Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 43:1 (NA 1992)
Article: A ‘Slain Messiah’ In 4q Serekh Milhûamah (4q285)?
Author: Markus Bockmuehl

TynBul 43:1 (1992) p. 155

A ‘Slain Messiah’
In 4q Serekh Milhûamah (4q285)?

Markus Bockmuehl

Almost by definition, the scholarly study of Ancient Judaism rarely makes for exciting headlines. It is all the more remarkable, then, that amidst the breathtaking events of 1991 academic controversy around the Dead Sea Scrolls should repeatedly have featured in the international mass media.

First came the news that Professor John Strugnell of Harvard Divinity School had been deposed in late 1990 as head of the international editorial team which has overseen the official publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls since their discovery in 1947. The most immediate reason for Strugnell’s dismissal after only three years at the helm reportedly lay in his increasingly acerbic anti-Jewish pronouncements in a series of press interviews.1

All this transpired amidst mounting scholarly protest at the creeping pace of publication and the editorial committee’s continuing refusal to release the photographs of the Scrolls. The Editors’ infuriating practice of writing articles on unpublished scrolls long before their actual publication had led to a growing impatience among Qumran scholars barred from access to these materials. In consequence, ‘samizdat’ copies of manuscript transcriptions began to proliferate in the academic community. Thus, for the past two years or more, photocopies of otherwise unidentified handwritten transcriptions of 4QMMT have been circulating; this document is a letter from the Qumran community to the religious authorities in Jerusalem explaining their differences over the halakhah of sacrifices, temple purity, fornication, etc. Although to this day that important

TynBul 43:1 (1992) p. 156

text is still not officially published, 4QMMT has been discussed in publications and senior seminars in numerous locations.2

Partly in response to increasing scholarly pressure, in 1988 the editorial team authorized a limited release of a preliminary concordance of the Scrolls, many of which remained unpublished and under a tight seal.3 The acquisition of a copy by Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio led that institution’s veteran Qumran scholar Ben Zion Wacholder to collaborate with his research student Martin Abegg on a computer-produced reconstruction of the texts originally analyzed in the Qumran concordance. Amidst a fanfare of publicity, this work was released on 4 September 1991 as A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls—The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeolog...