The Dead Sea Scrolls Are Now Available to All!

On November 19, 1991, the Biblical Archaeology Society, publisher of Biblical Archaeology Review, published a two-volume set of photographs of the previously unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls.

The source of the photographs was not disclosed. The volumes were prepared, with an introduction, by Professor Robert H. Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach, and Professor James M. Robinson of Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California.

The two volumes contain a total of 1,787 plates. Some have been enhanced by infrared photography. The publication was funded by the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation.

In their introduction, Professors Eisenman and Robinson state:

“Arrangements that initially seemed reasonable need, a generation or so later, to be supplemented by some mechanism by means of which scholars who were beginning their careers when the discoveries were made (not to speak of scholars then not yet born) can gain full access to them before their careers have been completed. It is under this higher claim of the academic community and society at large that the present edition has been initiated.”

Included in this edition are not only texts from the Wadi Qumran, the principal location described by the designation Dead Sea Scrolls, but also unpublished texts from nearby sites—Wadi Murabba’at, Wadi Daliyeh and Nahal Hever.

An index keys each plate to a photograph number in the Rockefeller Museum (formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum) in Jerusalem. Otherwise, the texts are not identified.