Capturing the Collections: Letter from Professor W. F. Albright

On March 8, 1948, archaeologist and biblical scholar William F. Albright wrote to his former student John Trever regarding the latter’s photographs of recently discovered manuscripts now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. He wrote: “In my opinion you have made the greatest MS [manuscript] discovery of modern times—certainly the greatest biblical MS find.”

At the time, only one year after the first scrolls had come to light, the date for when the scrolls were penned was contentious. Albright and several others maintained that they must originate from the late Second Temple period (538 BC – AD 70) based on the script in which they were written. Albright writes in his letter to Trever: “The spelling is most interesting, resembling that of the Nash Papyrus very closely.” Written circa 150 BC and discovered in 1902, the Nash Papyrus was the oldest biblical manuscript known prior to the discovery of the scrolls in 1947. Albright’s comparison of the scrolls’ script to that of the Nash Papyrus employs paleography, which is the study of ancient writing systems. (Paleography was the primary method for identifying the date of the scrolls prior to the use of carbon-14 dating.) Despite their close resemblance to the Nash Papyrus, many scholars still argued that the scrolls were from the Middle Ages, hundreds of years after Albright believed them to have been written.

Carbon-14 dating, or Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), is a dating technique which measures the decay of the unstable isotope carbon 14 in biomass. Carbon-14 dating was a very new technique at the time, and its first use in dating the scrolls was on the linen in which the scrolls were wrapped. Those initial tests yielded results which aligned with Albright’s evaluation, giving the linen wrappings of the scrolls a date of origin within the Second Temple period. In 1963, the Great Isaiah Scroll was determined to have been written between 200 BC and AD 1 using this method, not only verifying Albright’s theories but also aligning with the linen wraps.

I had the privilege of imaging Albright’s letter last November at Museum of the Bible, timed perfectly with my study of the scrolls that semester at school. Soon after, Albright’s letter was sent out on loan, and the images I took with Digital Imaging Specialist Rebeccah Swerdlow will be used to create a facsimile of Albright’s letter. A facsimile is a replica of an item often used for display in a museum, often rotating with the original object to minimize light damage to the original.

As part of the upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the museum, the letter will go out for display this November, and the facsimile produced will be swapped every six months with the original. I am uniquely excited for this exhibit to come to Museum of the Bible, especially with my part in imaging the letter.

I’m also fascinated with the uncertainty following the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially with the component of the newly emerged AMS technique. In class, I got to study not only the biblical texts within the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, but also the history of their discovery and analysis. The Dead Sea Scrolls have unequivocally altered biblical studies and the study of Second Temple Judaism. Albright’s letter to Trever marks a pivotal part of scholarly history and now becomes an important part of modern learning.

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Capturing the Collections is a series of articles from our specialists working in the Digital Imaging Lab featuring a look at some of the objects they are digitally preserving.

Learn more about Museum of the Bible’s upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition here.