Strata: Decision to Buy Scrolls from Bedouin Reflects “Greatness”

Père Roland de Vaux, the brilliant French Dominican priest who was director of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem in the 1940s and codirector of the Qumran excavations in the 1950s, is often given the lion’s share of the credit for the early collection and study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a recent review (to be published in Revue Biblique; excerpted below), of Weston Fields’s new book, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History (Brill, 2009), however, Fr. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, also of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, celebrates the recognition of another, sometimes-forgotten champion of the scrolls.