November 18, 2001	Sunday	Ramazan 2, 1422

NEW YORK, Nov 16: The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered with great fanfare in the late 1940s, have finally been published in their entirety, after decades of toil, controversy and scandal.

“It’s the greatest publication effort of the 20th century, there’s no doubt about it,” Jacob Fisch, executive director of the Friends of the Israel Antiquities Authority, told AFP on Friday.

The scrolls, which have provided archeologists and religious scholars new ways of looking at the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish world of Jesus, have been produced in 37 large tomes by the Oxford University Press.

Announcing the publication at the New York Public Library on Thursday, editor-in-chief Emanuel Tov dedicated a special “Thanksgiving Scroll” to New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the people of New York for “their heroism during the September 11 tragedy, and in friendship, solidarity and support from Israel for the United States.”

The hundreds of papyrus and leather documents, the first of which were discovered in 1947, have been surrounded by mystery and controversy ever since.

Early on, they were associated with the Essenes, an austere and mysterious Hebrew sect active from the third century BC to around 70 AD.

The improbable find in a cave near the Dead Sea by a Bedouin shepherd coincided with the birth of Israel and the absorption of Arab Palestine into Jordan, a time of political turmoil and intrigue.

Transcriptions and photographs of a first set of scrolls in relatively good condition were published quickly, confirming their antiquity and spurring the search for more.

The publication of the other more fragmented manuscripts and their translation from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek proved a gargantuan undertaking, and an international, interdenominational team of young American, Israeli and European scholars was formed.

But work on other scrolls proved slow and controversial. Five volumes came out between 1955 and 1968 in the series entitled “Discoveries in the Judaean Desert”.

But over the next two decades only two volumes emerged as the team, working in Jordanian Jerusalem, became hampered by political changes following the Six-Day War, in addition to competing work commitments and personal problems, quite apart from the complexity and magnitude of the project.

Academics awaiting publication of the remaining scrolls became impatient, with one calling the delays the “academic scandal of the 20th century”, and a media campaign was launched in the early 1990s calling for the release of the documents.

The chief editor of the project, John Strugnell, was replaced by Tov, who expanded the team further and set a tighter publication schedule.

The process was speeded up with the help of computer programs, and photos and microfiches of unpublished texts became available, spawning new controversy as independent scholars came out with competing transcriptions and analyses of the documents.

Controversies multiplied, the most sensational a spurious claim that the Vatican was trying to suppress publication of the scrolls because they would cast serious doubt on traditional claims of Christianity.—AFP