Dealing With Challenges and Limitations a Response

Abstract

In the summer of 1987 while I was attending a meeting in Jerusalem, Professor Jonas Greenfield of the Hebrew University and I went to the Shrine of the Book to compare some Aramaic fragments of the Book of Enoch with the published photographs and transcriptions. As we walked into the office of Magen Broshi, the Keeper of the Scrolls, we saw a roll of shelf paper stretched across the floor, on which were pasted photographs of scroll fragments that were readily recognizable as the Cave 1 scroll of the Hodayot. Professor Harmut Stegemann from the University of G6ttingen was showing Dr. Broshi the results of reconstructing this leather scroll on the basis of destruction patterns. Some of Stegemann's placement of fragments differed from Eleazar Sukenik's,1 and Stegemann had demonstrated the correctness of his placements by comparing them with Cave 4 fragments of the Hodayot, where his reconstructed readings were extant in pieces of intact text. This incident bears on the papers in this issue in two ways. First, what we saw that morning in Jerusalem was the unveiling of a valuable new method for lessening the margin of error in scroll reconstruction and for helping us to squeeze more information from these precious fragments. The papers by Brooke, Elgvin, Tov, and Larson make extensive use of this method to argue for the specific placement of fragments in relation to one another, both within columns and from column to column. This is especially fruitful because it provides one with a sense of the general content of whole documents, of which only small parts remain. If we know how close two pieces of Genesis exposition are to one another, or how close the Exodus exposition is to the Genesis exposition, we