Dwight Peck's reprint series

The Qumran Library and its Patrons

"The Qumran Library and its Patrons"

Copyright © 1977 The University of Texas Press

Pliny the Elder, writing between A. D. 70 and 79, wisely cautioned his readers to avoid the ''noxious exhalations'' of the Dead Sea, and in his survey of that region of Judea he described "a solitary race . . . remarkable beyond all the other tribes in the whole world," which resided on its inhospitable western shores.¹ This tribe he called the Essenes, and from this passage, another in Philo Judaeus,² and several in Flavius Josephus,³ the world has long known at least of the existence of the sect which Josephus described, in his characteristically Hellenistic way, as one of the "three philosophical schools among the Jews." What little else was known, however, from these three and a few more doubtful sources, had always to be handled very gingerly, until events and research activity of the past twenty-five years accorded them striking confirmation. The successive discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls in eleven cliffside caves above the Wadi Qumran, and the excavations undertaken in the ancient ruins nearby, have produced an astonishing amount of information about the people who once flourished there.⁴ The main facts are now virtually certain: Khirbet Qumran is the remains of the very Essenic community described by Pliny, and the fascinating scrolls are the remains of its library.⁵

The Essenes seem to have arisen as an outgrowth of the Hasidim, who in the first half of the second century B.C. devoted themselves to resisting Seleucid attempts to Hellenize the Jews and destroy the ancient orthopraxy and faith in the Torah. After the Maccabean Revolt, the new Hasmonean dynasty and its Hasidic allies set about purifying the nation's religion. Even amongst the stricter sort, however, there were dissenters; the Maccabean rulers had arrogated the high priesthood of the Temple to themselves, and some, who considered themselves the true heirs of the Zadokite priests descended from Davidic times, protested this diversion of the sacred office and became victims of the Hasmonean consolidation of power. During the reigns of Simon Maccabeus (142-134) or his son John Hyrcanus (134-104), some of these dissenters rallied round their leader, who (as the founding "Teacher of Righteousness" in the Scrolls) had suffered notable but unspecified abuses, and followed him into the desert. These dissenters were the Essenes, and the place to which a portion of them withdrew was Qumran.⁶ There the "sons of Zadok," established in a new Covenant, pursued their own salvation independently of the nation's, and gave up awaiting temporal political victory in favor of cosmic victory in the imminent last days, when they would "come back from the wilderness and live in safety for a thousand generations."⁷

The community flourished until 31 B.C., when occurred the famous earthquake recorded by Josephus. The covenanters abandoned their damaged site and did not return until after King Herod's death in 4 B.C. Thereafter they continued their communal life unbroken until the time of the First Jewish War. Then, in the spring of A. D. 68, a detachment of Vespasian's tenth Roman legion entered the area. The covenanters hastily secreted their sacred library in the surrounding caves and undertook the defense of their community, but unsuccessfully – the buildings were reduced to ruin and the inhabitants killed, captured, or dispersed in flight. The site itself saw only incidental uses for a short time thereafter, and has since lain virtually untouched. Hints of the presence of Qumran survivors have been detected amongst the Ebionite Christians in the Transjordan⁸ and in the fortress at Masada during the bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-135;⁹ but apart from these small remembrances, no trace of the Essenic community remains today save their ruins and their books.¹⁰

During its long life, however, the Qumran community was a formidable group. Its raison d'être was isolation. Convinced that mankind generally and the Jewish nation in particular had fallen from God's favor, the sectarians withdrew into the wilderness of Judah and devoted themselves to their preparations for the last days, removed from threat of temptation or contamination by God's and their own enemies. There in the desert, the true sons of Zadok relished their apocalyptic dreams of the day when they, the elect, would be restored to their inheritance and the "sons of perdition" (that is, everyone else, whether gentiles, laxer Jews, or the mistaken Jews of the Temple faith) would go to fiery judgment: "[Thou wilt make] an end of all that oppress us; and we shall give thanks unto Thy name for ever."¹¹ These confident expectations they fortified at every point by resort to their books.

The Qumran establishment must have been an impressive sight. Its communal life was centered about a main building some 120 feet on each side, in which were located the scriptorium, a large refectory and assembly hall, a pantry containing some 1700 earthen vessels, and the best-preserved pottery factory in ancient Palestine. This building and ancillary ones nearby also housed baths, storerooms, latrines, a flour mill, stables, furnaces and workshops, and an elaborate cistern and conduit system for retaining water, the whole surmounted by a defensive fortification with three-foot walls. A main cemetery adjoins the complex, wherein are found over 1100 tombs; two smaller cemeteries have been discovered nearby. Other signs of communal use have been found in the region for a distance of some two miles around, as far in the south as the smaller establishment of En Feshka. In addition, there seems to have been a considerable wall, about three feet high, which linked the main buildings with En Feshka and enclosed the more or less arable land of the littoral stretch between sea and cliffline into a large estate.¹²

These permanent buildings seem to have been meant for only communal functions, which in a closed communistic society would have been very many: worship and prayer, dining (which was scarcely separable from worship and prayer),¹³ group textual study, and the various industries by which the community survived. The people dwelt somewhat apart from the central buildings, some in clusters of manmade caves dug into the terrace within a hundred meters of the center, others perhaps in the larger caves in the cliffs above; but probably most of them lived in tents in the near vicinity. Women may or may not have been admitted as full members; though the classical writers generally describe the Essenes as celibate, several female skeletons have been uncovered both in the secondary cemeteries and just without the main one.¹⁴

The daily life of the Qumran sectaries must have been a most unappealing business. Having inherited a very rigorous interpretation of the ritual Law from their founder, they considered themselves bound by a new Covenant to fulfill to the letter the Mosaic obligations of holiness and ritual purity. Consequently, they lived strictly and with a passion in their rigor, constantly reviewing "God's ordinances in order to find out on what more arcane points they may guiltily have gone astray."¹⁵ Much of their routine was occupied by prayer, devout conversation, homiletic study, and seemingly endless washing. But until the sky opened, they had to live; and the Judean desert, if it was not quite the lunar landscape it now appears, could never have been an easy place in which to earn a living. It is clear that the community intended generally to be self-sufficient. Agriculture and herding would have been essential, of course, and so probably would bee-keeping. Perhaps there was some sort of venatic activity as well, though there cannot have been very much game.

Other suggestions have been made concerning the economic survival of Qumran. F. F. Bruce suggests that members of the community may have worked elsewhere for hire and returned to Qumran with their earnings.¹⁶ That seems improbable, however, since they had come there in the first place precisely to avoid such contacts with the "men of perdition," and were specifically enjoined in the Manual "to keep apart from all froward men."¹⁷ Duncan Howlett has advanced the more plausible idea that various items such as linen and pottery might have been manufactured on the premises and then offered for sale to visiting traders. As he points out, there was an enormous lot of fine pottery found in the ruins, which may suggest inventory stock, and the provisions made for potting may seem disproportionately great for the sect's needs.¹⁸

Howlett also suggests, however, that because of similarly sophisticated copying facilities at the site the sect may be thought to have engaged in bookmaking for profit; he points further to "the skill of the Essene scriveners" manifested in "the consummate artistry with which [their] writing was done," and asks whether it may not be assumed that the Essenes exploited this talent in their unaccommodating circumstances.¹⁹ This is quite unlikely. The Qumran scribes wrote with consummate artistry because they were recreating the sacred texts which were at the center of their lives. They went to the lengths of using a special paleo-Hebraic script wherever the sacred Tetragrammaton appeared, and sometimes rubricated the headings; some of the same copyists are identifiable in many different scrolls from the painstaking consistency of their styles. When they wrote out their own sectarian treatises, however, they were far less careful. It seems certain that, for scriptures at least, the scribal labor was considered a vital holy exercise, and therefore almost unthinkable that it could have been done for profit. Qumran may well have served as something of a copy center for Essenism throughout Palestine, but it is unlikely that this had any economic motive; for one thing, according to Josephus, Essenes permitted "no buying and selling among themselves, but each gives what he has."²⁰ They would not have sold their sacred scripture, and they would not have copied profane or "heretical" literatures; and as to their own sectarian compositions, who else would have bought them?

The physical evidence concerning the library itself is not conclusive, but it does permit a convincing reconstruction. First, there seems to have been a special facility, centrally located in the main building, for making and maintaining books in use. It was a central chamber on the second floor some forty-three by thirteen feet.²¹ The room was dominated by a narrow table over sixteen feet long, but only sixteen inches wide and scarcely twenty inches high, at least as presently reconstructed.²² There were also two shorter but otherwise similar tables which probably resided alongside a low bench fixed to the eastern wall, which wall, according to Father de Vaux, should be presumed from the architectural arrangement to have contained a large bay opening to the east.²³ A low plaster platform, rimmed and containing two shallow basins, formerly sat against the northern wall. In addition, two inkwells (one of them bronze) have been found in the debris, one containing the dried residue of a vegetable-base ink.

There can be little doubt that this chamber was indeed a scriptorium. Probably the two smaller tables, located where the light was best, were used for the copying itself, and the platform's basins used either for lustral ministrations before and after copying or, as a librarian has suggested, for the preparation of inks and pastes.²⁴ The great table in the center may have been primarily for copying as well; but, despite de Vaux's reservations, Pedley is probably correct in attributing to it the tasks of preparing the leather and other materials for writing, a worktable in effect. Actually there is no reason it could not have been used for both.²⁵

The chamber directly below, of similar dimensions, has usually been identified as a council chamber, but Pedley sees it as the library's reading room and bookstacks. The safest estimate of the number of scrolls originally represented by the fragments found so far is about six hundred, and when one considers the effects of rats, Romans, worms, and Bedouin on the Qumran books over two millennia, one begins to sense what enormous size the complete collection may have attained. Pedley's guess, therefore, is a very plausible one. Certainly, even if many of the scrolls spent much of their lives out amongst the tents for private study, as some scholars suggest but I think unlikely (since they were holy articles preeminently and since all study seems to have been regulated and communal), the central repository must have had ample and careful provision made for housing them. Pedley pursues this line further, however, and describes the adjoining complex of several rooms as including "the station of that library attendant who has to answer questions, account for circulation, assign duties and watch the comings and goings of visitors to the various parts of his domain."²⁶ It must be said that so far there is no evidence, and was probably never much need, for such an elaborate organization.

Similarly, Pedley describes with surprising thoroughness the other technical services supposed to have been in operation at Qumran, including the affixing to the scrolls of the sillyboi bearing numbers of pages and lines per page, the compilation of finding lists which gave title or incipit and other cataloging data, and the making of cabinets of the finest materials and workmanship. She envisions "a bee-hive of activity" with "a librarian in the background benignly content with the healthy growth and good condition of his book collection."²⁷ Her evidence for this reconstruction, however, is fetched from very far off, in one case from as far off as Cicero, and in her network of analogies from ''ancient libraries'' generally she fails to take into account the special character of the Qumran existence and the limited purpose and use of its collection. A simple array of shelves or niches and a very rough classification arrangement would probably have sufficed.

Still, more than just copying did go on in the scriptorium. The fragmentary manuscript of Samuel from the fourth cave, a third century copy which is the oldest document at Qumran, shows clear signs of extensive, careful repair work; the leather was first reinforced in patches and later backed with papyrus.²⁸ It further appears that the chief Isaiah scroll shows evidence of having been expertly resewn, and there is some indication that the leather upon which the biblical texts (as theophoric articles) had to be copied may have been prepared within the establishment.²⁹ In fine, the tools and facilities found at Khirbet Qumran show that at least some book materials preparation was probably done within the community, and, given the other industries fully developed there and the general Qumran abhorrence of outsiders, common sense would argue that all of it was.

This is not the place to entertain a lengthy discussion of the contents of the Qumran collection, but a few observations about its size and character can profitably be made. First, the collection must have been quite a large one. As already indicated, over six hundred books, by the best determinations, are represented in the surviving fragments. Any estimate of its original size must take into account not only the usual depredations wrought by time but also the special nature of its handling. That the library ended its use by fire and sword might suggest enormous losses; but on the other hand, its contents, because holy, were more or less carefully hidden away, perhaps all of them, perhaps only the few which came first to hand as the legionnaires approached. No more than the roughest guess could be made in these circumstances, but I should not think two or three thousand books very far from the mark.³⁰

Second, the collection was expanded continuously over the two centuries of Qumran occupation: paleographic evidence indicates that a few of the texts date from the third century B. C. and were probably brought in as copytexts; whereas the other writings, both scriptural and sectarian, date in their copying if not their composition from the first centuries before and after Christ. Further, though the books were maintained in the Qumran library, many of them speak of and to the Essene sect as a whole. Indeed, Qumran may have served as something of a central research library for Essenes throughout the country.

Third, concerning the collection itself, the Qumran library was exclusively literary. No non-literary materials, such as receipts, property or financial accounts, membership rolls, agricultural and craft manuals – or library shelflists – have been found in the surviving deposits; and unless for some reason these things were handled separately and perhaps carried off when final dispositions were made for the Roman attack, as is unlikely, it seems probable that no such writings were kept in the collection.³¹ This means that the Qumran library should properly be called a special collection in theology.

The literary materials which do survive can be classed into two main groups. The first would be comprised of scriptural texts, which account for roughly one quarter of the identifiable remains.³² These present a wealth of new information to biblical scholarship; many provide readings textually superior to or closer to New Testament quotations than either the Massoretic or Septuagint recensions or help to control disputes between them, and all of them contribute significantly to "the reconstruction of the textual history of the Old Testament."³³ Every book in the Old Testament canon is represented there except Esther, about which many people in ancient Israel harbored the gravest suspicions. Of Deuteronomy, the most frequently found, there are parts of fourteen copies present; of Isaiah and the Psalms there are twelve and ten respectively. In addition, there are many apocryphal and proleptic pseudepigraphal works as well, some of them hitherto unknown.

The second distinct class of surviving writings consists of sectarian materials composed within the community or in doctrinally very similar ones. "Distinct" is only a relative word here, though, for all of them are thoroughly sodden with scriptural influences. Some are adaptations and elaborations of biblical materials, and florilegia and testimonia composed of selected quotations. There are also great numbers of original sectarian tracts. Examples include the several recensions of the Manual of Discipline, which comprises a sort of constitution for the Essene "camps" and to some extent for Qumran as well, and the similar Zadokite or Damascus Document, already known from its earlier discovery near a Kara'ite synagogue in Cairo. There is the remarkable eschatological tract known as The War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, which prescribes the military order the community was to follow in the coming armageddon. In addition to these, there are numerous psalters, liturgies, wisdom books, phylacteries, self-gratulant hymns of thanksgiving, and more, ever more rules. Nearly everything, of both biblical and sectarian types, exists in multiple copies.³⁴

Perhaps the most significant genre of Qumran literature, however, is that of the pesharim on the various books of the Bible, interpretive commentaries which seek to allegorize the canonical books so that all of their statements, whether prophetic, literal, or purely accidental, are made into prophecies foretold ages past and being fulfilled in the present final days. The pesher is neither simply a rabbinical midrash, a traditional, often legalistic interpretation of allegorical texts, nor a "Philonic" explication of them in Hellenistic terms; the word itself ("this means," "this refers to") is derived from the Qumran methodology of backreading eschatological prophecies into otherwise harmless scriptures. This business of apocalyptic exegesis was clearly a primary religious activity of the community and probably an important aid to morale as well. For, though the age of inspired prophecy was known to be long past, divine inspiration could still be looked for in the elucidation of old prophecies, and the priests of Zadok who ruled the sect and monopolized its interpretations made no doubt whatever that the ancients were speaking directly to the Qumran covenanters in the last moments of the world and to no one else. As a consequence, in the Qumran view of history, insignificant events in the sect's private life very often loomed large alongside the major events of the Mediterranean world: one page of the Commentary on Habbakuk (in Gaster's edition) juxtaposed the Roman Senate replacing the rulers of the earth "one after another" with some charges made against the group's founder "in the midst of their entire congregation."

The outstanding feature of all the scrolls that have been published so far, once one has noted their intense, almost obsessive piety and their disheartening preoccupation with the eschaton, is that they, like the Qumran refectory, are communal in character. The exegetical books are not treatises but homilies of a sort. Philo describes the manner of their exercise: when the whole community has gathered and sits attentively in rows, "then one takes the books and reads aloud, and another of especial proficiency comes forward and expounds what is not understood. For most of their philosophical study takes the form of allegory, and in this they emulate the tradition of the past."³⁵ Likewise, the Manual of Discipline, while it strictly prohibits and penalizes nearly every normal activity from spitting and laughing raucously to going to sleep during a public session, nonetheless makes a special point of encouraging discussion of "God's truth" freely amongst other believers.³⁶ The hymns and psalms were to be sung together, the prayers to be prayed together, the liturgies to be performed together, all as a single body. They give evidence of a closed and uniform communal life, for which an ample range of library materials provided the impetus and control.

The covenanters, then, were members of an apocalyptic sect who withdrew into the wilderness to prepare for and await the end of the existing order, and who had a library, a not inconsiderable one by ancient standards, the facilities and organization of which must be further studied and fitted into the picture of librarianship in the classical world. But in their relationship to that library there was something unique and perhaps even a bit eerie. For this was less a community with a library than a library with a community. Josephus describes how the covenanters "display an extraordinary interest in the writings of the ancients,"³⁷ but manifestly it was more than this. This was a group of people who had systematically cut themselves off from every experience of the world except their books. The xenophobic injunctions of their manuals indicate that they remained altogether isolated from the people, institutions, and events of ancient Judea. Nothing but the labor of their hands distracted them from their texts, and doubtless they understood even those onerous desert chores in the prophetic terms provided them in Amos.

The results of such inbred thinking can be very curious. When the Romans came to the Near East, they were not the Romans at all; they were the Kittim and Chaldeans of Numbers, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Book of Jubilees. As Jeremiah had foretold, when the Kittim do thus and thus, one must understand that the Kingdom has nearly come, because their deeds are before everything else a sign. The books told them what the signs were and what they meant; in turn, what they saw in the books was conditioned by their apocalyptic hopes, plans, and premises, all of which were derived from these same books – precisely circular. There was no exchange with the heterogeneous world outside, and no heterogeneity in the text-dominated world within the walls. The library itself did not create this syndrome; Judaism, the troubled times, and a certain species of human mind created it; but the Qumran library was absolutely essential to it.

The library at Qumran seems indeed to have been a remarkable establishment, but far more remarkable were its patrons. In this present age of what has been called the "secular schism," a people whose daily thoughts and actions were so thoroughly saturated with religious concerns is scarcely imaginable, and the religions of even the most insistent of our American fundamentalists are nothing so strictly textual as was that of the Qumran community, nor their reading so exclusively theological. Even the medieval monastic libraries of Christian Europe usually had some odd bit of Priscian or Ovid to lighten the fare. There may well have been other libraries in the ancient world larger and better organized than was the one at Qumran, but there can hardly have been, at any time then or since, a library which so dominated its surrounding subculture as this one did.

Notes

1. Historia naturalis, Loeb Classical Library (London: 1942), 2: 276-277.

2. Quod omnis probus liber sit, 75-91; also, as quoted by Eusebius, Philo's Hypothetica, 11:1-18, Loeb Classical Library (London: 1967), 9: 54-63, 436-443.

3. Bellum Judaicum, II: 120-161; Antiquitates Judaicae, XIII: 171-173, and XVIII: 18-22, Loeb Classical Library (London: 1956), 2: 368-385; (1957), 7: 310-313; (1965), 9:14-21, amongst other passing mentions.

4. The best accounts of the finds are Frank M. Cross, Jr., The Ancient Library of Qumran (London: Duckworth, 1958), pp. 1-23, and Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls and More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking, 1956, 1958), pp. 3-69, 3-36; summarized through 1967 by Robert G. Boling in "Twenty Years of Discovery," New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, ed. D. N. Freedman and J. C. Greenfield (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 81-88.

5. The case for identifying the Qumran sectarians with the Essenes was first conclusively stated by Andre Dupont-Sommer, especially in his Jewish Sect of Qumran and the Essenes, tr. R. D. Barnett (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1954), passim, and is now generally accepted.

6. The loci classici and the scrolls agree that later there were many Essene concentrations, both urban and rural, though they were less monastically organized than Qumran’s. The plausible theory that there was at one time a network of such groups which had Qumran as headquarters is discussed in W. H. Brownlee, The Meaning of the Qumran Scrolls for the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 133-37.

7. Theodor H. Gaster, tr., The Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation, 2d ed. (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), p. 257; all quotations from the scrolls are from this translation.

8. F. F. Bruce, Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1956), pp. 123-24.

9. Boling, "Twenty Years of Discovery," p. 87.

10. Detailed archaeological evidence of the community's history is most ably discussed in Roland de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

11. Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures, p. 331.

12. De Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 59-60; G. R. Driver, The Judaean Scrolls: The Problem and a Solution (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 41.

13. Josephus describes in detail their habits of prayer and refection in Bellum Judaicum, II:128-132 (Loeb ed., 2: 373).

14. De Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 46-48, 57-58.

15. Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures, p. 55.

16. Bruce, Second Thoughts, p. 107.

17. They may have held land elsewhere and had the revenues sent to them, as Josephus implies, Antiquitates Judaicae, XVIII: 22 (Loeb ed., 9: 19); but here, and elsewhere in speaking of labor for wages, Josephus, Philo (Loeb ed., 9: 61, 441) and the Essene "Zadokite Document" (Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures, p. 94) are all describing Essenes generally and not necessarily those of Qumran.

18. According to Philo, "they have not the vaguest idea of commerce" (Loeb ed., 9: 55), but the Zadokite Document, while it generally prohibits commerce with outsiders, excepts "spot cash transactions" (Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures, p. 93).

19. Duncan Howlett, The Essenes and Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 87.

20. Bellum Judaicum, II: 127 (Loeb ed., 2: 371).

21. Cross, Ancient Library, p. 49.

22. De Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 29.

23. Ibid., p. 33.

24. Katherine Greenleaf Pedley, The Library at Qumran (Berkeley: Peacock Press, 1964), p. 17. This pamphlet was reprinted from the Revue de Qumran, 2 (1959): 21-41.

25. De Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 32; Pedley, Library at Qumran, p. 16.

26. Pedley, Library at Qumran, p. 14.

27. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

28. Cross, Ancient Library, p. 31.

29. Pedley, Library at Qumran, p. 17; de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 79-83.

30. Given the nature and extent of the remaining pieces, however, the difficulty of trying to conceive what may be missing from the collection may make one think a somewhat higher percentage has survived, and he must lower this estimate of the total accordingly.

31. One possible exception is the Copper Scroll, which purports to be an inventory of an immense hidden treasure; scholars are still divided on the question whether it is that – and whose treasure it may have been – or is simply another exercise of the allegorical imagination.

32. David Noel Freedman, "The Old Testament at Qumran," New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, p. 117.

33. J. de Waard, A Comparative Study of the Old Testament Text in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1966), pp. 79-83; Cross, Ancient Library, pp. 125f.; Patrick W. Skehan, "The Scrolls and the Old Testament Text," in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, pp. 89-100.

34. A convenient checklist of scrolls discovered in the first six caves is provided by Burrows, More Light, pp. 407-409. There is a vast literature on the theological implications of the scrolls, among which two of the more interesting studies are A. R. C. Leaney, The Rule of Qumran and its Meaning (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), and L. Mowry, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church," Thought, 40 (1965): 513-528.

35. Hypothetica (Loeb ed., 9: 57-59).

36. Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures, p. 68.

37. Bellum Judaicum, II: 136 (Loeb ed., 2: 374).

Please do not reproduce this text in any form for commercial purposes. Feedback and suggestions are welcome, . First published in Journal of Library History, 1977, posted on this site 26 August 2001.

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