USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011115.0958 (On Screen): One of the most towering examples of academic irresponsibility is finally being rectified. When I was a young child, there was an archeological find of staggering importance in Israel: a cache of scrolls was found sealed in clay jars in a cave in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, the now notorious Dead Sea Scrolls. And for fifty years an institute in Israel has been sitting on them, analyzing them and refusing to publish photographs of them. Scholars all over the world requested, then demanded, access and were refused, though selected excerpts began to be released in a trickle over the last fifteen years. Now, at long last, those photographs have been published in toto.

There were numerous strange events along the way to this eventuality. For example, one of the things they did release was a concordance, which gave the locations of every word -- but not the text itself. But some clever guy realized he could feed the concordance to a computer and reverse sort it, and reproduce the text. That at least permitted scholars to study what the scrolls said, albeit not the actual writing. And given how semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Arabic, etc.) are written, there's always a substantial chance that the words were interpreted wrongly since semitic languages do not write vowels. That would mean that by analogy feel, foul, foal and fool would all be written as "fl"; the opportunity for confusion should be obvious. Hw cn y b crtn wht n sntnc mns whn ll th wds r wrttn tht w? Still, access to the text was a major embarassment to the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which had been responsible for sitting on them and trying to suppress them.

So why was it that they were suppressed? Because of the fear that they would cast an unpleasantly critical light on Israel and on Jewish traditions. The time was spent trying to analyze them to create a unified and (hopefully) definitive analysis of them which would not be ideologically embarrassing. By so doing, alternative and less desirable interpretations would be squelched, or so it was hoped. It appears that they've finally given up on that, which is why they gave in and published.

If this proves anything, it shows that any attempt to allow religion and politics to affect the course of science is doomed to failure, and only results in polluting the science. It is not to the credit of the IAA that it took fifty years to publish; there was no excuse for them not publishing the raw photographs in the 1960's without any attached commentary, to let the scholars of the world begin their work. This is not an academic triumph, it's the end of an academic scandal. (And likely it's the beginning of another as scholars discover that the omnibus commentary produced by the International Editorial Team is self-serving and ideologically motivated.) (discuss)