Unreliable Vaults, Holy Disbelief: Narrative Ethics in Dead Sea Scrolls “News”

National Geographic’s revelation of forgeries in March 2020 concerning “Dead Sea Scroll-like” fragments purchased by the Museum of the Bible is one of the most recent examples in a long media history of ethical consequences facilitated by the absence of provenance narratives. Throughout the media history of Dead Sea Scroll reports, rhetorical repetition, invocation of ignorance, and narrative deficiency have characterized articles which rely on placeholders for provenance, as well as the underreporting and under-evaluating of information provided by interviewees. Narrative inquiry and ethical analysis allow for an exploration into how the media – here used as a term to describe professional online news sources accessed by both scholars and non-scholars alike – first facilitated absences, then deficiencies in provenance reporting on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the fragments that claim to be them.