John Strugnell

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John Strugnell, born in England in 1930, was the youngest member of the team of scholars led by Roland de Vaux, formed in 1954 to edit the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. He was studying Oriental languages at Oxford when G. R. Driver recommended him for the work. In 1956-1957 he held a position at the Oriental Institute of Chicago, then again from 1960 to 1967 he was away from his scrolls, this time at Duke University, though he returned in summers to continue his efforts in Jerusalem. In 1967 he received a position at Harvard. He followed Pierre Benoit as editor-in-chief of the scrolls in 1984, a position which he held until 1990. During this period he was responsible for bringing Numerous Jewish and Israeli scholars to work on the scrolls, breaking the long standing exclusion.

His production of editions of texts was not large, but the text which he did publish were all extremely important, texts including "The Angelic liturgy", later published as Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifices (Shirot 'olat ha-Shabbat), and "An Unpublished halakhic Letter from Qumran", later known as MMT from the Hebrew (Miqtsat Ma'asei ha-Torah), this latter text being edited with Elisha Qimron, who did much of the work. These texts helped to enrich scholarly knowledge of the cultus of the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nevertheless, he was a slow worker and the times had changed since it was acceptable to keep the scrolls protected from what was once considered misuse and hasty publication.

For many years scholars had sat back and accepted the lack of access to unpublished texts and the slow publication of the texts. This changed during Strugnell's editorship, for there came a growing movement of scholars calling for access to the scrolls. By this time his health had deteriorated. Only one volume was produced under his general editorship, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever, by Emanuel Tov.

Finally Strugnell was removed from his editorial post on the scrolls project in 1990 after critics charged that he was moving too slowly in publishing them and he gave an interview to Ha'aretz saying that Judaism was a "horrible religion". He is currently professor emeritus at the Harvard Divinity School.

In the interview, Strugnell insisted Judaism was "a Christian heresy, and we deal with our heretics in different ways. You are a phenomenon that we haven't managed to convert -- and we should have managed."

Strugnell now says that he was suffering from stress-induced alcoholism and mental illness when he gave the interview. Shortly after he was dismissed from his post, he was institutionalized in McLean Hospital for a period. He now insists that his remarks were taken out of context and he only meant "horrible" in the Miltonian sense of "deplored in antiquity". He also insists that he tried to publish the scrolls as fast as he could but that his team was the limiting factor.

[edit] References

Article by John J. Collins on John Strugnell, in The Encyclopaedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Lawrence Schiffman and James VanderKam, Oxford, 2000.
The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, James VanderKam and Peter Flint, HarperSanFransisco, 2002.
"Headliners: Fallen Scholar", New York Times, Week in Review, December 16, 1990
Ron Rosenbaum, "The Riddle of the Scrolls", Vanity Fair, reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune