FINAL WARNING: Setting the Stage for Destruction
After the Israeli government took full possession of Jerusalem in June
of 1967, many were surprised that de Vaux was allowed to continue in
his capacity as the leader of the team of scholars, even though it was a
known fact that he was anti-Semitic, which was why he would not
allow any Jewish scholars into the project. In the mid-1980’s, Strugnell
brought in Israeli scholar Elisha Qimron; Talmud scholar Jacob
Sussman; Devorah Dimant of Haifa University; and Emmanuel Tov,
Shemaryahu Talmon, Joseph Baumgarten, and Jonas Greenfield, of
Baltimore’s Hebrew University, to work on some unpublished text.In November, 1990, without informing Strugnell, the Israeli government
assigned Emmanuel Tov to become the ‘joint editor-in-chief’ of the
project to finish the translation and publication of the Scrolls. Then, in
December, 1990, the New York Times quoted from an October 28, 1990
interview Strugnell had with the Israeli paper Ha-Aretz, where he said
that Judaism was a “horrible religion,” a “racist” religion, and that
Israel was “founded on a lie.” Magen Broshi, curator of Jerusalem’s
Shrine of the Book, said: “We’ve known for twenty years that he was
an anti-Semite.” On another occasion, he referred to Strugnell’s “rabid
anti-Semitism.” These anti-Semitic comments resulted in him being
dismissed from the project as editor-in-chief, even though he still
controlled his portion of the texts. Tov became chief editor, along with
Professor Eugene Ulrich and Emile Puech.In September, 1991, Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder, and one of his
doctoral students, Martin G. Abegg, from Hebrew Union College in
Cincinnati, Ohio, released their compilation of the Qumran texts, which
was published by the Biblical Archaeological Society. In 1988,
Strugnell had printed 30 copies of a 52,000 word concordance of
words found in the scroll, which had been created by de Vaux’s team
in the 1950’s, so it could be used by the team. Wacholder and Abegg
used a computer to reconstruct these words, and it was purported to
be 80% accurate. Later that month, the Huntington Library in San
Marine, California revealed that it had a complete set of negatives,
from photographs, of photographs of the original scrolls, which had
been given to them in 1987 by Elizabeth Hay Bechtel of the Bechtel
Corporation, who had founded the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center
in Claremont, California (who also had a copy). They made microfilm
copies available to any scholar who requested it. The Hebrew Union
College also have a partial set; and the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate