The scrolls, found in caves near Qumran between 1947 and 1956, include the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. For more than 40 years, a small international team of editors held exclusive rights to publish many of the fragments, and progress was slow. The Huntington's director, William Moffett, revealed that the library held a full set of microfilmed photographs made for safekeeping and would make them available. Within months Israeli authorities agreed to open access.
The first scrolls were found in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave above the Dead Sea. Excavations over the following decade uncovered some 900 manuscripts, most in thousands of fragments. Many were quickly published, but responsibility for others was divided among a small group of scholars who had exclusive rights to them, and by the 1980s much of the material remained unpublished. Critics called the arrangement a scholarly cartel.
In the early 1980s a philanthropist, Elizabeth Hay Bechtel, had arranged for the scrolls to be photographed as a precaution against loss, and a set of the negatives ended up at the Huntington Library in San Marino, near Los Angeles. On Sunday, September 22, 1991, Moffett announced that the library would allow any qualified scholar to see them. Weeks earlier, two scholars in Cincinnati had used a computer to reconstruct unpublished texts from a concordance.
The official editors protested and the Israel Antiquities Authority initially threatened legal action, but it soon relented. In November 1991 a two-volume facsimile edition of the photographs was published, and the scrolls have since been digitised and put online.
Key people: William A. Moffett