The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers.

• Author: Kaufman, Stephen A.

The events of the early 1990s surrounding the then still unpublished materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls collections resulted in a flourish of public interest, the jump-start of several academic careers, and a detour - if not a premature end - for several others. Since then, both authorized and unauthorized "publications" from this huge but largely fragmentary (as well as fragmented) corpus have appeared. Only with the appearance of these two official and essential reference publications, however, has the study of these materials been put on firm foundation, enabling complete and careful access to all of the known photographs of the texts from Qumran and related areas.

The publication by Tov and Pfann is a microfiche edition of all of the relevant photographic negatives (including photographs of related non-textual materials) from the Rockefeller Museum (PAM), the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and the Shrine of the Book (SHR), with the exception of twenty negatives from the SHR collection that are missing from this publication - an omission mentioned (vol. 1, p. 73) but not justified. Included are associated materials from Murabba at, Masada, Nahal Hever, Wadi ed-Daliyeh (and "Wadi Seiyal"), and other, minor sites. In some cases, multiple exposures were taken for individual negatives in order to deal with the varying levels of coloration on the several fragments mounted together on most plates. In a few other cases, no photographs of certain text fragments are known to exist. I know firsthand that such is the case with some fragments whose whereabouts have simply been lost over the years. What is not clear to me is whether or not there are also fragments in the major collections that are currently identified but have simply never been photographed. The last photographs in the PAM series were made in 1961! Those in the IAA series were made in the 1980s. Also included here are one hundred more recent photographs taken by the West Semitic Research Project (i.e., Bruce and Ken Zuckerman), in Amman (primarily, the "Copper Scroll"), East Jerusalem, and at the Shrine of the Book.

The microfiche publication itself is very well done and of the highest quality. (Peter Moerkerk, the photographer responsible for this work, details the steps involved on pp. 15-16 of volume 2.) On a good machine, readers should be able to accomplish much the same as they could with high quality prints or with the original negatives at a light table. (I have used all...