Fragments of biblical treasure are up for sale
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| This Friday, May 10, 2013 photo shows the ten commandments written on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. Nearly 70 years after the discovery of the world's oldest biblical manuscripts, the Palestinian family who originally sold them to scholars and institutions is now quietly marketing the leftovers - fragments the family says it has kept in a Swiss safe deposit box all these years. |
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are up for sale - in tiny pieces.
Nearly
70 years after the discovery of the world's oldest biblical
manuscripts, the Palestinian family who originally sold them to scholars
and institutions is now quietly marketing the leftovers - fragments the
family says it has kept in a Swiss safe deposit box all these years.
Most
of these scraps are barely postage-stamp-sized, and some are blank. But
in the last few years, evangelical Christian collectors and
institutions in the U.S. have forked out millions of dollars for a chunk
of this archaeological treasure. This angers Israel's government
antiquities authority, which holds most of the scrolls, claims that
every last scrap should be recognized as Israeli cultural property, and
threatens to seize any more pieces that hit the market.
"I
told Kando many years ago, as far as I'm concerned, he can die with
those scrolls," said Amir Ganor, head of the authority's anti-looting
squad, speaking of William Kando, who maintains his family's Dead Sea
Scrolls collection. "The scrolls' only address is the State of Israel."
Kando
says his family offered its remaining fragments to the antiquities
authority and other Israeli institutions, but they could not afford
them.
"If anyone is interested, we are ready
to sell," Kando told The Associated Press, sitting in the Jerusalem
antiquities shop he inherited from his late father. "These are the most
important things in the world."
The world of Holy Land antiquities is rife with theft, deception, and geopolitics, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are no exception.
Their
discovery in 1947, in caves by the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, was one
of the greatest archaeological events of the 20th century. Scholarly
debate over the scrolls' meaning continues to stir high-profile
controversy, while the Jordanian and Palestinian governments have lodged
their own claims of ownership.
But few know of the recent gold rush for fragments - or Israel's intelligence-gathering efforts to track their sale.
Written
mostly on animal skin parchment about 2,000 years ago, the manuscripts
are the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found, and the oldest
written evidence of the roots of Judaism and Christianity in the Holy
Land.
They are also significant because they
include the Hebrew originals of non-canonical writings that had only
survived in ancient translations, and because they prove that multiple
versions of Old Testament writings circulated before canonization around
100 AD. While some of the scrolls are nearly identical to the
traditional Hebrew text of the Old Testament, many contain significant
variations.
The scrolls were well preserved in
their dark, arid caves, but over the centuries most fell apart into
fragments of various sizes.
Israel regards the
scrolls a national treasure and keeps its share of them in a secure,
climate-controlled, government-operated lab on the Israel Museum campus
in Jerusalem. Pnina Shor, who oversees the antiquities authority's
scroll collection, said the trove of fragments is so numerous - at least
10,000 - that staff haven't finished counting them all. Israel has been
criticized for limiting scholarly access, but is partnering with Google
to upload images of scrolls online.
How most
of the Dead Sea Scrolls ended up in Israeli hands is a tale that begins
with a Bedouin shepherd who cast a stone inside a dark cave and heard
the sound of something breaking. He found clay jars, some with rolled-up
scrolls inside. After a return visit, he and his Bedouin companions had
found a total of seven scrolls.
They sold
three of them through an antiquities dealer to a Hebrew University
professor, and four to William Kando's father, a Christian cobbler in
Bethlehem who in turn sold them to the archbishop of the Assyrian
Orthodox church.
On the eve of the 1948
Arab-Israeli war, the archbishop smuggled the scrolls to the U.S. and
advertised them in a Wall Street Journal classifieds ad. Yigael Yadin,
Israeli war hero and later one of Israel's pre-eminent archaeologists,
bought them through a front man.
For the next
decade, archaeologists dug up thousands more scroll fragments in Dead
Sea area caves and began to assemble them, like a jigsaw puzzle, in the
Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in east Jerusalem, then ruled by
Jordan. Bedouins also found fragments and sold them to Kando, who in
turn sold most of them to the museum. Other fragments went to Jordanian
and French state collections, and universities in Chicago, Montreal and
Heidelberg, Germany.
In the 1967 Mideast war,
Israel seized the Rockefeller collection, and sent soldiers to Bethlehem
in the West Bank, 8 kilometers (5 miles) south of Jerusalem, where
Kando was rumored to hold another important scroll. After a brief
imprisonment, Kando revealed the parchment scroll in a shoe box under a
floor tile in his bedroom, and sold it to Israeli authorities for
$125,000, according to a written account by Yadin.
It
is called the Temple Scroll, because it partly describes the
construction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. At 8.15 meters (26.7
feet) long, it is the longest ever found.
But
Kando held much more than he surrendered to Israel. William, his son,
said his father had fragments tucked away which he eventually
transferred to Switzerland in the mid-1960s.
In
1993, just as scholars finally began publishing research of
Israeli-held scrolls, and the world was abuzz with Dead Sea Scroll
fever, Kando died, bequeathing his secret collection of fragments to his
sons.
It was the perfect time to sell.
Norwegian
businessman Martin Schoyen, a 73-year-old collector of biblical
manuscripts, purchased his first Dead Sea Scroll fragment a year later,
said Torleif Elgvin, a scholar with the Schoyen Collection. He
eventually purchased a total of 115 fragments, many of them from Kando
and some from an American scholar and a British scholar who kept them as
souvenirs in the early days after their discovery.
A
few years ago, Schoyen suffered financial losses in a business
investment and could not afford to continue collecting scrolls, said
Elgvin.
William Kando then took his business
to the U.S., startling manuscript collectors who didn't know there was
any scroll material still available for purchase.
"These
were the hurdles I had to pass with collectors in America," said Lee
Biondi, a California dealer who sold pieces on behalf of Kando. "The
impossibility of it; people saying, `you can't get a Dead Sea Scrolls
fragment. That's impossible.'"
In 2009, Asuza
Pacific University, an evangelical Christian college near Los Angeles,
bought five fragments, along with biblical antiquities, for $2,478,500,
according to Azusa's 2010 tax form. The college said it had purchased
the fragments through Biondi and a private collection. Kando told The
Associated Press he was the source of all the fragments.
Between
2009 and 2011, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth,
Texas, negotiated with Kando for the acquisition of eight fragments
kept in the Kando family's safe deposit box at UBS Bank in Zurich,
according to a book published last year by the seminary president's son,
Armour Patterson.
The Seminary did not
disclose the sum of the acquisition, but one family said it donated $1
million for the exhibit, and another family said it donated $500,000 for
the purchase of a Leviticus fragment, according to the Houston
Chronicle.
That scroll fragment includes
passages from chapters 18 and 20 concerning the laws of sexual morality,
and carried a special price tag because of the text's significance,
said Bruce McCoy of the Seminary.
"The particular passage is a timeless truth from God's word to the global culture today," said McCoy.
In
2009 and 2010, the Green family, evangelical Christians in Oklahoma
City and owners of the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts retailer, bought 12
fragments for its private collection, the world's largest of rare
biblical manuscripts. Jerry Pattengale, who oversees the scrolls in the
Green Collection, would not say who sold them and for how much, and
Kando denied they came from his collection.
Representatives of the collections in Norway and the U.S. say they will publish their research on the writings in a few years.
Pattengale
would only provide a basic inventory of the Green Collection's
fragments: it includes material from Genesis through Leviticus;
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, Micah, Daniel, and Nehemiah; a Psalm and a
mysterious extra-biblical Hebrew document known as an Instruction text.
"They
are really small pieces, but they are important because you may have
two or three lines that may have not been found anywhere else. And
suddenly it adds a lot to the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls,"
Pattengale said. "There is at least one rather amazing discovery in one
of them."
He said a non-disclosure agreement
bars him from revealing the finding until it is published. He estimated
it would be released in about 18 months and published by Brill, the
leading publishing house of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship.
For
decades, scholarly access to the scrolls was tightly controlled by a
small circle of researchers. Access is freer now, but digital sharing of
the artifacts among Israel, Schoyen, and U.S. institutions is limited.
Governments
have also jockeyed for ownership of the scrolls, a dispute rooted in
the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the redrawn borders that changed control
of the desert region where the scrolls were found.
Palestinian
officials claim rights to the material because it was found in today's
West Bank, Jordan claims rights because the material was discovered when
it ruled the territory, and both have unsuccessfully petitioned to
seize scrolls when they were displayed abroad in Israeli
government-sponsored exhibitions.
Israel
considers the scrolls its national patrimony, and says all fragments
should be in its large repository for best preservation and research.
Ganor
of the antiquities authority said under Israeli law, all scrolls
located abroad were removed illegally. "Whoever buys these takes a risk
that the State of Israel would sue," Ganor said.
But
Kando said his father transferred fragments to Switzerland in the
mid-1960s - before Israel passed its 1978 law preventing the
unauthorized removal of antiquities from the country.
Biondi,
the California dealer, said if it weren't for private collections able
to pay large sums, fragments would still be languishing in the Kandos'
safe-deposit box, and important historical discoveries would not see the
light of day.
"It was kind of like a rescue operation, to get this stuff out of the vault," said Biondi.
Kando
would not say how many more fragments are in his family's collection.
But since 1995, Israeli officials have been keeping tabs on his
attempted sales - and the correspondence of dealers and middlemen - in
an effort to determine what Dead Sea Scrolls his family has left. They
estimate that the Kandos are still holding onto around 20 fragments.
The
Associated Press was given partial access to the contents of a
classified Israeli dossier - a thick red binder which includes
photocopies of foreign passports, photos of tiny scroll scraps, letters
written by Kando to prospective buyers, and testimony from informants on
attempted sales.
One such testimony alleges
that in 2007, a well-known professor in Jerusalem offered to facilitate
the sale of a Deuteronomy fragment to a U.S. dealer for $250,000. A
document dated May 17, 2012, marked "confidential," listed eleven scroll
fragments and their sizes, only a few centimeters large.
Israel
is keen to obtain one scrap in particular from Kando: a well-preserved
Genesis fragment shaped like a butterfly and about the size of a cereal
box - "The largest fragment in private hands," Kando claims.
About
5 years ago, Israeli diamond billionaire and antiquities collector
Shlomo Moussaieff offered to buy the piece and donate it to the country.
Ganor, of Israel's antiquities authority, said Kando's price of around
$1.2 million was too high.
The fragment
includes passages that tell the story of Joseph, and is written in
Paleo-Hebrew, an ancient Israelite script pre-dating the Hebrew block
characters adopted by Jews around the 5th century B.C. and still in use
today.
The Kando family agreed to display the
Genesis fragment, for the first time, in Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary's exhibit. After the exhibit closed in January,
Kando said the fragment returned to his family's Swiss safe deposit box,
still mounted in the glass frame in which it was displayed.
Kando
is said to be asking for about $40 million for the Genesis piece,
according to Pattengale of the Green Collection. Kando would not
disclose financial details of his dealings, and said his family is
currently not participating in any new negotiations for additional
scroll sales.
Scholars consider Kando's
fragments to be authentic because his father was directly involved in
the sale of scrolls when they were first discovered.
New scroll fragments from the Dead Sea region have surfaced in recent years from different sources.
In
2005, Israeli police raided the home of Hanan Eshel, an Israeli scrolls
scholar, after he facilitated the purchase of scroll fragments from a
Bedouin man who said he discovered them in a cave a year before. The
fragments were unrelated to the Dead Sea Scrolls trove, but were found
in the same region and dated to the 2nd century A.D.
Eshel
had already given the fragments to Israeli authorities before the raid,
and had said it was never his intention to purchase them for himself,
but Israel's antiquities authority said he had acted illegally. Eshel
died in 2010.
In mid-2010, a team of 30
Israeli undercover agents and officers staged a stakeout at Jerusalem's
Hyatt Hotel, posing as interested buyers, and seized a papyrus fragment
dating to the 2nd century A.D. The Palestinian dealers offering the
papyrus for sale were arrested.
It is likely
more ancient manuscripts, and even Dead Sea Scrolls, remain hidden in
caves next to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, waiting to be
discovered.
Many cave entrances are hidden by
vegetation and rock falls, or their approaches are eroded, said Lenny
Wolfe, a Jerusalem manuscripts dealer.
"I would not at all be surprised if more material were to be found," Wolfe said.
