J. M. Allegro
Personal Information
Description
John Marco Allegro was born in London in 1923 and began his linguistic studies after war-time service in the Royal Navy. He studied at the University of Manchester, where he obtained a first-class Honours degree in Oriental Studies in 1951. The next year he was awarded the degree of M.A. and was engaged in further research at Oxford on Hebrew dialects when he was asked to fly to Jerusalem to join the international Scrolls team. After a year's work on the editing of the fragments, he returned to Britain to take up an appointment in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester University. He has returned to Jerusalem in connexion with his work on the Scrolls a number of times since then, and in the spring of 1955 took part in an epigraphical expedition to Nabatean sites organized by the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. Besides his preliminary publication of a number of the Scrolls fragments, he has written several articles on Semitic philology in British and foreign periodicals, and has broadcast a number of times on the Scrolls. He is married and has a son and daughter.
Books
The Dead Sea scrolls
Early in 1947, a fifteen-year-old Bedouin boy discovered a cave at the edge of the Dead Sea. In it were broken jars containing scrolls of leather wrapped in linen cloth, inscribed in a strange writing. Soon recognized as "the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times," the chance finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls touched off furious controversy among Bible scholars and fascinated the public. In this book, the author tells the entire story -- of the discoveries, of the attempts to date the manuscripts, of their content and their significance.