Caves of Dispute: Patterns of Correspondence and Suspicion in the Post-2002 “Dead Sea Scrolls” Fragments*

Over 30 fragments purportedly from the Dead Sea Scrolls belonging to two private collections were published for the first time in Summer 2016. Virtually all of these fragments in The Schøyen Collection and Museum of the Bible are non-provenanced apart from verbal guarantees made by their sellers. An unusual feature of these fragments is that almost all of them correspond to texts from the Hebrew Bible, but also to a few previously known compositions from antiquity. This paper examines the published fragments from both collections according to their observable physical properties, as well as palaeographical and scribal characteristics, and seeks to understand from these more about their potential origin—whether from antiquity or modern times.