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The main area of interest at this site is the
Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran
and the primary concern is with their historic, literary, and cultural significance;
and only marginally with their religious significance. The scope of the site
coverage is limited by my own nascent understanding of the peoples,
religions, history and languages of Palestine (which is understood here to include
Maccabaean Palestine, including all of Galilee, Samaria, Judaea, Philistia,
Idumaea, Gaulantis, Galaaditis and the whole of the eastern shore of the
Dead Sea. Near neighbors, in various eras, included the Seleucid Empire
(Phoenicia/Syria/Ituraea) to the North, Decapolis and Peraea to the East,
Nabataea to the East and South, and Egypt to the South and Southwest).
The predominant outside influences,
during the era of greatest interest, came first from Egypt, then from Babylon and
Seleucid Syria, and finally from Rome.
The primary temporal focus is aimed at the period from about 200 BCE to about 100 CE. This is supposed to be the time of the composition, copying and storage of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is also considerable interest in more recent Dead Sea Scroll developments, including; their discovery, assembly, translation, and interpretation; allegations of conspiracy; intrigues involving concordances; and charges and counter-charges of all kinds - all of which have swirled around the scrolls. All the controversy has finally produced what amounts to a publishing bonanza. Even the official editors and their chosen publisher are getting back into the act. Clarendon Press is putting out new volumes of its Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (of Jordan) series and is even re-issuing several of the earliest numbers from that series. The "release" of the Cave 4 scrolls in the early 1990's is marked by the publication of certain facsimile copies of photographs of the scroll fragments from Qumran Cave 4 (4Q). Scrolls from ten other Qumran caves had already been published, nearly in their entirety, by that time. Cave 4 contained by far that largest surviving cache of scrolls in the area. Publication of such a large number of scrolls has to be treated as a major event and welcomed with open arms. Direct access to the scrolls is, however, still limited to members of the newly expanded International Team of Scroll Editors, who currently work under the auspices of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The vast majority of scroll scholars, meaning those not lucky enough to be chosen as official editors, have nevertheless taken the opportunity to produce a growing number of independent translations and analyses from outside the cloister of the IAA. This can only be viewed as a good thing. A diversity of ideas, opinions and proposals works for all other disciplines and there is no reason to expect that it won't work in the arena of scroll scholarship. There is no way to corner the market on ideas and there is nothing like a broad consensus to beat out a narrow one every time. But there is no way to arrive at a broad consensus unless everyone with expertise and an interest has the opportunity to see the evidence. Even publication of the photographs does not constitute complete access to the evidence, but it has given the interested parties something to work with for now. I admit feeling uncomfortable with the general agreement that has been expressed until recently about the origins, authors and provenance of the scrolls. I think it is well past time that the broadest range of ideas be consulted with respect to all matters concerning these scrolls. I am very glad to see such a process getting underway, even if it does have a long way to go. The evidence that has not been released includes the scrolls themselves (which all admit are too fragile to permit general access), the archaeological materials (all of which is inaccessible, some of which appears to be missing, and most of which has still not been published), and the notes from the early archaeological digs at Qumran. The early editors certainly appeared to be participating in an attempt to control the interpretation of the scrolls by limiting access to the evidence. This type of behavior has a foul reek even if the excuses used to explain it away may have some merit. Only small minds think they can get away with such a small-minded exercise. The events of the 1990's have proven their inability to get away with it any longer, if that was their intention. Everyone is still waiting to see if the delay was worth it. The diversity of the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls is somewhat surprising considering the impressions one gets from the early publications. If one small sect in the desert could hold such a diversity of incompatible views about itself, its God, its raison d'etre, its neighbors, and its enemies, then I will be flabbergasted. There is more going on than anyone has suspected and it looks as though it might take decades more to figure out, if we ever can, what it was. The decades of unnecessary delay imposed by the original editors has certainly not helped this aspect of the situation. |
Serekh ha-Yahad
Other Scrolls from Palestine
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There was clearly a vibrant and complex society
thriving throughout
Palestine during the relevant period and the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran are among
the most significant documents ever discovered dating from that time. As
the following summary shows, however, they are not the only ancient
Judaean or Palestinian manuscripts discovered in modern times. Furthermore,
it is probably safe to assume that caves have been used to store scrolls since
scrolls were first produced in this region. Here is a list of the known modern
scroll discoveries from Palestine;
The documents found in those caves are also deservedly a part of the legacy of the region. Here, however, I intend to concentrate on the specific collection of manuscripts and fragments found in eleven caves, out of several hundred examined by the earliest archaeological expeditions, near Khirbet Qumran by Bedouin and Jordanian expeditions beginning in 1946 and 1947. In what follows the term 'Dead Sea Scrolls' refers, almost exclusively, to materials found within about 1.5 miles of Qumran. The controversy about lack of access to the scrolls concerns primarily the thousands of fragments from Cave 4 (4Q). Those are almost the only scroll fragments not in print. With few exceptions, the contents of Cave 1-3, 5-11 have been published for decades. Cave 4 was an entirely different matter. It contained literally thousands of fragments from hundreds of manuscripts. The job of cleaning, preserving and translating them, we now know, took several years. Some delay beyond that must be attributed to the sheer volume of the manuscripts. But even allowing a decade for that, we are still entitled to an accounting of why it has taken another quarter of a century to get the ball rolling. Batches of manuscripts, most even more obscure than these, have almost always managed to work their way into print in far less time. |
Mishmarot
The Times and the Culture of Palestine
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The period from c. 200 BCE to the time of the
destruction of the Second
Temple in 70 CE, was the era from which both Rabbinic Judaism and
early Christianity sprang. Many of the worlds great religions trace their
history through this region, if not from it. These documents, from the
world's cultural, religious and linguistic crossroads, are from a unique
formative period before the Rabbinical, Christian and Moslem redactors
made their contributions and alterations to this literature. That fact
alone enhances the significance of these unique, ancient, and primarily,
parchment documents.
One tidbit that I find very revealing is that no two copies are alike. These people had, it seems, an opinion very different from that held by many modern religious authorities about the immutability of the biblical texts; even those with centuries of tradition already behind them, such as the Book of Isaiah. It might be concluded that each scribe considered it his duty to "improve", clarify or "correct" each text he copied. That gives me the impression of a rather more flexible religious canon during the intertestamental period. This is the sort of insight that reveals much about who these people were and how they conducted their daily lives. The scrolls were clearly meant to be read, but they are also clearly storage vessels for ideas. Who were they meant to be read by? What assumptions did the author and the reader share? Was any of this literature aimed at the far distant reader? How many people, either at Qumran or within the general population, could read these manuscripts and how were they to be used to transmit information to the illiterate? Answers to questions like these are endlessly fascinating and ultimately unanswerable. Nevertheless, it is by looking for answers to these that we can hope to gain some insight into the minds of the composers of these and other scrolls. |
Miqsat Ma`ase ha-Torah
Texts, Sources and Archaeology
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A secondary interest at this site involves trying to understand the controversy
and resolve the issues engendered by and lingering after the discovery,
reconstructions, translations and interpretations of these documents, as well
as the ongoing doubts about the quality of the archaeology practiced by Harding
and de Vaux at Qumran itself.
The most significant controversy is starting to resolve itself as the pace of publication by the International Team of Editors picks up steam under the goad of international outrage and the scrutiny of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Too little was done by too few for too long. It took several prods to get the IAA and its academic editors moving. Among these was the publication of photographic images of almost all the unpublished Cave 4 scrolls. These were obtained from a mysterious source by Robert Eisenman between September 1989 and the autumn of 1990. When E. J. Brill of Leiden withdrew as publisher shortly before the scheduled publication date for these photographs in April 1991, BAR's editor, Hershel Shanks, his Biblical Archaeology Society, and the Irving Moskowitz Foundation stepped in to cover the cost of publication of the two volume A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Another prod came with the announcement, only two months before publication of Eisenman's photographs, that the Huntington Library in San Marino, California would open its previously secret archive of Dead Sea Scroll photographs to all interested scholars. (If the Huntington was not the source of the photographs sent to Eisenman, then who was and where did the photographs come from? There have not been that many opportunities for outsiders to take a full set of photographs.) Both of these events followed the publication of A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four: reconstructed and edited by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg, 2 fascs. (Washington, D. C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991 and 1993). These guesses about the contents of certain Cave 4 manuscripts were extracted with the aid of a computer from John Strugnell's very limited edition Concordance prepared exclusively for the use of the members of the international team of editors working on the scrolls. How Wacholder and Abegg obtained a copy of that Concordance is still a mystery to me. These were guesses, at best, and recent comparisons show that they are not very accurate. Still, this work did much to shake up the IAA and its editors. It was the first serious shot across their bow, and it did encourage both Eisenman and the Huntington Library in their determination to "Free the Scrolls." These events put the IAA and its entire international team of official editors on notice that their nearly 50 year old monopoly, and entire academic lifetimes of foot dragging, were coming to an end. The IAA originally favored the status quo after it took de jure but not de facto control of the scrolls following the Six Day War. Eventually it did expand the size of the editorial board, reassigned all the unpublished material not in imminent danger of publication and started pushing for firm publication dates from the new and old editors. I have a certain sympathy for the rights of those who invested their time and energy into the intensive early work of collecting, cleaning, preserving, assembling and translating the Cave 4 documents. However, enough is enough. Having had almost 50 years to make whatever hay they could of the exclusive contract they seem to have had with the Palestine Archaeology Museum, it was long past time for those with access to either publish or perish. |
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Other fascinating problems remain to be resolved and, now that the wider
community of scroll scholars has access, to at least the photographic
evidence, some real progress can be anticipated in these areas as well.
For example, there is an amazing amount of academic support for the hypotheses that:
On the face of it, this entire integrated scenario seems highly unlikely to me. Real life is not that simple. Which parts of it are true and which parts are fanciful remain to be determined. The near monopolistic hold once maintained by the few scholars with access to the primary (and still largely unpublished) archaeological evidence said to support these propositions has been broken. Whether or not any of it will stand up to the light of wide ranging scrutiny is still an open question. I have been disappointed, however, to see how reluctant some researchers are to broach even the slightest doubt about this story. Roland de Vaux invented much of it in the first couple of weeks he spent digging around Khirbet Qumran. De Vaux revised his own ideas after reflection and modern scholars are beginning to do more of the same now that the scrolls and archaeological data are beginning to appear. Given the current level of archaeological sophistication, it is a wonder that our understanding of Qumran, itself, is so weak or that anyone still refuses to acknowledge that:
A possible scenario which permits an extensive sectarian presence in a large region around Qumran during the 100 years from 31 BCE to 70 CE is one in which they served as support staff for the official representatives in exchange for their use of the facilities and camping rights nearby. Sectarians may have managed the kilns, raised food south of Qumran and maintained the drainage system which kept the cisterns full of water, among other things. Significantly, even this level of accommodation to the official presence implies that they were able to maintain some sort of civil relationship with the authorities in Jerusalem. (The current interpretation of some of the works from Cave 4 seem to suggest that such an arrangement is unlikely. But that is only a problem if one is also assuming that there was only one source for the scrolls and that all the scrolls must fit within the confines of a single sect of Judaism.) In fact, if the presumptive sectarians had provided these services to a series of rulers through earlier politically sensitive times, even back to the Roman expeditions of the 60s and 40s BCE, then the sectarians may have felt some confidence that, if the Romans ever captured the fortification, they would be asked to provide the same services for them. Such a miscalculation could explain the size of the large nearby cemetery. (The odd placement, orientation and aspect of the graves suggests that Jewish Sectarians did not construct those graves, though they may be buried in them. Others have suggested that the graves are occupied by immigrants who were denied entry into Jerusalem due to physical ailment or impairment.) Sectarians are not required for these purposes, however, well educated and hard working domestics are hard to find in the desert and one or more sectarian groups might have been very welcome to fulfill these tasks in exchange for cash or protection. The original version according to de Vaux is too narrow to be true. Sectarian domestics may not be realistic, but what makes warrior monastics so believable? Why de Vaux's early ideas have gained such a foothold is less important than that their shortcomings should eventually be recognized and corrected. I don't see how most of the important questions about the Scrolls can be resolved until the source of the scrolls is firmly established. I do not see any overriding reason to assume a single source for the scrolls, a single sectarian belief system behind their composition, a single group, sectarian or otherwise, living at Qumran, or one good reason to think that the group was Essenic. While all of this may be true, it is not good enough to simply assume it. Someone needs to produce the evidence and present the arguments. Then we'll see how many it convinces. There is no reason why there has to be one single source for the scrolls. Given their diversity, three or four predominant sources might easily be responsible for the bulk of the manuscripts. Too many already use a single source approach to explain the meaning and to imagine internally consistent theologies which attempt to incorporate the scrolls as a unity. No one is examining the scrolls with the goal of determining if the scrolls came from one or many sources. That oversight dooms much of the current work to a permanently provisional status. In the late 1980's and early 1990's curiosity about the scrolls was heightened by suggestions that there was an on-going and systematic campaign to suppress their contents. There were several pet theories about who was suppressing what and why. For example, the list of theories includes but is not limited to the following, in no particular order;
That last one sounds as likely as any to me. The so-called Qumran-Sectarian hypothesis was formulated very early in the exploration of Qumran, its caves and its scrolls. The fact is that most of the excavation was not undertaken by professional archaeologists. Roland de Vaux, who with G. Lankester Harding controlled the early expeditions, was not himself a trained archaeologist. The archaeology stopped well short of a complete understanding of the site. The results of the early field work have still not been published, though a new team is working on them now that de Vaux and Harding are both dead. Their early reports suggest that many artifacts listed in the field inventories are now missing. Different parts of the inventory are now controlled by governments that are barely civil to each other. Over the decades parts of the inventory have been lent to various associates of de Vaux. Most of these never published anything either. Those who have died in the mean time may or may not have passed on the artifacts to their own chosen successors. How much better it would have been if the original excavators had bothered to publish the work they did with their own hands rather than forcing others to reconstruct that work from inadequate documentation and deteriorating or missing artifacts. Work was undertaken anew in the late 1980's after a hiatus of almost thirty years. The new Belgian team must have had a difficult time just gathering the materials, much less synthesizing an entire dig without the benefit of having been there at the time. This is not the record of a dedicated group of serious scholars. It is more like the record of occasionally enthusiastic amateurs. It could be the record of an incompetent group whose main interest was in protecting their pet theory by limiting access to their data and their material, some of which, for all we know, might contradict it. Or perhaps they were just too busy to bother or too lazy to care. The Qumran-Essene hypothesis did not initially appear unreasonable in light of the contents of the first six or seven scrolls recovered and published (from 1Q), nor in light of the first reports from the archaeological digs at the site. The pace of public interest and adulation, however, may have overwhelmed the slower more studied pace of site excavation and scroll scholarship with such heady consequences that those involved in the earliest speculations were emotionally and professionally trapped into perpetuating what has become an almost insurmountable jumble of improbable speculation, labyrinthine arguments, and ignored or suppressed contradictions. The tragedy is that so few scholars with a vested interest and direct access to the scrolls and the archaeological material have shown the courage during the last forty years to face up to the facts and examine the evidence. Too many are still defending the dogma rather then evaluating the evidence. Most appear more interested in telling us what the evidence means than in examining the evidence to see what it says and what it does not say. This is not science; it is a new religion; and that is one more than we need. There is no room for dogma in the face of facts. What we need are more facts, and fact based arguments, less speculation, and fewer unsupported defenses of the old dogma. If anyone has the evidence, then it is time to produce it. No more appeals to higher authority or the "classical interpretation" are allowed. There is nothing classy about a worn-out idea. One of the prime motives behind the interest of the general public in the Dead Sea Scrolls is undoubtedly speculation about their relationship, if any, to the presumed roots of the Christian church; assumed to be newly emerging from its Hebrew roots, but still tied to them, at about the time the scrolls were hidden in the desert. The political entanglements, if any, and the identity of the particular sect, or sects, or sub-sect which eventually evolved into the early Christian church are not readily apparent from any of the other known historic, literary or religious writings of that era. The Dead Sea Scrolls are largely unedited, at least by modern hands, primary documents of contemporary literary and religious writing of this history-making epoch. High levels of interest in this aspect of their contents is completely understandable. The same can be said for their bearing on our understanding of the roots of Rabbinic Judaism, which was also beginning to emerge at about the same time and which finally established its position of dominance only in the third century CE. The complex and turbulent state of Judaism makes any contemporary documents from that era extremely important and potentially revealing of new insights into the processes that were shaping the lives, the culture and the ethos of the peoples of the ancient Middle East. Given the commonality of their early histories and the diversity of the "Judaean Religion" which spawned both of them, it is probably fair to say that Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism are two sects of one common religion. The differences are largely bound up in their differing responses to the cultural heritage of the Israelites. Rabbinic Judaism was an exclusive religion limited to those who were descendants of Israelites who fled with Moses from Egypt or who had adopted the cultural standards of Judaean society through intermarriage. The exclusion of the Samarians provides an example of how exclusive it eventually became. The early Christian religion, in contrast, might be characterized as inclusive. It made accommodations with the local heritage of the non-Israelite populations all over the Mediterranean basin. Its inclusivity gave it a vast numerical advantage in its early efforts to establish itself and that advantage continues to this day. The Christian sect had to give up most of its ties to the cultural heritage of the Israelites in order to present this inclusive appearance, however, and many of the differences between these two great religions have evolved from this one crucial early difference. One expectation of those awaiting further work on the scrolls is the reasonableness of such a view. Could the diversity of the Israelite religion harbor two such groups within its boundaries? If it could, then the beginnings of the Christian Church might reasonably predate the birth of Christ. The assumption that he started the sect that eventually adopted his name would have to be dropped. Oddly enough, I do not see much evidence that anyone is actually investigating this question; as interesting as it would be to know the answer. The seeming obsession of the major Hebrew sects, beginning around 200 BCE, with matters of ritual purity may have been a response to the appearance of one or more sects that threatened to disconnect themselves from the well known heritage of the Mosaic Law. This would be purely speculative at this point, but it is a question that begs an answer or at least an attempt at elucidation. The urge for a more inclusive religion may well have predated the first appearance of the Christian sect in Judaea. How will we ever know if no one asks the question? The scrolls were rediscovered over 50 years ago but the vast majority from Cave 4 have only been available to the scholarly community at large since about 1993. Therefore, the possibility still exists that the Dead Sea Scrolls could shed new light and offer new insights into many hitherto unreported or inadequately reported events, beliefs or groups of that period. They might also help us understand how various Jewish groups competed with each other during that period for political, religious, and moral supremacy. It is unlikely that they will tell us how one variant of intertestamental Judaism evolved within a few generations into the early Christian church. But, even if they do not, they can still tell us volumes about the cultural milieu in which early Christian and Rabbinic ideologies developed and, perhaps, something about the complex of ideas from which they sprang. These manuscripts should still have some interesting surprises which will, if they can ever be unraveled from the myths and misinformation that has come down to us from other, presumably, less pristine, sources, both ancient and modern, tell us much about our own culture and expand our world view. |
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Many of the sites my searches have uncovered are sponsored by religious and other
organizations of various types whose primary interest is not directed at the Dead
Sea Scrolls themselves. I am trying to weed out those sites which do not provide
specific information about the scrolls, their creation, discovery, modern
history, preservation, translation, interpretation, historical or literary ancestry, or
their comparison with or relationship to other known biblical, canonical, literary or
historical texts.
The political, military, cultural, religious, and economic context for the composition of these scrolls is very important and links to a number of non-scroll specific sites will be incorporated as they are identified. Related topics of interest include such areas as archaeology, languages, history, classics, religion, biblical studies, Jewish studies, geology and carbon-14 dating, among others. The choice of sites is by design focused primarily on their relevance to the scrolls and events of the ancient Middle East and the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. This site will continue to grow and evolve as new web sites are created, as additional existing sites are discovered, and as information about the scrolls becomes more generally available on the Web. Please send me your suggestions, comments and questions, along with your list of the interesting and relevant sites you've discovered while searching for Dead Sea Scroll sites. They will be added here as quickly as possible. While there are only a few translations of actual scroll material available on the Web, there is still plenty of interesting information for anyone who has the inclination and time to delve into it. This site includes a collection of the currently available documents related to Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other related documents. In editing lists of sites uncovered by various search engines, this topic area has been interpreted fairly broadly to include subjects that may not seem, at first glance, to be directly related to the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves. This was done purposely to provide some measure of perspective for this topic. The collection at this site is not geared to an examination of biblical accuracy, the history of biblical scholarship, why a large segment of the scrolls have still not been officially translated and published by the vastly expanded editorial group currently entrusted with that task, the political history of the modern Middle East or the ownership of the various scroll collections. All those topics are relevant and certainly interesting. Such links, as can be found for those and similar topics, may eventually be included. This site is geared to generating a wide angle view of the scrolls, the scrolls' original owners and copyists, the modern scroll scholars, their techniques, and the lessons that they have, or should have, learned. The goal is to put that information into an effort to unravel the historical setting in which the scrolls were first created and to read them honestly and to learn what they can tell us about intertestamental Palestine and its inhabitants. |
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There are now four very affordable books in print for English
speakers who want
to see for themselves what to make of the contents of the 4Q scrolls. None of them
covers the biblical texts, which have mostly been published already. These concentrate
instead on the much more interesting non-biblical texts. The paperback editions of these
books are;
F. García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated - The Qumran Texts in English, 2nd ed., trans. W. G. E. Watson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). Approx. $29.95, I think. Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Revised and Extended Fourth Edition (London: Penguin, 1995). $12.95. Michael O. Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr. and Edward Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls, A New Translation, (Harper, San Francisco, 1996). $35.00. The first of these contains translations of 50 selected Cave 4 documents while the other three contain nearly complete collections of the (mostly) non-biblical texts from Cave 4. One should not assume, and I do not, that these offer anything like the final word on the translations of these texts. There are plenty of people working on them now; all have their own specialties, perspectives, and ideas about how to read them and what they mean. On top of that, and adding to the complexity of the problems, there are difficulties with the condition and readability of the manuscript fragments themselves. Of course, parts of the text are almost always missing. Of the pieces available, it may not always be obvious to everyone how to put the pieces together or which ones belong together; which belong to separate copies of the same text; and which belong to entirely separate texts. Furthermore, there is the continuing evolution of the shapes of the letters and the spelling of the words to contend with. Some changes in spelling are merely due to scribal errors. Other times they reflect changes in usage. Sometimes there are reasonable disagreements about which vowels have been left out. Such fundamental uncertainties clearly make it difficult for all parties to agree on the simple translation, much less the meaning, of many of these fragmentary documents. But underlying all other concerns there is the fundamental question about what the words, in context, meant to their authors, the scribes who copied them, and the audiences that read or listened to them. This is the critical concern, obviously, and it is a much larger problem than merely translating the scrolls. Answering this question requires knowing much more about the people and their social, political, economic, linguistic and emotional status than we have any current right to claim to understand. Until we get the simple steps out of the way, however, there is no rational way to examine these larger issues. Some words with very different meanings are spelled similarly or identically. Sometimes, even with the complete context, it is difficult to tell which meaning was intended. The meanings change with time, vary among different sectarian groups, are used allegorically and figuratively, or with secret meanings and in other ways that are difficult for the modern translator to unravel. Our understanding of the meaning of these documents is bound to evolve as studies continue. And after all that, a single unambiguous meaning might never be satisfactorily demonstrated. It might be helpful to remember that one of the reasons sectarian groups existed was to explain certain critical matters to their adherents. If the meaning of God's word was obvious or if God's revelations were given to everyone the teachers and their writings would have found no one in need of instruction. An allegorical or downright misleading or ambiguous text, we might expect, would have been generally preferred, if not to keep the unbelievers in the dark, then at least to keep the believers coming back. Nevertheless, these manuscripts offer glimpses into a fascinating cultural period just prior to the beginning of the millennia of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. It was a time of religious, cultural and political upheaval. It was a time when, for example, there was a significant increase in the cultural fascination and obsession with ritual purity. Disagreements over this one cultural practice may have been sufficient to spawn dozens of sectarian groups with strong antithetical responses to each other. The implied mini-upheavals, leading to an ongoing and culture-wide religious upheaval, eventually produced two of the World's great religions. The extent of that birthing process convinced both the Christian and Jewish leaders that they had to decide once and for all the specific Canon for each defining version of the Bible. In that attempt both were largely successful. Faint ripples of that upheaval, largely buried by religious leaders for almost two thousand years, have resurfaced in the form of a religious library (or possibly a genizah) with a significant non-canonical selection of works that escaped centuries of suppression, censorship and redaction. If it is true that much of it was never meant for public viewing, that is interestingly relevant in light of the fact that modern scholars have perpetuated that intention for additional 50 years, nearly. If they were meant for a wider audience, it is also interesting to see how widely and how successfully the first and second century authorities were able to bury the parts of our religious heritage which they did not approve or could not rationalize into their more compact and more rigid belief systems. There is no doubt that the importance of the non-biblical scrolls will impact most deeply on studies of the history of Jewish religious beliefs, culture and practice. That will have a secondary effect on studies of the early Christian church as well. It is also possible that some indirect evidence about the events which sparked the appearance of early Christianity might be gained from studying these manuscripts. Clearly, some large segment of Palestinian Jewish heritage was lost, purposely or not, for a very long time. Otherwise, we would not find the Dead Sea Scrolls consisting of fully one-third new, never before seen, manuscripts (though some have been mentioned by other sources). In fact, they are undoubtedly only a small part of the lost heritage of the Jews of intertestamental Palestine. At the Qumran site itself there is evidence that several caves collapsed when they were undermined by running water coursing through them. The few remaining bits of scroll evidence found in those caves suggest that substantial but unknown numbers of scrolls were destroyed in situ or, possibly, by being swept into the Dead Sea by ancient downpours. Furthermore, if none of the Qumran scrolls is from Jerusalem, then there are potentially thousands more scrolls from the Temple which might remain to be discovered. Though some Temple scrolls were burned by the Romans, it seems highly likely that some part of the vast library associated with the Temple was spirited out of Jerusalem ahead of the approaching Roman Army prior to 70 CE. Since the discovery of the caves at Qumran other caves, possibly by now all the caves, in the Judaean Desert and elsewhere nearby have been explored and there is a growing corpus of written material from about the 4th century BCE, through the period of the First Jewish revolt against Rome, and up to and including the time of the Second Jewish revolt around 135 CE. These discoveries along with scattered historical reports of other scroll caches, discovered near Jericho and elsewhere in early Christian times, evidence the fact that the practice of storing scrolls in caves was not limited to one sect or to the eleven caves at Qumran or even to one time period. The materials from the Qumran caves are, rather, merely a part of an expanding documentary reservoir from the region in and near greater Palestine from a range of historic periods, as well, apparently, as from an assortment of literary traditions. |
About the Supplementary Files
for the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran
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I have reconstructed from a variety of other sources, most of them not
available on the WEB, several additional files that may be of interest
to students of this topic. These are not simple copies of those other
sources and as such are subject to errors introduced due to my own lack
of understanding. The Supplementary Files include:
(Just because I've taken the |
Recommended References in Print
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The most intelligent book for the general reader that I have found on this topic is
Professor Golb is associated with the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. The clarity of his arguments and the depth of his experience and understanding of scroll scholarship, in general, are remarkable. It is well worth the price and it really is a pleasure to read. There is much in it that is thought provoking. For that alone it is worth the read. While I doubt that his story is entirely accurate, it is much more deeply based in understandable scholarship than the Qumran/Sectarian dogma. One thing that seems certain, based on my general reading in the field, is that it is very easy to imagine any number of wild scenarios for what "really" took place. It is much more difficult to do what Golb has done and try to tie his ideas to known facts with a minimum of clearly defined speculation. His speculations are labeled as such and are based on carefully examined evidence and a wide-ranging perspective on the more generalized scroll scholarship of many regions and time periods. He does good science and uses clear logic and even if he cannot reconstruct the complete story, he will have done his job by stimulating others to follow his methods to even better conclusions. That's what I expect from any serious scholar. I only hope that by sifting through and studying Professor Golb's mountain of information that I will, during my own future studies, be able to comprehend some small part of it. The wealth of information is somewhat daunting but well worth the effort. For the most sympathetic view of the Qumran/Sectarian hypothesis by a reasonable voice from among the original International Editorial Team, Frank Moore Cross has published
I am also evaluating other sources and I will incorporate what they have to offer at this site and the best of them in this short list. I expect Professor Golb's book to remain the best starting place that I can recommend to anyone with an active intelligence and an interest in what the Dead Sea Scrolls are really about. I would be very interested in reading his translations and/or interpretations of the contents of specific scrolls. It seems, however, that he is putting his efforts elsewhere and is relying on his young colleague, Michael Wise, to do the translating. Perhaps we should be looking to Professor Golb for future analyses of Professor Wise's translations. Whatever he does, I think it is likely to be worth reading and very interesting. |
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