The Dead Sea Scrolls Inventory Project

What is the value of these earlier lists? Some of the data in these fascicles need to be updated, and the later lists are better to consult. Much of the Cave 4 and Cave 11 material remained unpublished then. The material was distributed to new editors who might rename documents and fragments of documents. The photographs and museum plates remained constant, but particular details needed to be changed as more texts were published. If one is only interested in the final publication of fragments and texts, these early lists are not of much value.

One of the values of these lists is that they help one realize how unpublished material was distributed to early editors such as Cross, Allegro, Strugnell, Milik, Starcky and Skehan. When I was compiling these fascicles, there was still the expectation that particular DJD volumes would be devoted to a sequence of texts linked to these editors. Puech had taken over the Starcky material. Puech would later publish three volumes of the Starcky material. The Biblical texts were being reassigned to students of Cross. Ulrich was dealing with the Skehan material. Strugnell assigned some of his texts to students and others. Even some of the Milik texts had been reassigned.

The Biblical texts were kept together in canonical order when published in the DJD volumes. However, Strugnell and Milik’s materials were redistributed to many scholars and were published somewhat randomly. Here the fascicles preserve lists of texts that Strugnell and Milik were editing. While some later publications credit the early work of Strugnell and Milik, others do not. These early editors gathered fragments, made joins and helped reconstruct texts. The fascicles help show the materials that Strugnell and Milik were editing and how they were organized in the list of documents. Because of the more random publication of these materials in the later DJD volumes, the organization of these materials took more work to comprehend.

An example here is the so-called sapiential texts that Strugnell grouped. 4Q408 through 4Q426 were related mainly to sapiential texts. 4Q414 was a baptismal liturgy on the back of 4Q415, a sapiential text. 4Q415–4Q418 were published in DJD 34, but the other texts are scattered in different volumes. Even 4Q414 is found in a different volume, so one might not notice it is on the back of a sapiential text. One might wonder why 4Q409 was in this group. While separate publications of each text may have been pragmatic, one may wonder if the organizational structure of Strugnell has been lost in the process. The earlier lists help one to see some of these issues more clearly.

The value of these older lists is to understand how texts were understood then (in the early 90s). This is at the end of the editorial work of Strugnell and before Tov became the general editor. They help provide information about the history of scholarly work on the fragments. Since most photographs had been taken under the direction of the early editors, it is possible to see how they sorted and organized fragments into identifiable texts. The new editors worked largely with these photographs in their editorial work. These older photographs reflect a set of fragments organized in a particular way to show a particular understanding of the work. While some editors handed on insights and transcriptions to the new editors, there was no transmission of information in some cases.