Review of "DSS REVEALED" CD-ROM marketed by LOGOS Systems (1994),
produced by Pixel Multimedia and Aaron Withens (et al.),
text by Ronny Reich (Israel Antiquities Authority)

This attempt at a slick, multi-leveled, technologically versatile
tool for the understanding and study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and 
their world is largely successful and worth consideration as an 
electronic "textbook" resource. It has its bugs and frustrations, 
but these are far outweighed by the values.

I ordered my copy from CBD (Christian Book Distributors) for 
$47.95 (a procedure recommended by LOGOS, incidentally), and it 
arrived within a week. The CD-ROM will run on either Mac or 
Windows, and it seems perhaps a bit less "buggy" on the Mac, 
although I did my testing on a Windows machine. The machine I 
am using is "pentium" level with a 17 inch color screen, so I 
expected relatively fast response and quality pictures.

The first thing I learned is that when the menu pops up reporting 
some sort of program problem and offers the choice of "cancel" 
(or whatever; the left button) or "ignore," the answer is to hit 
the ignore button three times; otherwise, hitting the left button 
tends to hang the system and require rebooting. Not a pleasant 
way to proceed! But by becoming adept at the triple ignore move, 
I was able to spend a couple of largely pleasant hours with the 
CD-ROM, and to explore maybe a third of its riches. 

The presentation starts and ends slowly, and one needs to 
discover how to disable or work around those portions if one is 
to use the material for short periods of time (as I hope my 
students will sometimes do). At the end, all the credits are run 
in great detail (perhaps 5 minutes worth) before one is permitted 
to quit. That will be especially frustrating in a library or a 
lab. I do not for a minute begrudge the credits, but must I see 
them every time I use the disk? No thanks. 

The key to manipulation, in addition to the triple ignore, is to 
point and click the mouse, even when the British narrator is 
speaking. Thus at the outset, after a dramatic and attractive 
materialization of the MMT fragments, six topical options appear 
on screen: Location, Discovery, Scroll Work, Scrolls, History, 
and Debates. At the same time, three (later four) buttons also 
appear permitting hyper-connections to other major and minor 
topics (depending on where one is in the overall configuration of 
data), navigational tools (including an extensive, if fairly 
elementary, glossary of terms, names, etc.), a help feature, and, 
as you get further into the data, a list of specific links to 
pictures or text for the topic at hand. Thus one can move fairly 
quickly from one spot to another without needing to negotiatiate 
the heirarchical menus at every point. 

I spent most of my two hours in two of the sub-menus, History and 
(of course) the Scrolls. Virtually every new major topic offered 
a smallish box with brief video clips that one could stop or move 
around in at will ("Quick-Time" software), along with a variety 
of links, connections, etc. In general, I wished the video box 
was larger, but found no way to change its size. With the photos 
of the DSS themselves, frequent opportunities to enlarge to a 
pre-set size and selection were available, and that proved very 
useful and attractive. The video clips were all narrated by the 
British gentleman whose name is doubtless in the credits, but I 
somehow dozed and missed it. Next time. The text for the clips 
was written by Ronny Reich -- that I did catch in the credits.

The information conveyed in Reich's script is, as expected, 
fairly basic, but also refreshingly reliable and uncontroversial 
for the most part. The problem of needing to unteach students 
what they learn from this CD-ROM tool should be virtually non-
existent. To put it another way, a good basis for further 
learning is established by the script, even if some of the 
British pronunciations of names strike an odd chord. And although 
there were various artsy pictures of Jesus with haloed head (in 
the Bible Review vein), I did not notice any of the popularized 
religiousity (of whatever brand) that sometimes mars these sorts 
of projects.  

Back to the modules. Under "History," I could explore Time, 
People, Languages, Sources, and Beliefs -- and I looked at them 
all. People included Essenes, Pharisees, "Saducees," and Early 
Christians, but no Zealots. Sources included OT, NT, Rabbinic 
Literature, Philo, Josephus, and Pliny, but no Pseudepigrapha.
Languages covered Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and the development of 
relevant scripts (but no Chinese!). And so on. I was surprised to 
find "Immersion" as one of the choices under "Beliefs," but it 
did not turn out to be aimed at justifying modern baptistic 
Christian perspectives. 

The Scrolls module occupied most of my time. It contained 
selected pictures of most of the major writings, and some of the 
archaeological remains (pots, combs, linens, etc.), displayed in 
a special larger window than that used for the video clips, with 
a smaller lower portion that holds up to seven lines of English 
translation or explanation. Thus one can access a nice photo of 
the Habakkuk Pesher with a translation (normally from Vermes) 
below. In most instances, selected enlargements of the photos 
can also be called up, and are usually readable on screen. 
Indeed, in general the quality of the scroll photos is much 
better than the often fuzzy maps and other pictures in some of 
the other modules, although not _everything_ else is blurred -- 
my point is that the quality of the digitized images varies 
significantly. 

In addition to the program bugs (voice sometimes was lost from 
the video clips, but could be restored by halting the clip and 
restarting it), there are other signs of haste -- "Saducee" has 
been noted and appears more than once (what use is the second "d" 
anyway?), Geza Vermes is Giza in the credits, and Vermez once 
elsewhere. And so on. I can live with that. What goes on in the 
"Debates" module is not yet known to me, but may merit an 
addendum to this quick review. Still, on the basis of what I have 
seen already, I am ready to include the disk as a major tool for 
the introductory course on the DSS that I am offering next term 
(network auditing will be permitted; details later). It is a 
worthwhile step towards the electronic textbooks and courses that 
will soon become commonplace in our technologically expanding 
world. For those who have appropriate machinery and $50, this 
might be a worthwhile investment. I'm glad I took the plunge. 

Bob Kraft, UPenn