The concordance came into the hands of a professor in Cincinnati, who with the assistance of a computer-savvy graduate student succeeded in reconstructing from the word list several complete Qumran texts. The Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) of Washington published them in September 1991. The photo archive given to Claremont was the other source of the leak. All hell broke loose after the unauthorised publication by BAS, and Jerusalem threatened legal proceedings. Meanwhile, in secret, the director of the powerful Huntington Library of Pasadena was getting ready to announce that its photographic collection of the Scrolls would be placed on open shelves. How did it obtain these photos? Elizabeth Bechtel, a Californian philanthropist and founder of the Claremont Centre for Ancient Manuscripts, was given by the IAA two sets of Scroll photos, one for the centre under the usual conditions of inaccessibility, and the other for her private collection of memorabilia. After a quarrel with the trustees of her institute, she donated her own archive to the Huntington with no restrictive clauses. A press conference was called in New York on 21 September 1991 to announce the end of the Scroll embargo, but the news came out earlier. The archaeology correspondent of The Times interviewed me on 19 September and next day, 24 hours before the American press, he broke the story, quoting my warm approval of the Huntington. The IAA soon threw in the towel and after four decades of restrictive practices, freedom of inquiry finally triumphed. Hostilities ceased and the images of the manuscripts were made available in photographic, microfiche and CD-Rom form. DJD also obtained a new lease of life.

In 1956, Joseph Milik, de Vaux's right-hand man, promised a yearly output of two to three DJD volumes. De Vaux, Benoit and Strugnell managed a bare eight volumes in 35 years. Tov and his team produced 32 from 1992 to 2009. To mark the completion of the magnum opus, Tov has been awarded the much-coveted Israel Prize in Biblical Studies. As for my 250-page Dead Sea Scrolls in English of 1962, it became in 2004 The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, a more than 700-page volume installed among the Penguin Classics.

To begin with the Hebrew Bible, 200 mostly fragmentary Qumran manuscripts represent the whole Old Testament except possibly the Book of Esther. They agree in substance with the traditional Scripture, the oldest complete Hebrew copy of which dates to AD 1008. But the Qumran Bible discloses numerous stylistic differences, textual additions or omissions and changes in the order of the passages. The Scrolls prove that the unified traditional text of the Bible was preceded by countless variations and that we owe the definite form of Scripture to the authoritative intervention of Jewish religious authorities around AD 100.