Biblical Hebrew Forum

[goranson AT duke.edu]

Quoting Herman Meester <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>:


> {....]
> Neither does all of this:
> -Not all military fortresses look the same. Some walls are thicker than
> others. Besides, it's a ruin.
> -Not all military sites are at "major crossings".
> -If Kh. Qumran was not a site with military potential, why would "zealot
> squatters" move in just after the Essenes left?
> -Pliny describes the Essenes as celibate, but women's and children's
> skeletons were found in the Kh. Qumran cemetery.
> -In the Kh. Qumran "scriptorium", no parchment fragments have ever been
> found.
> -Although the Qumran "sectarians" were lovers of purity, they made a
> cemetery at a very short distance, while there was much more space
> available.
> -The Copper Scroll does not fit the Qumran-sect idea - forcing its adherents
> to dismiss it as a fake.
> -Pliny talks of one single settlement, but in fact there were more, similar
> to Qumran: similar graves to those at Kh. Qumran were found in the region.
> -The Dead Sea manuscripts contain far too many different hands to all be
> written at Qumran, or even the majority.
> -No legal deeds, no letters, or the like, have been found in the caves -
> remarkable if Qumran was some kind of head quarters for the Essene movement.
> -In Masada, were manuscripts were found too, evidence for literary activity
> *was* found, unlike in Qumran.
> -Qumran-Essene sect identification is based only on Pliny's problematic
> account, written after 70CE, when the Qumran "Essenes" would already have
> been gone, had they ever been there. The described location too isn't Qumran
> - there's quite a distance between Ein Gedi and Qumran. A problem that has
> to be solved by stating that Pliny's text is corrupt - as De Vaux did.
>
> regards,
> Herman,
> Rotterdam

Can you show any known fort that resembles Qumran? Zealots occupied houses and
the Temple--does that make those houses and the Temple forts? The female and
child bones are post-70 bedouin burials, as Zias showed in Dead Sea
Discoveries. The khirbeh was burned and flooded--hence parchment would not
survive there, unlike in caves. But ostraca and inkwells were found. Who said
"headquarters"? Masada literary evidence? The Copper Scroll records group
property, not individually-owned property; I do not call 3QCu a fake (though
some items are listed twice, redeposited). Who said all the mss were
written at
one place? They are obviously written at more than any one place (including
Jerusalem) and over many decades in time (but some sectarian hands are
repeated, as Tov's new book affirms: Scribal Practices and Approaches
Reflected
in the Texts from the Judean Desert). No, Pliny's source account reflects 15
BCE, not as Golb misunderstood as if Pliny visited Judaea post 70 (he
did not).
Several pre-1948 writers correctly read Pliny as locating Essenes (the
Qumran/Feshkha one site Pliny's source knew) on the "northwest" shore of the
Dead Sea. The Qumran-Essene identification is based not only on Pliny and Dio
and Solinus, but e.g. on the Josephus War 2 initiation so similar ti 1QS;
predestination; preserving books with named angels (unlike Sadducees) and so
on.

regards,
Stephen Goranson
Durham NC
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson