The American Jewish Archives Journal, Volume LXI 2009, Number 1

antiquities, Shanks could not get Eitan to confirm that the concordance existed.
Only in reviewing the transcript of the interview did he finally confirm it. 432
In the interview, Shanks kept pushing Eitan to admit the importance of the
concordance to scholars since they could not see the scrolls themselves, but
he would not take up the issue. In any case, Strugnell granted the permission
in a private letter to Wacholder and sent him a formal authorization to be
used if Wacholder could find a party willing to copy the 2,500 pages of the
concordance. 433 Wacholder’s relationship with Strugnell was quite positive, and
Strugnell had helped Wacholder by making his own notes about unpublished
texts available to him when Wacholder was preparing The Dawn of Qumran. 434
The official release indicated that the copy was for “Prof. B.Z. Wacholder” 435
but includes no specific restrictions as to its use. Wacholder approached David
Gilner, the librarian at HUC-JIR, Cincinnati, for aid in acquiring a copy. 436
Gilner agreed on condition that in exchange for covering the amount it would
cost to copy and bind the volumes, 437 Wacholder should allow it to become
library property rather than a personal copy. According to Gilner, Wacholder
did not want to pay for the copy and agreed to the conditions. 438 Since there
were no particular restrictions, ownership of the copy was not an issue. Gilner
approached Baltimore Hebrew College professor Joseph Baumgarten, who
granted permission for his college to copy the volumes. 439 However, the copying
had to be delayed because he would be taking the copy for his personal use
to Jerusalem between January and May 1990. 440 In March, a notice appeared
in BAR about the availability of the concordance. According to the notice, a
copy was deposited in the Harvard Divinity School library for in-library use.
Baltimore Hebrew College likewise had a copy for in-library use (although
the notice points out that at press time it was unavailable because it was in the
possession of Baumgarten.) 441 Of particular interest is a statement in the notice
that one of the reasons for avoiding broad availability of the concordance was
possibly the concern of the editors that “an unauthorized person might reconstruct
an unpublished text by using” it. 442 Perhaps the BAR editors meant for
the statement to inspire efforts. In the meantime, Gilner asked the Harvard
University Library to acquire a copy for Wacholder. 443 In April 1990 Harvard
declined to copy the material because unbinding the five volumes and copying
the material would be too complex. 444
Meanwhile pressure was building on the editorial team to release more of
their material. In response, Strugnell, the editor-in-chief, said in an interview
with ABC’s Good Morning America of those applying pressure: “It seems we’ve
acquired a bunch of fleas who are in the business of annoying us.” Responding,
BAR published what journalist Neil Asher Silberman has called the “most
famous and most outrageous of Hershel Shanks’s BAR covers.” 445 The cover
depicts an image of Strugnell at center on a television with the quote below.
Surrounding the image are large silhouettes of fleas with the names of the
62 • American Jewish Archives Journal