Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Herman Meester" <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

2006/5/24, goranson AT duke.edu <goranson AT duke.edu>:

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
>
> (Apparently, this list is not the place to discuss this, but before I stop
doing so:)
maybe we can agree then, given the acknowledgement that there are definitely
mss. among the DSS that were *not* written by the "Essenes at Qumran" that
we should study each individual manuscript as if it has nothing to do with
Essenes, Qumran, etc.? This way, it doesn't really matter who was where and
when - let the texts speak for themselves, without attributing them to any
specific group. Seems to me to be the healthiest approach.
regards,
Herman