DSS personalities & historical persons

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3411
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by DCHindley »

spin wrote:
DCHindley wrote:Unfortunately, the standards of language, conduct & research on DSS of his day, "the like of which I had never experienced in my career as a historian," still remains the norm
I'd say a lot has changed since Roth's day. The scrolls were "liberated" in the 90s through efforts from many scholars. There is no longer the climate of private party there once was.
True,

But what still gets me is the intense need among many of the best and brightest to force fit these documents into non-threatening, or just convenient, pigeon holes. This is a "no wake" zone in the river of scholarship. Everything is agenda driven. It's them or us.

DCH
User avatar
John T
Posts: 1567
Joined: Thu May 15, 2014 8:57 am

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by John T »

The "Curse of the Scrolls".

If you disagree with Schiffman and his ilk, they will label you as unhinged, crack-pot etc.,. Much like Huller does to Eisenman on this forum. They don't want to argue the merits but prefer to slay straw-men or simply censor your opinion so as to stop minority views from getting a fair hearing.

In my opinion, the Teacher of Righteous was a title that got passed to the most senior member of the Qumran community.
Much like the first President of the U.S. was George Washington however, the title of President is automatically transferred to the current office holder.

In that view, the Eisenman theory; James the Just held the title of the Teacher of Righteousness, remains plausible.
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."...Jonathan Swift
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3411
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by DCHindley »

John T wrote:The "Curse of the Scrolls".

In my opinion, the Teacher of Righteous was a title that got passed to the most senior member of the Qumran community.
...
... the Eisenman theory; James the Just held the title of the Teacher of Righteousness, remains plausible.
But is that the same thing as identifying J t J as the Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in several of the scrolls?

I agree that in early Christian lore, J t J was a super righteous dude, as was probably the T o R, but how many others were similarly considered amazingly just by their disciples or the local population, only we have no literary remains that mention them?

IMHO, John T, the whole James the super Just legend, which seems to have been promoted by Clement of Alexandria and especially Hegesippus the story-teller, was fabricated whole cloth, probably by Hegesippus himself, from various Judean legends he had recorded in his notebooks during his travels. The trapping of the T o R into violating his own Sacred Sabbath (Day of Atonement) sounds nothing like what early Christians thought had happened to J t J.

Dinner time!

DCH
User avatar
spin
Posts: 2146
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 10:44 pm
Location: Nowhere

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by spin »

DCHindley wrote:what still gets me is the intense need among many of the best and brightest to force fit these documents into non-threatening, or just convenient, pigeon holes. This is a "no wake" zone in the river of scholarship. Everything is agenda driven. It's them or us.
I don't see this as reflective of what is happening now:
DCHindley wrote:force fit[ting] these documents into non-threatening, or just convenient, pigeon holes
We're in a hiatus period in which things are stewing. For me it seems that much of the force fitting has been shed, as the old "we-know-what-it'd-all-about" brigade die off. What that might mean for your picture is that the "us" category has shrunken to an all time low and the "them" has grown and spread their interests to look at a wide range of what the scrolls indicate. The theory-jockey has now become superfluous. Sure we are still living in the wake of 40 years of "we-know-what-it'd-all-about" hegemony, but the believers are older and those newer ones are less zealous. That's just academic conservatism. I see articles about whether the members of the yahad were celibate, what is the relationship between CD and S, how does yahad compare with habura. This is seriously interesting stuff coming out of scrolls study. Think of the implications of having a paper trail for the evolution of religious documents, as we do with CD & S.

When people come here dredging up twenty-year-old books with outmoded theories of who's-who-in-the-DSS, you know they're just latched onto a dying religion. There are more things in heaven and earth than that sad philosophy. These are interesting times for the scrolls and I think the times are getting better.
Dysexlia lures • ⅔ of what we see is behind our eyes
iskander
Posts: 2091
Joined: Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:38 pm

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by iskander »

The moribund will not lie down and die
The rite of consecration of the personnel with holy water and a prayer during the ceremony of the S-400 regiment entering service in Feodosia

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/photo/201701171 ... em-crimea/
Image
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3411
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by DCHindley »

spin wrote:
DCHindley wrote:what still gets me is the intense need among many of the best and brightest to force fit these documents into non-threatening, or just convenient, pigeon holes. This is a "no wake" zone in the river of scholarship. Everything is agenda driven. It's them or us.
I don't see this as reflective of what is happening now:
...
The theory-jockey has now become superfluous. Sure we are still living in the wake of 40 years of "we-know-what-it'd-all-about" hegemony, but the believers are older and those newer ones are less zealous. That's just academic conservatism. I see articles about whether the members of the yahad were celibate, what is the relationship between CD and S, how does yahad compare with habura. This is seriously interesting stuff coming out of scrolls study. Think of the implications of having a paper trail for the evolution of religious documents, as we do with CD & S.

When people come here dredging up twenty-year-old books with outmoded theories of who's-who-in-the-DSS, you know they're just latched onto a dying religion. There are more things in heaven and earth than that sad philosophy. These are interesting times for the scrolls and I think the times are getting better.
spin,

Thank you for your opinion. I am not so ready to shed any present attempts to connect figures in the scrolls with historical figures, however meager the historical remains may be. The writers must have been thinking of certain people when they used the words they did, although I am happy to think that over periods of time several folks may have been identified by similar labels: "Righteous Teacher," "Wicked Priest," "Man of Lies," etc. I am interested in creating a matrix of options along both axis, just for heuristic purposes.

That being said, the OP was actually in response to a request by Lena Einhorn, as she has an interest in how individual persons in the war years 66-73 CE were described and at least test this out for the sake of her own "time shift" theory. Privately, she expressed disappointment at Roth's theory just as you do, but perhaps for different reasons. IMHO, Roth had his own agenda, to remove any possibility that a figure mentioned in the non-biblical DSS could be connected to figures in early Christian legend and literature. I doubt that there were any, but early Christianity, if really an outgrowth of Judaism as practiced in that era, may have easily shared many cultural practices with the writers of the non-biblical DSS.

If you like, you can bypass this thread, but as always, I do value your input. As a rule, you have thought out the issues you talk about very carefully in advance. You go right for the inconsistencies and methodological problems and bypass a lot of bullsh!t, and for that I and I'm sure many others thank you.

DCH
User avatar
spin
Posts: 2146
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 10:44 pm
Location: Nowhere

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by spin »

DCHindley wrote:I am not so ready to shed any present attempts to connect figures in the scrolls with historical figures, however meager the historical remains may be. The writers must have been thinking of certain people when they used the words they did, although I am happy to think that over periods of time several folks may have been identified by similar labels: "Righteous Teacher," "Wicked Priest," "Man of Lies," etc. I am interested in creating a matrix of options along both axis, just for heuristic purposes.
The writers were happy enough to talk of Amelios and [Demet]rios and Jonathan and various others, but chose not to provide names of local powers, but to use epithets. It was deliberate obfuscation for those who were not within the chosen readership who knew what the terms meant. We were lucky with Daniel because there are a lot of sources that supply context for decoding the cloak of mystification placed over the central figures of the second part of the book. We are nowhere near as lucky with the DSS. This leaves us at the moment with unresolvable theory wars. It has been extremely detrimental to scrolls study. Hence my willingness to leave the identification issue hanging in order to get on with achievable things.
DCHindley wrote:That being said, the OP was actually in response to a request by Lena Einhorn, as she has an interest in how individual persons in the war years 66-73 CE were described and at least test this out for the sake of her own "time shift" theory. Privately, she expressed disappointment at Roth's theory just as you do, but perhaps for different reasons. IMHO, Roth had his own agenda, to remove any possibility that a figure mentioned in the non-biblical DSS could be connected to figures in early Christian legend and literature. I doubt that there were any, but early Christianity, if really an outgrowth of Judaism as practiced in that era, may have easily shared many cultural practices with the writers of the non-biblical DSS.
First, Roth's theory made quite good sense of the data available to him. I wouldn't be disappointed with it: it was simply falsified. That's the way it goes. Second, one would expect a religion that has its hooks so tightly into Judaism to somehow be an outgrowth from it and a recent DSD volume shows a lot of scholarly interest in links between the DSS and christianity. Personally, I'm more inclined to see christianity's dependence in diaspora Judaism.

I'm just dribbling pearls of rambling wisdom.
Dysexlia lures • ⅔ of what we see is behind our eyes
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3411
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by DCHindley »

spin wrote:I'm just dribbling pearls of rambling wisdom.
Damn! Stepped on one!! :wtf:
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3411
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by DCHindley »

Well,

It looks like I have read Driver's book before, as I already had in my personal "library" photocopies of several of the chapters (on Zadokites, "Sadduceans," Boethusians, Sadducees, Pharisees & "Zealots,"* etc.). These must have been made eons ago (probably early 1990s), but for some reason they are the only set of photocopied chapters and articles I have that did not properly identify the source on them somewhere. "Chee," said Dennis the Menace's young sidekick Joey, in sheer amazement at Dennis' master-like control over things mischiefy.

This volume pulls together all the usual historical suspects for all the various personalities mentioned in the non-biblical DSS, but this will not be fun.

DCH

*The parties/factions in quotation marks are those that were invented by Driver and/or Roth to meet the needs of their theories. They are hypotheticals.
User avatar
maryhelena
Posts: 2878
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:22 pm
Location: England

Re: DSS personalities & historical persons

Post by maryhelena »

Greg Doudna's chapter in Qumran Revisited: A Reassessment of the Archaeology of the Site and its Texts, is available on academia edu.


"The Sect of the Qumran Texts and its Leading Role in the Temple in Jerusalem During Much of the First Century BCE: Toward a New Framework for Understanding" (my part in Stacey, Doudna, and Avni, Qumran Revisited, 2013)


https://www.academia.edu/12143840/_The_ ... sited_2013_

Image

David Stacey has also made available his part of the book on academia edu.

https://www.academia.edu/12132830/Qumra ... xford_2013_
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
Post Reply