JÓZEF MILIK stood head and shoulders above all other experts in deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Milik’s association with the scrolls began in 1951 when, as a young priest finishing his doctorate in Rome, he came to the notice of Father Roland de Vaux, the French Dominican in charge in Jordanian Jerusalem of the publication of the manuscript fragments found four years earlier in caves near the Dead Sea and the ruined settlement of Khirbet Qumran.
Born in Seroczyn, Poland, in 1922, Milik trained at the Catholic University of Lublin and from 1946 to 1950 at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He moved to Jerusalem at the end of 1951 and was put in charge in the company of Dominique Barthélémy, another French Dominican, of the fragments from Cave 1. With exemplary speed and almost exaggerated loving care the editorial work of these badly damaged texts was completed, and volume I of the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) was issued in 1955. Between 1951 and 1956 ten more caves yielded tens of thousands of manuscript fragments. In 1957 Milik published in French a first-class non-technical survey of the Qumran finds. This, in its English translation, Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (1959), was for many years a set text for students.
At a more technical level Milik was responsible for deciphering and putting together a large proportion of what may fairly be described as the world’s greatest jigsaw puzzle. He took the lion’s share in producing volumes II and III of DJD in 1961 and 1962 — the latter containing the famous Copper Scrolls listing hidden treasure — and was the sole editor of volume VI in 1977, while in the previous year he brought out an impressive and highly controversial edition of the fragments of the Book of Enoch.
Milik left Jerusalem in the early 1960s and spent the next decade or so in Rome. Then, having acquired French nationality, he settled in Paris. During his last 25 years he all but abandoned work on the many manuscripts which he had undertaken to edit. After 1981 he wrote no more on Qumran, although he did assist other scholars after he had been obliged to hand over to new editors the texts which had been assigned to him four decades earlier. His withdrawal from scrolls studies was an enormous loss.
Advertisement
The reason why he lost interest in the scrolls is a mystery. Since it started around 1980, the most likely explanation was his disappointment at the cool reception of his literary theories developed in The Books of Enoch (1976). His talents as a historian did not match his brilliance as a philologist and epigraphist. His dating of the Parables of Enoch to AD270 and the Fourth Book of Ezra and Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities to AD100-250 (scholarly consensus places them between AD70 and 100) was generally rejected.
Milik was a scholars’ scholar. Employed by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he never held a teaching post. In addition to the Scrolls he excelled also in Semitic, especially Nabataean, epigraphy and in Polish philology.
In 1969 he met in Rome Yolanta Zalouska, a Franco-Polish art historian. He left the priesthood and married her. Under her influence he overcame a drink problem. She predeceased him. They had no children.
Advertisement
Józef Milik, scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was born on March 24, 1922. He died on January 6, 2006, aged 83.