THE COMPLETE DEAD SEA SCROLLS IN ENGLISH.<i> By Geza Vermes</i> .<i> Allen Lane/Penguin: 648 pp. $39.95</i>

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This momentous discovery, probably the most important archeological find in history, began in 1947 when two Bedouin shepherds, searching for a lost goat--or more likely illegally prospecting for antiquities--near the ruins of Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea, wandered into some caves and happened upon tall pottery jars containing seven leather scrolls. This trove was funneled to an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem who became the agent through which the Bedouins sold to Jordan and Israel the scrolls and scroll fragments subsequently discovered in the 11 scroll caves of Qumran and a variety of other Judean Desert sites.

By 1954 the first seven scrolls, the most complete in the entire collection, had been acquired by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Bedouins and archeologists competed feverishly to locate additional scrolls in the caves near Qumran. It was quickly concluded that the ancient inhabitants of this site had placed the scrolls in the caves.

Earlier, in 1952, cave 4 yielded an enormous quantity of scrolls: among them a community rule instructing the followers, or “sons of light” as they were called, to listen to the community’s master; and the controversial “pierced Messiah” text, a small, badly deteriorated fragment that some sensationalists argue, incorrectly, prophesies the crucifixion of Jesus. Other major discoveries followed, continuing until 1956.

The scrolls are a collection of, for the most part, fragmentary remains of almost 850 ancient Jewish documents dating to the pre-Christian period. Although the composition of these texts ranges over a very long period, the manuscripts were copied between the 3rd century BC and the early 1st century. This dating has been confirmed by paleography (the study of the history of writing), archeology and two independent sets of sophisticated carbon-14 tests. This means that the texts are pre-Christian and cannot have any direct references, as was once hoped for by Christian scholars, to Jesus or John the Baptist.

It is generally believed that these scrolls were gathered by a sect occupying the ruins of Qumran from some time after 150 BC until AD 68. Some of the scrolls were copied or composed by the sect, but others were brought there from elsewhere. Fully two-thirds of the scrolls were part of the general literary heritage of the Jews of the Greco-Roman period. The site, adjacent to the caves where the scrolls were found, was destroyed by the Romans during the Great Revolt of the Jews against Rome (AD 66-73). The connection between the scrolls and the ruins at Qumran is proved by a unique pottery assemblage, including the large storage jars in which some of the scrolls had been found, a type of jar virtually unique to Qumran. Archeological excavations of the ruins uncovered a settlement that featured a communal dining hall and a large number of ritual baths and a Jewish cemetery. Most archeologists have connected the sectarian group that gathered the scrolls with those who inhabited the site. Through the years of discovery, an increasingly fascinated world has awaited the light the scrolls would throw on the Bible and the history of Judaism and Christianity.

But the onslaught of discoveries throughout the 1950s, severely taxed the ability of scholars to publish and make the manuscripts available. Already in the spring of 1950, photographs and transcriptions of some of the initial discoveries appeared. This immense jigsaw puzzle of some 80,000 fragments of about 850 ancient manuscripts began to be pieced together in the Palestinian Archeological Museum (later called the Rockefeller Museum) under the control of the Jordanian government, which, during the 1948 War of Independence of the state of Israel, had come into possession of East Jerusalem, the site of the museum and Qumran itself. The Jordanian authorities established an international team that was charged with publication of the scrolls. The accomplishments of the team included the excavation of the Qumran site, preliminary transcriptions of many of the scrolls, publication of several volumes of fragments (less than 25% of the material) and the preparation of a concordance to the texts.

By 1960, the team’s work had virtually ground to a halt. When Israel swept into East Jerusalem after being attacked by Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, the unpublished scrolls fell into Israeli hands. But fearing international public opinion if it were to wrest control of the scrolls and their publication from the international team, all of whose members were Christian, the Israeli Antiquities Department decided to maintain the original publication arrangements. This decision was made despite the fact that the team by then had partially disbanded, and its members had lost interest, become ill or discovered that they had taken on more than they could publish in a lifetime. In fact, some of them died without ever publishing their fragments and bequeathed them to their students. All those in this little coterie termed “the charmed circle” or “the cartel” by excluded scholars--kept their texts to themselves and did not allow outsiders to see, much less publish, any of the scrolls.

By the mid-1980s, a new generation of scholars began to clamor for an end to the secrecy surrounding the scrolls. Rumors began to circulate about what might be hidden in these ancient parchments. Some had claimed that the texts, if released, would disprove Christianity. The international team began to take on a wider group of scholars, including some from Israel. The press and scholars excluded from the team began a campaign to free the scrolls from restrictions on scholarly use, and researchers began to complain about the slow pace of publication. In 1991, the issue came to a head with the bootleg publication of a computer-reconstructed edition of previously unpublished texts and the unauthorized release of a microfilm copy of photographs of the entire corpus by the Huntington Library in Pasadena. The Israel Antiquities Authority then declared in 1991 that the restrictions on access to the scrolls were over. Before the unauthorized release of the scrolls, the authority had appointed a new leader of the international team, Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to reorganize and complete the production of the official edition.

The antiquities authority’s release of the Dead Sea scrolls and the successful reorganization of the editorial program have resulted in the recent publication of large numbers of manuscripts over the last few years. As hoped, the freeing of the scrolls did indeed spark a golden age of Dead Sea scrolls research. No one would doubt that this is now an entirely different field of study. The new publication team, made up of Jews and Christians, is constantly releasing new volumes in the official Oxford University Press series and will soon finish its job.

Geza Vermes was one of the first scholars to demand the release of the scrolls, and the scholarly world is indebted to him for his efforts. The spate of important scholarly studies and translations stimulated by the availability of the materials continues unabated, and major advances are taking place in the field as studies proceed. It is no surprise that as material began to be released and to appear in scholarly editions, Vermes, a veteran scholar of the scrolls and of ancient Jewish history who taught at Oxford, has constantly expanded his popular translation of the scrolls to keep pace with the process. New texts have been added in each subsequent edition. Now Vermes has issued what he calls “The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.”

Most scholars, Vermes included, agree that the community responsible for the scrolls can be identified with the Essenes, a previously known Jewish sect. This perspective remains the majority view among scholars, even though the precise meaning of the word “Essene” is not certain, and it does not appear in the scrolls or in any other ancient Hebrew text. In his introductory essay on the Qumran community, Vermes restates his long-held views on this topic, basing his reasons almost entirely on the documents that were available when the scrolls were first published in 1962. Though some recently published scrolls do play a role in his argument, he does not present a synthesis based on the collection as it is known today. Some, including this reviewer, have suggested in light of recently published materials that the Jewish legal tradition of the sect stems from Sadducean priests and that the group developed from a group of priests who split from their brethren in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt (168 to 164 BC). While Vermes is certainly not obligated to accept this theory, he owes his readers a reconstruction of the community’s history and character that takes into consideration the full corpus and the new texts included in his translation.

Vermes is not the first to attempt to gather the Dead Sea Scrolls into one volume. Two similar collections have recently appeared: Florentino Garcia Martinez’s “The Dead Seas Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English” in 1994 was followed last year by “The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation” by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg and Edward Cook. Like his predecessors, Vermes omits biblical texts which constitute about one-third of all the scrolls. Unlike his predecessors, he also omits texts that he considers too fragmentary to be meaningful to the reader. For this reason, his collection is considerably less complete than the others. Numerous texts on which little research has been done are omitted by Vermes. Yet Vermes’ translations are the most accurate and the most readable, and the format of his volume makes them the most accessible.

Vermes has rendered many difficult texts beautifully, so that their literary value and character come through even in translation. The reader will find many beautiful fragments in this volume, like those of wisdom poetry, which combine striking images with the more dogmatic concern of warning followers about false doctrine. A fragment called “The Seductress” applies the familiar biblical metaphor of the harlot to this temptation:

She is ever prompt to oil her words,

and she flatters with irony,

deriding with iniquitous lips. . . .

Her inns are couches of darkness,

and her dominions in the midst of the night.

She pitches her dwelling on the foundations

of darkness

she abides in the tents of silence.

Only about one-third of the Dead Sea texts are sectarian compositions: the works composed and transmitted within the group that used the Qumran buildings, gathered the scrolls and hid them in the caves in ancient times. Though these texts are the most important for the discussion of the identification of the sect, placing them at the center of the discussion focuses us away from the most important value of the scrolls, which Vermes himself admits is “the history of Palestinian Judaism in the inter-Testamental period.” Fully one-third of the fragments are of apocryphal or pseudepigraphical texts, that is, Jewish texts from Second Temple and related to the Bible and part of the general literary heritage of the Jewish people at this time. Vermes, however, translates only those parts of the scrolls that exist as fragments from Qumran, so that readers have no idea of the context of the entire work. This approach obscures the fact that longer, more substantial texts than what are presented here were available in the ancient collection at Qumran.

Further, these apocryphal texts, virtually ignored in Vermes’ introduction, make possible a new understanding of the history of Judaism in the two centuries preceding Christianity. The reconstruction of the approaches to Jewish theology, law and biblical interpretation in antiquity is the central challenge that the scrolls pose for researchers. From this point of view, Vermes’ concentration primarily on the nature and history of those who assembled the library, rather than the scrolls’ impact on ancient Jewish theology, represents an outdated approach.

Even regarding the history of Christianity, the value of the scrolls no longer lies in the common assumption that Essene Judaism was a forerunner of the early Church. Instead, scholars are now aware that Christianity developed out of a complex of Jewish ideas that circulated among various circles and that are reflected in part in the Dead Sea Scrolls. For this reason, these apocryphal-type scrolls are increasingly important in historical research. The scrolls help us realize that much of what may have been previously taken to be foreign influence on Christianity stems from Jewish roots.

At the same time, we can now better understand where Jesus differed from the Jewish groups of his time, which is a point made by Vermes. Many substantial differences exist between his teachings and those of the Qumran sect. For example, the sectarians abstained from eating with transgressors and those who were ritually impure, whereas Jesus went out of his way, according to Gospel tradition, to eat with such people. Jesus followed the widespread Jewish tradition of preaching love of all men, as did the Pharisaic sage Hillel, but the Qumran sectarians were taught to hate those who scorned their teachings.

The scrolls have opened up a new chapter in the study of Judaism precisely at the time when it was involved in fateful developments for the history of Western civilization. The study of these documents is really at its beginnings, and we can hope for many more important conclusions as research proceeds. Vermes has played a substantial role in this research, and his translations have been a standard in the field. “The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English” presents an excellent collection of texts, but it would have been greatly strengthened had the introduction been entirely rewritten to synthesize the rich collection that it provides for the reader.