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Recalls Abegg: "I was hoping all the time Wacholder was doing these negotiations that it wasn't just a word list, that it was a key word in context, like Strong's concordance. Actually, I found it was better than that, because if you looked up the last word in an entry or in a verse, Strong's wouldn't give you the next word in the next verse; but this concordance did."

Because the cards were keyed to each other, Abegg could type one card after the other into his word processor until he had reconstructed whole texts—texts that had never before been published. When in 1991 the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, who since the mideighties had been calling for the "release" of the scrolls, caught wind of Abegg's reconstructed texts, he encouraged Abegg to let him publish them.

Abegg found himself facing an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, there was the academic protocol against publishing other people's work—coding the 3x5 cards represented hundreds of days of piecing the texts together. On the other hand, says Abegg, "we saw that this material had been done in the late fifties and could have been published then. They had held on to this material, were telling everyone it couldn't be published because there had been no transcriptions. And then we found out that, indeed, there had been transcriptions back in the fifties—they were pulling the wool over our eyes all these years."

The texts went to print in September 1991. The Huntington Library in California quickly followed by making public actual photos of the manuscripts. And finally, even the Israel Antiquities Authority, which controlled the scrolls, ruled that it now supported open access to copies of the scrolls. From the New York Times to Newsweek, Wacholder and Abegg were declared the liberators of the scrolls. "Andy Warhol talks about your 15 minutes of fame," says Abegg, whose steady gaze and conventional haircut make the 47-year-old father seem anything but a publicity-seeking renegade. "I had my 15 minutes many times over that year."

The limelight has faded in the six years since. Abegg is now busy doing what he loves best: teaching and working on the scroll texts themselves. And even Tov, whom Abegg always deeply admired, has apparently welcomed back his prodigal son: this past summer Abegg was invited to become one of Tov's official scroll editors.

OUR OLD TESTAMENT TO THE "T"—ALMOST

( … just as) it is written in the b(ook) of Isaiah the prophet …
—4Q265, fragment 2

Abegg and Flint, who together are codirectors of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute, are two of nearly a dozen evangelical scholars who have been added to the international team of scroll editors in the last decade. Not surprisingly, says Flint, their presence is influencing the scholarly discussion surrounding the scrolls. "Just as Jews have helped focus on things like ritual purity, food laws, and things of interest to Jews, I think evangelicals have helped focus the interest on the reliability of the Bible, how we got our Bible, and also on the relation between Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls," he says.

Flint, 46, believes that evangelicals have arrived late on the scene in exploring the significance of the scrolls for Christian faith. So when Trinity Western—a school of the Evangelical Free Church begun in 1962—called in 1995, asking him to help begin the institute in conjunction with the school's graduate program in biblical studies, he was more than ready. And more than qualified.

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October 6 1997, Vol. 41, No. 11