City Seminary of Sacramento acquires library of noted Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Strugnell
City Seminary of Sacramento is pleased to announce the acquisition of the greater portion of the John Strugnell Library. Dr. Strugnell of Harvard Divinity School is the noted former chief editor of the Dead Seas Scrolls.
"The Strugnell Library is unique, in that it is so deep in so many areas" said City Seminary's Frank Walker, Professor of Historical Theology . " He had large sub-libraries in Semitics - including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic - as well as Greek and Latin, and large sections on classical studies, patristics [early church writings], apocryphal and pseudepigraphal [falsely attributed] literature, Judaism, Christianity, Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies."
Strugnell's association with the Dead Sea Scrolls began in 1955, following his training in Semitic languages and classics at Oxford University in Great Britain.
"The original Scrolls team was appointed in the early 1950s by Jordan, which nationalized the collection in 1961, and denied Jewish scholars access," according to a 1991 Jerusalem Report. Israel's Department of Antiquities left the team's jurisdiction over the Scrolls intact after Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967.
Strugnell, who taught at Harvard School of Divinity for 37 years,
worked as a team member while the Scrolls were under both Jordanian and
Israeli control. He served as editor in chief of the Scrolls project
from 1987-1990.
Controversy has surrounded him. Under his leadership, the long
publication delay of much of the Scrolls material, particularly
fragments from Qumran Cave 4, raised an outcry from scholars. Hershel
Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review magazine, took up the cause to open the Scrolls to other scholars and speed up publication of the texts.
Though Strugnell and other editors maintained that the work was
being conducted as expeditiously as quality and funding allowed, he was
removed in 1990. Emanuel Tov of Hebrew University became the first
Jewish editor in chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Publication has gone
faster since then.
A highlight of the collection is Strugnell's copy of the famous or
infamous Dead Seas Scrolls "concordance." (A concordance is a list of
words found in a text arranged alphabetically, with references to all
the places where each word is found in the text). The early Scrolls
team made a concordance of the words in the unpublished texts to assist
their own work.
In the early 1990s, a copy of this private concordance to the
unpublished scrolls was obtained (perhaps illegally) and "reversed" by
two scholars. Using a computer, they constructed a copy of the withheld
text that allowed the reconstructed text to be published in an
unauthorized format.
A lengthy lawsuit ensued in Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court found
that Shanks, publisher of the text, had denied scholar Elisha Qimron
the opportunity to append his name to his own work. Qimron had
reconstructed the text from fragments, and although not the "author" of
the particular text in question, his jigsaw-puzzle work of
reconstructing the text was ruled an intellectual property.
Shanks, also editor of Moment magazine, said a leading
Scrolls scholar, Florentino Garcia-Martinez, has indicated Qimron had
little to do with the actual reconstruction of the text. Qimron is
threatening a lawsuit against Garcia-Martinez, said Shanks.
Experts at Dove Book Sellers who handled the sale of Strugnell's
collection worked for weeks to catalog the thousands of volumes valued
in "the low six figures," and every item was available for purchase on
a commission basis with the scholar.
"Professor Strugnell also allowed us to keep [intact] papers,
letters, personal notes and other materials related to his work on the
Dead Sea Scrolls." In assessing Strugnell's collection, Dove's Jeffrey
Ball said, "It's rare to find a scholar of this academic power."
"This is very big news in the Protestant
community here in Sacramento, as well as among other centers of
scholarship (indeed, the rabbinic and other first century Christian
materials included in this library will be of great interest to
Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish scholars alike)," concluded Professor
Walker.
A partial listing of those works catalogued at the time of sale can be found under downloads.
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