ABSTRACT
The attempts to trace the relations of these Biblical commentaries found among the Dead Sea scrolls to events in the history of the Dead Sea Sect are already in themselves so complicated that I have forborne to complicate them further by describing the personal relations of the scholars who have been working on them. The occasion for the most acrimonious of the controversies about the scrolls has been the opinions and exploits of Mr. John Allegro of Manchester University, and in summarizing the work in this field it is important to explain his role. Though his credentials as a scholar have been sound enough to win him his present chair as Lecturer in Old Testament and Intertestamental Studies and his membership in the international committee appointed to work on the Jordanian scrolls, he could hardly contrast more strongly with the typical Biblical scholar or the traditional English don. He is irreverent and rather brash. When I first met him, twelve years ago, he seemed to me, in fact, to belong to the species of what was then called the Angry Young Men —a member of this generation who had landed, by some strange accident, in the field of Semitic scholarship. The explanation of his occupying his present position is that he prepared himself in youth for the Methodist ministry, that he excelled in Hebrew studies and got a scholarship for advanced work at Oxford, was recommended by H. H. Rowley, 273the head of the Semitic department of Manchester University, for a place on the Jordan team, and went on to a chair at Manchester in Comparative Semitic Philology. He has been assigned for editing and publication in the series of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan a group of mostly non-Biblical fragments which includes the Nahum pesher. In the meantime—quite early, I imagine—Allegro had lost his faith, had now no commitment to any Church, and was thus in a unique position among the Protestant, Anglican and Catholic scholars who made up the rest of the interdenominational commission. It has been partly, it seems to me, an inevitable result of this that he and his colleagues should not always have agreed, but it also cannot be denied that his having so much annoyed them—as well as having come to be on rather uneasy terms with some of the Jewish scholars and Arab officials—has been due to a certain element of bad judgment and indiscretion on his own part. It ought to be explained in advance, before giving specific examples, that his quarrels with other scholars have usually been provoked by his making through the press or radio sensational-sounding statements about unheard-of and disturbing revelations supposed to have been found in the scrolls, before publication of the documents on which these statements were based and which, when the texts were published, did not necessarily prove what he had given the impression they did. Allegro may thus at moments have misled the public. He has certainly been at cross purposes with his colleagues.
