Samizdat Dead Sea Scroll for Sale

Want to buy a Hebrew transcription and English translation of MMT, one of the most important, unpublished, still-secret Dead Sea Scrolls? It’s available-simply write to Poland, new home of the free press.

MMT, it is said, will revolutionize Qumran studies.^a It was assigned for publication over 35 years ago to Harvard professor John Strugnell, who has reportedly written (with Elisha Qimron) a 500-page commentary on the 120-line text. But Strugnell won’t release the text until his commentary is published. So the text remains unavailable to most scholars.

As the New York Times wrote in the editorial printed in the sidebar “New York Times Endorses BAR’s Position”: “Teachers are forced to circulate scrolls furtively in samizdat form, the way unsanctioned art and literature circulated in the Soviet Union before glasnost.” MMT is the most important of these samizdat texts.

In this way, a transcription and translation of MMT was sent anonymously to the editor of a Polish publication devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Qumran Chronicle. He reprinted it as a special appendix to the December 1990 edition. To obtain your copy of MMT, send $22 (regular mail; add $8 for air mail) to: