Subject: DSS

From: "Vinton A. Dearing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 10:48:03 PST

The address of the Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Center is 1325 N. 
College Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, telephone 909-621-6451, e-mail 
[email-masked]. The center is not open every day nor all day when it 
is open and during normal hours there may be no one there, so 
telephone before visiting. It is in the west wing of the Library of 
the School of Theology at Claremont. Its president is James A. 
Sanders, who is a professor at the School and also at the Claremont 
Graduate School. I quote from Bible Review, August issue, p. 40, "Its 
mission is to make photographic (and now digital) records of old 
manuscripts, to preserve the records in the safest possible way and 
to make them available to all who request them, in cooperation with 
the institutions that own the original documents. . . . Besides this 
treasure trove of ancient manuscript records, the ABMC boasts the 
world's largest and best-preserved collection of Dead Sea Scroll 
negatives and transparencies. The center now distributes, at minimal
cost, prints and transparencies of the scrolls, both published and 
unpublished, to researchers all over the world. . . . Soon the ABMC, 
in collaboration with Brigham Young University and the Foundation for 
Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, will also make available 
high-resolution digital images of the scrolls. .  . . The ABMC, 
which also publishes two newsletters a year, depends heavily on 
donations by individuals who value its activities." You may ask 
the Center to put you on its mailing list and to send you films on 
interlibrary loan. The director is Michael Phelps. Bruce 
Zuckerman, a former director, has a web site with digital images 
of the DSS. How that site and the Center's forthcoming site will be 
coordinated has not been worked out. This summer images made with a 
new and improved camera at BYU showed characters that had been 
invisible before.  Small donations in support of the Center are 
accepted as well as large, so all those who wish to serve biblical 
scholarship in this way can do so.  There are no preliminary 
formalities if you wish to work at the Center itself. Please note 
that the e-mail address given in Bible Review is no longer current; 
use the one given above.
    A phone call to the Huntington Library discloses that the scrolls 
there were published as A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 
prepared with an introduction and index by Robert H. Eisenman and 
James M. Robinson, Washington, DC, Biblical Archaeology Society, 
1991, a 2 volume set originally priced at $185, so my memory had not 
failed me when I said they had been published. As is well known, the 
DSS began to deteriorate as soon as they were brought to light. What 
is not so well known is that the original photographic negatives of 
them also started to deteriorate. The founder and first president of 
the ABMC, Elizabeth Hay Bechtel, arranged to have the original 
negatives copied by the Huntington Library's photographer and it is 
these films that reside in San Marino. Another publication, perhaps 
more widely available in libraries, is The Dead Sea Scrolls on 
Microfiche: A Comprehensive Facsimile Edition, Leiden and New York, 
E. J. Brill, 1993. There are supplements to the original series. 
   Vinton Dearing