I’m happy to report that the first 2022 issue of Harvard Theological Review contains my article on the Dead Sea Scrolls said to come from Cave 1 at Qumran:

“How the ‘Jerusalem Scrolls’ Became the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1: Archaeology, the Antiquities Market, and the Spaces In Between”

This paper emerged out of The Lying Pen of Scribes project. A big thank you to Årstein Justnes for encouraging me to dig into these questions back in 2020, and thanks also to Eibert Tigchelaar and Stephen Reed for spending a good deal of time answering questions and generally helping me out.

I workshopped a number of ideas related to this article on this blog over the last couple years, and I’m very grateful for the input of many people in the comments and via email. I thought this might be a good occasion to gather those posts in an organized way (and also to add some updates to a couple of the posts):

Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 1: The Genesis Apocryphon Roll

Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 2: The Thanksgiving Scrolls

Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 3: Is Cave 1 Really Cave 1?

Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 4: Sukenik’s Isaiah Scroll

Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 5: The Strange Case of 1Q5 Fragment 13

Qumran Cave 1 Questions, Part 6: 1QSa and 1QSb

A few other posts from the last several months touch on related topics, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls that Mar Samuel, the Archbishop of the Syrian church, kept in the US:

The Dead Sea Scrolls of New Jersey

Then there is the video footage of the more famous Scrolls that Mar Samuel brought to the US and then sold:

Dead Sea Scrolls Archival Newsreel Footage

As a follow up to that post, I should add that Alexander Schick subsequently alerted me to the existence of video footage of William Brownlee and John Trever with the Scrolls in Jerusalem in the very early days. He noticed that some of this footage was presented on YouTube by Orit Rosengarten. The archival footage begins at 14:31:

There is also a freely available online copy of Trever’s photos of the “Cave 1” scrolls:

Trever’s Photos of the Cave 1 Scrolls Freely Available Online

And I came across a newspaper article that identified by name some of the lesser known excavators of Cave 1:

Two Unheralded Excavators of Cave 1 at Qumran: Ibrahim Asuli and Mohamed Mustafa

…And finally a photo shoot from the 1950s involving Cave 1 materials staged in a “natural setting”:

A Dead Sea Scrolls Photo Shoot from the 1950s

In connection with this photo shoot, I should add that Alexander Schick, while working through the estate of Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, has located a publication that used these pictures, a pamphlet produced by the Jordan Tourist Department under the title “Qumran und die Schriftrollen vom Toten Meer”:

This was a very enjoyable project. Thanks again to everyone for putting up with my questions!