Backing down from a legal threat, the Antiquities Authority has called for an international conference of scholars in Jerusalem to resolve a dispute over access to more than 3,000 photographs of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The authority’s director, Amir Drori, said a compromise formula would be sought to protect the rights of those scholars who have long worked on the scrolls and others who until now were unable to gain access to them for research.
He proposed that the conference be held in December and attended by representatives of the four institutions that hold negatives of the photographs and the international team already involved in the research.
The Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., touched off the controversy early last week, when it opened its photographic collection to all qualified scholars, despite strong objections from Jerusalem.
Israel maintains that Huntington, one of the world’s foremost private research libraries, was contractually obliged to serve only as a repository of photocopies made as a precaution against the originals in Jerusalem being lost or destroyed.
The Antiquities Authority, the Israeli government’s official custodian of archaeological finds, threatened legal action over what it claimed to be a breach of contract.
The Jerusalem Post quoted a senior archaeologist Friday as saying, “The authority is quitting the fray because it would have been too expensive to fight it in the courts.”
The authority heatedly denied that in a statement over the weekend. But it said it is interested in resolving the dispute through a conference rather than a head-on confrontation.
ERRORS IN REPRODUCTION POSSIBLE
The scrolls, widely considered the most important archaeological discovery of the century, were found in caves near the Dead Sea over 40 years ago.
According to Drori, 80 percent have been published to date. The remainder is being worked on and should be ready for publication in six to seven years.
A pirate publication of the scrolls was just produced by two Bible scholars, using computers to reconstruct probable passages from a secret concordance of the text.
Its publisher, Herschel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archeology Review, conceded there could be at least 20 percent error in the reconstruction. But he said it had been necessary to break the lock by a small group of scholars on the scrolls.
Crities have long charged that research has been restricted to a privileged few scholars who have been slow and secretive about their work, impeding research.
Drori acknowledges that there have been delays in publishing the ancient documents. He insists the Antiquities Authority opposes their unauthorized publication only to protect the work and reputations of the 40-odd scholars who have labored over them.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
