From the Caves of Qumran
to CD-ROM
By Noel Reynolds
Associate Academic Vice-President, Brigham Young University
Reprinted from the November 1996 edition of Brigham Young
Magazine
In the winter of 1992, Bill Hamblin, a BYU history
professor stationed at the BYU Jerusalem Center, called some of his associates in Provo
with an exciting proposition. Would we have the ability and the interest to bring the Dead
Sea Scrolls together on computer? Truman G. Madsen, director of the Jerusalem Center, had
recently been invited to serve as a member of the advisory board of the new Dead Sea
Scrolls Foundation (DSSF), and the need for such an electronic library of the scrolls had
surfaced as a major item for discussion by that board. Madsen mentioned the need to
Hamblin, and Hamblin called Provo. Professor Madsen himself called a few weeks later to
pursue the issue. Utah County's reputation as a center for advanced computer applications,
particularly textual databases, had inspired this inquiry.
Both Madsen and Hamblin had directed their Provo
inquiries to officers of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, known
best by the acronym FARMS.
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| Noel Reynolds |
Noel Reynolds (president of FARMS) and Jack
Welch (its founder) are BYU professors of political science and law respectively who serve
on the FARMS board of trustees on a volunteer basis. They had been discussing for several
years plans for FARMS to create a comprehensive text database that could provide
background materials for scholars doing research on the Book of Mormon. Such a database
would contain all biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts in their original
languages and in English translation. A Dead Sea Scroll (DSS) electronic library would fit
nicely into that concept. FARMS was definitely interested.
Why were scroll scholars interested in such a
database? The first discovery of ancient scrolls at Qumran occurred just 50 years ago.
What began as a chance discovery by Palestinian shepherds soon evolved into a series of
major archaeological excavations and even more successful clandestine digs by the bedouin.
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