The Facts on Schiffman's Plagiarism08/02 11:04 PM
I don’t know how you people define “plagiarism,” but here are the facts, well-known to scrolls scholars and, of course, to the museum curators who continuously invite Dr. Schiffman to lecture at their Dead Sea Scrolls exhibits:
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In an article entitled “The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980), historian Norman Golb wrote as follows:
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“In the ruins of [Masada] were discovered fragments of fourteen … scrolls, including … remarkably, a portion of the so-called “Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice” – a duplicate of a text found in Qumran Cave IV… The cogent inference to be drawn from the presence of Hebrew manuscripts at Masada is that Jewish sicarii inhabiting the site possessed scrolls which they had brought there after taking the fortress in A.D. 66, while other Jews, of Jerusalem, took scrolls with them in addition to basic possessions needed for survival, in withdrawing to that site.”
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Golb wrote that the Qumran and Masada manuscripts were writings of Palestinian Jews and were remnants of a literature showing a “wide variety of practices, beliefs and opinions.”
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The scrolls, Golb suggested, were best to be interpreted “not by pressing them into the single sectarian bed of Essenism, but by separating them out from one another, through internal analysis, into various spiritual currents which appear to have characterized Palestinian Judaism of the intertestamental period.”
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In the same article, Golb also wrote that the apocalyptic texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the mentality of various Palestinian Jewish groups prior to 70 A.D. were “factors which may … help to explain the zeal which led to the Jewish War.”
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Then, in 1985, Golb published another article (in Biblical Archaeologist 48), in which he said that the content of the scrolls was “more than sufficient to show the mentality and religious outlook of various groups within Palestinian Judaism” before 70 A.D., and that they “cast important new light on aspects of that period’s history, particularly on the question of the influence of the beliefs and practices then current in Palestine on both the nascent rabbinic Judaism and the earliest forms of Palestinian Christianity.”
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So much for Golb’s 1980 and 1985 articles which, of course, on account of their detailed and fundamentally novel analysis of the evidence, were rightly seen as posing a severe threat to the traditional Qumran-Essene theory. Five years later, in 1990, Lawrence Schiffman published an article entitled “The Significance of the Scrolls.” The article appeared in a journal entitled Bible Review, and was later (in 1992) reprinted in Hershel Shanks, ed., Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schiffman argued that the scrolls were in part written by a Sadducee sect living at Qumran, but here are some of the other things he said in the article:
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“Very recently several fragmentary texts were published from Masada …, occupied by rebels during the … Revolt against Rome. In addition, a manuscript of the Sabbath Songs (angelic liturgy), known in several manuscripts from Qumran, was found at Masada. Thus, Jewish defenders of Masada possessed books of the same kind as those in the Qumran collection, but that were not directly associated with the sect itself. In other words, many of the works found at Qumran were the common heritage of Second Temple Judaism and did not originate in, and were not confined to, Qumran sectarian circles.”
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Schiffman did not mention or cite Golb’s practically identical argument made ten years previously. On the next page, Schiffman wrote:
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“It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Scrolls are the primary source for the study of Judaism in all its varieties in the last centuries before the Common Era. In short, this corpus does not simply give us an entry into the sect that inhabited the nearby settlement, but also has an enormous amount to tell us about the widely varying Judaisms of the Hasmonaean and Herodian periods … these documents are providing a critical background for the study of the later emergence both of rabbinic Judaism and of the early Christian Church.”
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Compare Golb’s earlier statements about the “religious outlook of various groups within Palestinian Judaism” which “cast important new light … on both the nascent rabbinic Judaism and the earliest forms of Palestinian Christianity.” Schiffman, however, again did not mention or cite Golb’s articles.
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Instead, on the next page of his article, he went on to state that the influence of the apocalyptic Dead Sea Scrolls could be seen “in the messianic pressures for Jewish resistance against Roman rule that were factors in fueling the two Jewish revolts, the First Revolt of 66-70 C.E., and the Second Revolt, the so-called Bar Kokhba revolt, of 132-135 C.E., both of which had messianic overtones.” Compare Golb’s earlier statement about the “factors which may … help to explain the zeal which led to the Jewish War.” Schiffman did not mention or cite this statement of Golb’s either.
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Note how Schiffman has changed the wording a bit but kept the basic ideas (including some of the vocabulary, such as “factors”): “various groups within Palestinian Judaism” becomes “widely varying Judaisms”; “cast important new light” becomes “has an enormous amount to tell us”; “the question of the influence … on both the nascent rabbinic Judaism and the earliest forms of Palestinian Christianity” becomes the “background for the study of … the emergence both of rabbinic Judaism and of the early Christian Church”; etc.
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Now Schiffman had every right in the world to use these ideas—but it was his duty to say where he got them from. Where I come from, if a college student does this, he gets called before a committee on charges of plagiarism and probably ends up getting expelled. Schiffman, however, is not a college student, and so he apparently thought he could get away with it. Israeli journalist Avi Katzman had a different point of view, and so he asked Schiffman why “in different articles you have published, you have not hesitated to take over portions of Golb’s theory without acknowledging as much, and without giving him appropriate credit?” (Haaretz, Jan. 29, 1993).
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One might have expected Schiffman to give some kind of explanation, possibly even to apologize. He could have said, for example, that he was sorry about the omission and planned to correct it in his next book. Instead, this is what he said:
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“This isn’t the issue. There’s no innovation in Golb’s theory. He can say what he wants. The idea that we’re not dealing with a sect is self-evident. Does he think that he wrote the Bible?”
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Well, let’s analyze this, folks: “There’s no innovation in Golb’s theory.”
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As is well known, Golb, starting in 1980, published a series of articles arguing that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the remains of Jerusalem-area libraries, containing the writings of multiple Jewish groups. At the very end of his 1980 article (see footnote 80 on p. 24), he carefully distinguished his theory from the “overly specific” view of Karl Rengstorf, who in the early 1960’s had argued that the scrolls were the library of the Jerusalem Temple. Golb wrote:
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“While it is true that a number of the scrolls give prominence to the sons of Zadok and the priestly order, most of them do not, so that [Rengstorf’s] assignment of all of the scrolls to the single library of the Temple becomes a matter of arbitrary choice … narrowing down the conception of intellectual and spiritual life prevailing within Jerusalem before the war.” Golb’s own, broader conclusion was that the scrolls were “remnants of a literature showing a wide variety of practices, beliefs and opinions which was removed from Jerusalem before and during the siege.…”
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Then, in 1985 (Biblical Archaeologist, p. 80), Golb wrote of “collections of literary scrolls – that is, libraries – removed far from their original home,” and concluded that the scrolls stemmed “not merely from sectarians but from first-century Palestinian Jews in general,” and that they were “removed from Jerusalem by inhabitants of the city before and during the siege on the city.”
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Let’s look at that statement of Schiffman’s again: “There’s no innovation in Golb’s theory.” The statement is obviously untrue, because no one, until Golb came along, had argued that the scrolls were the remnants of Jerusalem-area literary collections (in the plural). Does the statement reflect Schiffman’s guilty conscience? Or was he simply incapable of comprehending the articles of which he himself had clearly chosen to make use without crediting their author?
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Whatever the answer to this question may be, Schiffman, not content with stealing Golb’s ideas, also began publishing misinformation about Golb’s theory. According to Schiffman’s above-cited Bible Review article, Golb had argued that the scrolls were the “library of the Jerusalem Temple.” Schiffman then repeated this despicably misleading assertion in his book Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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Now who other than a plagiarist would misrepresent the theory of the scholar whose ideas he’s decided to filch? Is this normal procedure in academic circles, to play vicious games with one’s scholarly adversaries, misrepresenting their views and stealing from them at the same time without proper attribution? What kind of a human being does that? And what kind of a system elevates such an individual to the status of a popular, bearded “authority,” invited to lecture in that big booming voice in one museum exhibit after another? To some of us the answer is quite clear: it’s a sick system that glorifies an academic thief.
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