H. Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach. But where did he get them? He and Professor James M. Robinson, as they stated in their “Introduction,” were only “enlisted” to “implement the right of the academic community to obtain access to this important material without further delay.”¹ They did not disclose the source of the thousands of Dead Sea Scroll pictures we published.

I think I now know where they got them. But my answer only adds to the mystery. I have often asked Eisenman (who brought Robinson into the project) where the pictures came from, but he has steadfastly declined to tell me. I had always thought they came from a source in the Israeli government.