Nothing much happened during Father Benoit's reign: only two further Cave 4 volumes trickled in. In 1984, he resigned and was replaced by John Strugnell, an academically capable Oxford graduate, but a highly inefficient person. Publishing was not his forte. In 1987, on the 40th anniversary of Qumran, two British colleagues and I tried to breath fresh life into the moribund editorial process. We organised an international conference in London to which we enticed the editorial team. The aim was to shame them into action. With one exception, they all turned up, made further promises, but my proposal at a public meeting that the photographs of the unpublished documents should be released at once met with blunt refusal from Strugnell. By then, general dissatisfaction with the editorial delays had reached boiling point and media speculation was rife. Instead of blaming the team, journalists and popular writers dished out a conspiracy theory: the Vatican had decided to prevent the publication of the Scrolls because they contained compromising material for Christianity.

While revolution was brewing, Strugnell was finally demoted on account of an unforgivable faux pas. Neither his team-mates nor the Israeli archaeological establishment could stomach his characterisation of Judaism, in an interview with a Tel Aviv daily, as a horrible religion which should not exist. He was relieved of his office on health grounds - he suffered from manic depression aggravated by alcoholism. The sensational opening move of the next chief editor, Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University, chosen by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), was to appoint 60 new members (myself included) to the team. But sadly the IAA carried on with de Vaux's "closed shop": no one except the selected editors could as much as peep at unpublished texts. This was intolerable, but de Vaux's policy was already doomed. Its downfall was caused by the IAA and Strugnell.

Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, photographic archives of the Scrolls were deposited in "safe" countries: two in the US (in Cincinnati and in Claremont, California) and one in the UK (at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies). The institutions were obliged to keep the unpublished documents under lock and key. Strugnell, in turn, published privately for the use of his editorial team 25 copies of a handwritten word concordance of the Qumran texts. Both of these leaked.