The Dead Sea Scrolls Forgery Question

What antiquities fraud has to do with contemporary religious debates and geopolitics

The human toll of the Iraq invasion aside, one of the great crimes of America’s involvement there is allowing the looting of the Iraqi National Museum. The Bush administration loved the idea of regime change, but was squeamish about the measures required to do so with a minimum of violence and disorder. The coalition didn’t even establish martial law in Baghdad, so the situation spiraled out of control. I’m generally against regime change wars, but if you’re going to do it, do it. To do it halfway leaves a period of anarchy and negotiation, where the strong will prey on the weak, and priceless things will get lost. That’s what happened.

These looted Iraqi artifacts have popped up in the antiquities markets since then, and slowly they are being returned, but the issue of artifacts being used for terrorism financing remains. ISIS used antiquities sales to finance its activities, and Turkish law enforcement routinely intercepts thousands of artifacts coming from Syria.

Though regulators in Europe have stepped up their interest in antiquities as a tool of money laundering, and the U.S. Treasury Department is looking into it too, unlike paintings, antiquities of dubious provenance aren’t a way to launder money because they aren’t clean assets—the proceeds themselves have to be laundered. “Antiquities transactions are more likely to generate criminal proceeds than to clean them,” as Neil Brodie and Donna Yates put it in a recent paper. The distinction they draw is undeniably true: money laundering is common in the art market, but in the antiquities market the more common problem is fraud.

However, if the point is to generate proceeds off the books, to fund either intelligence or criminal operations, the trade in fraudulent antiquities fits the bill rather well. The point could also be ideological, to generate evidence for liberal interpretations of religious history or backdate Jewish claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. When it comes to the trade in artifacts and manuscripts from the Holy Land, you’re also dealing with the falsification of religious and human history.

The thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is there’s a gap of about a thousand years between them and the next-oldest Hebrew manuscripts, and all the ones that have been forensically tested at this point have been shown to be fake. This raises undeniable questions about the rest of them, which are hanging in the air unanswered.

In early 2020 the Museum of the Bible in DC revealed that all their fragments purporting to be parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls were forgeries. The museum is not popular among archaeological professionals, but you have to commend them for their honesty, publicizing the research of Collette Loll, even though it called into question their own collection. In their defense, they were very good forgeries. Christianity Today surmised all the fragments bought by evangelical institutions in the last two decades are frauds.

Emanuel Tov, the biblical scholar, gave a quote to National Geographic casting doubt on Loll’s findings, which I’ll quote in full:

I will not say that there are no unauthentic fragments among the MOB fragments, but in my view, their inauthenticity as a whole has still not been proven beyond doubt. This doubt is due to the fact that similar testing has not been done on undisputed Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in order to provide a base line for comparison, including the fragments from the Judean Desert sites that are later than Qumran. The report expects us to conclude that abnormalities abound without demonstrating what is normal.

This is not exactly a reassuring argument. He’s suggesting the findings about the fragments in DC are unreliable because the tens of thousands of fragments in the Israel Museum have never been tested. Maybe the answer is to check those too?

A few months later, also in 2020, the results from the first DNA test of the Dead Sea Scrolls held at the Israel Museum were published. They proved that some of the Israeli fragments were indeed written on ancient cowhide, but so were the ones in DC. They weren’t really asking the question that’s relevant at this point. It seems likely that some portion of the Israeli ones are forgeries too. How many? Haaretz ran an article that year suggesting the provenance of the Israeli scrolls is better, but that’s probably not enough to put the issue to rest.

These alleged pieces of ancient religious history are contested between Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians. Even before the collection built from Jordanian excavations and stored in the Rockefeller museum passed into Israeli hands in the 1967 war, it was closely guarded and publication was agonizingly slow. Most of the project’s revelations tended to support the liberalizing trend in religious life in the second half of the 20th century—a common take is they constitute the library of the Essenes. Pretty convenient that the major archaeological find in Biblical scholarship right around liberal theology’s heyday is the book collection of a sect of Jewish hippies. I’m sure it’s just another instance of reality conforming to liberal assumptions.

There has in recent years also been an attempt to rehabilitate the fragments of the Book of Deuteronomy, long thought to be forgeries, put on the market by Moses Shapira in the late 19th century, which would be the oldest Dead Sea Scrolls if accepted as legitimate. The New York Times ran something on it in 2021 under the headline, “Is a Long-Dismissed Forgery Actually the Oldest Known Biblical Manuscript?” Probably not. Idan Dershowitz, the world’s foremost Moses Shapira defender, whose work has been central to this new effort, has been known to make somewhat unusual claims that tend toward liberalizing interpretations of ancient Judaism, and it’s a little concerning to see Harvard take this stuff seriously.

Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments that have hit the market in the last two decades have come from the children of a Palestinian antiquities dealer nicknamed Kando, who bought some of the original finds in the 1940s and, so the story goes, squirreled away a few of them in a Swiss vault, which were passed on to his children. The Israeli authorities, and according to the Times of Israel, also Israeli intelligence, is very interested in locking these down—their position is they are part of Israel’s national patrimony. But what if another reason for their interest is that a whole lot more of these fragments are fake than we know?

To the extent this issue has implications for religious groups, if more of the Dead Sea Scrolls are shown to be forgeries, it probably benefits Catholics and Orthodox Jews, whose traditions are robust enough that they don’t really depend on these things. It poses problems for liberal Christians and secular Zionists. This is going to be a very interesting matter to watch in the coming years.