John, thank you for calling attention to Vermes' book. I'm sure it's quite familiar to many on this board but is new to me. Conveniently, there's a pdf, though I don't know whether it's of the most recent edition:
http://www.thechristianidentityforum.ne ... crolls.pdf
Vermes makes a good point against Golb that the texts contained in the whole collection, as known so far, seem to reflect the interests of sectarians. To maintain that the scrolls are from a sectarian library in Jerusalem and were spirited out before the city finally succumbed to the Roman assault seems unnecessary.
If one agrees that the collection is sectarian, the motivation for positing a Jerusalem provenance seems weak,
unless there is strong reason to deny that there was a sectarian settlement near Qumran. Vermes is convinced that Qumran was not a fortress. I don't know what to think about claims that it was just a commercial establishment and not a sectarian community.
I have read a good deal of Vermes' intro but cannot read it all, at least, right now. I note, however, that Vermes follows what I take is the standard view of the motives of those who put the scrolls in jars in caves: "But from that place, members of an ancient Jewish religious community, whose centre it was, hurried out one day and in secrecy climbed the nearby cliffs in order to hide away in eleven caves their precious scrolls. No one came back to retrieve them, and there they remained undisturbed for almost 2,000 years."
This goes against your suggestion, John, that the scrolls were the property of postulants to the community and that they were deposited in jars in caves as a means of separating the property of postulants from community property, at least during the time of their postulancy. [Perhaps I have your suggestion wrong here.] It also goes against your belief, stated above, that hiding scrolls from the Romans would evidence a lack of faith.
Do you have a refutation of Vermes' view of the purpose of depositing the scrolls in jars in caves?
Just speculating right now, it seems to me that the question of motive for depositing can only be addressed from assumptions about whether the DSS represent a unified collection, a library, or were instead possessions of a range of owners. In favor of the former assumption: the sectarian bias reflected in the list of works represented. In favor of the latter: utter diversity among scribal hands, such that (acc. to Golb, anyway) no individual scribe's work seems to be represented by more than one scroll. The latter phenomenon argues against the collection's being the product of a single scriptorium. Since the Qumran settlement, acc. to Vermes' Essene hypothesis, contained only c. 150 people at once, you'd expect to see the same scribe's handiwork in several scrolls if scrolls were copied at Qumran.
You might want to suppose that the Qumran community was Essene, had its library, produced few volumes, acquired many volumes, item by item, when personal books of postulants eventually became community property... but you still have to account for their deposition
in jars in caves. Seems overly labor-intensive to me if the purpose was to keep property of people still in the postulant stage separate from community property. Why schlep them all the way up there? Seems likely, on the other hand, if the purpose was to hide the scrolls. I have read that the jars themselves had stuff on top of them - don't know whether the jars were themselves buried inside the caves in c. 70 CE or whether the stuff on top of the jars is later deposit.
Thank you, ficino
