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

There is something demeaning about senior scholars having to ask Sidnie
White, already a major Qumran scholar at age 31, if she would identify and
spell certain Hebrew words in unpublished texts that she, through Cross
and Strugnell, has access to. As this inquiry was taking place in one session,
I looked over at the white-haired Ben-Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union
College, who was listening intently to absorb in his legendary capacious
memory the facts young Sidnie White was generously divulging. 459
Upon his return to Cincinnati, Abegg set to work examining the concordance,
which had just recently been catalogued and made available. He hoped
to garner more information about the texts that had been discussed in response
to his paper. He was particularly interested in examining two texts related to
the War Scroll, 4Q280 and 4Q285, which had appeared in preliminary studies
by scroll editor Jozef Milik. 460 Looking for the texts in the concordance,
Abegg realized that the entire text could be reconstructed because each word
was provided in context. He started first with the War Scroll fragments, then
a series of calendars (4QMishmarot haKohanim, 4Q320–330), and then, as a
treat for his teacher, the texts of the Damascus Document, preserved in Cave
4 (4Q266–273). 461
Initially Abegg reconstructed the texts by cutting and pasting the entries
manually into a word processor on a Macintosh computer. Because the computer
could only accept texts that were typed from left to right, the Hebrew words had
to be entered in reverse, starting with the last letter first. 462 Eventually Abegg
created a computer program that he called “Glue,” 463 which automatically placed
the words in their correct position once entered. 464 He described the process of
reconstruction in a September 1991 interview:
My first attempt at reconstructing the manuscripts began by locating words
in the Preliminary Concordance common to any text, such as prepositions,
and then allowing the context to lead me through the work. For example, the
preposition “in” might have revealed the phrase: “in the beginning” with the
reference of Genesis 1:1. By then looking up the word “beginning,” one would
find the phrase: “the beginning God created,” which when added to the first
phrase would produce “in the beginning God created.” In this fashion I was
able to “cut and paste” a text on the computer screen. The quality of these texts
gave us the impetus to tackle the concordance on a larger scale. After entering
every entry with its corresponding reference into a data base, I programmed
the computer to sort material by manuscript, fragment, column, and line
number. I then wrote a program to recognize overlapping phrases in each line
and to perform the “cut and paste” job that I had done manually. 465
To reconstruct the unpublished corpus, Abegg entered 42,000 lines of
Hebrew and 10,500 lines of Aramaic. 466 He approached Wacholder with the first
fifty pages of reconstructed texts in early 1991. Wacholder wanted to publish, but
64 • American Jewish Archives Journal