Since their discovery in the Qumran caves beginning in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been the object of intense fascination and extreme controversy. Here Professor Norman Golb intensifies the debate over the scrolls' origins, arguing that they were not the work of a small, desert-dwelling fringe sect, as other scholars have claimed, but written by different groups of Jews and the smuggled out of Jerusalem's libraries before the Roman seige of A.D 70.
Golb also unravels the mystery behind the scholarly monopoly that controlled the scrolls for many years, and discusses his role as a key player in the successful struggle to make the scrolls widely available to both scholars and students. And he pleads passionately for an academic politics and a renewed commitment to the search for the truth in scroll scholarship.
