Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

[John T]

Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

I'm a new member here so please forgive me if this topic has already been discussed ad nauseam. If so, please provide a link on this thread so I and other newbies can get up to speed.

Here is an article (2010) that I feel is fair and balanced which gives several different takes on who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... cience-tv/

Since 2010, has there been any new plausible theories and/or have any of the old ones been debunked?

I agree with this statement in the article: "Many modern archaeologists such as Cargill believe the Essenes authored some, but not all, of the Dead Sea Scrolls."

However here is a bizarre theory: "A team led by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich recently discovered ancient sewers beneath Jerusalem. In those sewers they found artifacts—including pottery and coins—that they dated to the time of the siege. (Related: "Underground Tunnels Found in Israel Used In Ancient Jewish Revolt.") The finds suggest that the sewers may have been used as escape routes by Jews, some of whom may have been smuggling out cherished religious scrolls, according to Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Then you have another theory called the Jerusalem theory, which is not taken very seriously in the article: "I don't buy it," said NYU's Schiffman, who added that the idea of the scrolls being written by multiple Jewish groups from Jerusalem has been around since the 1950s. "The Jerusalem theory has been rejected by virtually everyone in the field," he said. "The notion that someone brought a bunch of scrolls together from some other location and deposited them in a cave is very, very unlikely," Schiffman added."

What is your theory and what evidence is there to support it?

Respectfully,

John T

[John T]

Below is a video called: "The Naked Archeologist", which dispels the theory of Qumran being a pottery barn or a depository for the Jerusalem library. The proof of all things is the location of the latrines compared to the rules written about them in the Damascus Document, as explained by James Tabor (16 minutes into the show). In short, the Essenes were proto-Christian and wrote most of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

http://youtu.be/LGe2SEt8WQw

[Stephan Huller]

In the end - when I saw the Gabriel posts and the rest - I figured you were associated with Simcha. Simcha made my mother very, very happy so I will always be indebted to him. But moving on to your post, the community cannot be definitively identified as Essene.

[The Crow]

Essenes are actually older that Christianity. They have a lot of commonality with one another. Heres a link that may shed light:

http://www.thenazareneway.com/essene_an ... allels.htm

I have not followed up on any of the claims made on this site just so everyone knows.

[Stephan Huller]

And 'proto-Christian' is a very loose concept. Jimi Hendrix can be identified as 'proto-Van Halen' even though Eddie claims he was completely influenced by Eric Clapton and not by Jimi. It is a dangerous thing to throw around terms like that without hard evidence. There were certainly many Jewish groups. IMO the community resembles the Sadducees more than the Essenes. But we know so little about the inner relationship of the various groups. It's best to stick with what we know and can be relatively certain of and identify the community as Sadducean in some form.

[spin]

Not the latrine nonsense again. Look at locus 51 at Qumran. De Vaux wrote of the pit found against the west wall, that it was without a doubt "a bottomless cesspit latrine." (The Excavations of Khirbet Qumran and Ain Feshkha: Synthesis of Roland de Vaux's Field notes, Humbert, Chambon & Pfann, 2003, p.30) Jodi Magness's approach was to claim it was for guests. There is a latrine in the Qumran settlement and it doesn't matter if Magness's harebrained idea were somehow correct. The point of the Essene latrine habits was for purity, which is made a farce with a latrine in the settlement, if the settlement were, as she thought, an Essene site.

The Israeli archaeologists, Magen & Peleg, who have worked the site for the past ten years or so, see the site as a pottery center. This ably explains the quantities of wares found at the site much better than the elusive Essene theory. There were at least five kilns found on the site and Magen & Peleg note that the stepped cisterns contained quantities of clay best explained for pottery production. Various scholars have noted the site resembles a commercial production center. Yizhar Hirschfeld saw it as analogous with the productivity of manor houses, in that it may have produced a number of things in quantity. Archaeologists such as David Stacey have seen the pottery linking it to the royal palace at Jericho.

There is nothing in the site itself that would make one think that it was anything other than a commercial enterprise and if vellum was produced on site, that would be enough to make any inhabitants impure.

There is no direct connection other than contiguity between the settlement and the caves.

The facile treatment of the Jerusalem origin of the scrolls given in the video (http://youtu.be/LGe2SEt8WQw) clearly shows little understanding of the current state of the analysis.

[The Crow]

And 'proto-Christian' is a very loose concept. Jimi Hendrix can be identified as 'proto-Van Halen' even though Eddie claims he was completely influenced by Eric Clapton and not by Jimi. It is a dangerous thing to throw around terms like that without hard evidence. There were certainly many Jewish groups. IMO the community resembles the Sadducees more than the Essenes. But we know so little about the inner relationship of the various groups. It's best to stick with what we know and can be relatively certain of and identify the community as Sadducean in some form.

OK. I need to look into this further I reckon. I did find something on the Dead Sea Sects. Apparently Josephus and Philo wrote about them at some point.

[spin]

There were certainly many Jewish groups. IMO the community resembles the Sadducees more than the Essenes. But we know so little about the inner relationship of the various groups. It's best to stick with what we know and can be relatively certain of and identify the community as Sadducean in some form.

Well, working from "sons of Zadok", who were more important at Qumran than the sons of Aaron, I'm not sure of the mapping between "Sadducean" and "sons of Zadok". If the sons of Zadok were indeed the high priestly family of Onias, which was truncated and uprooted to Egypt, then we must see "Sadducean" as having a different significance, which I'd try to put as the party of the Aaronids who remained after the Oniads left the scene, but who were not of the party of Alcimus, who leaned to what seems the early Pharisaic line that wanted to open up the temple for all Israel. There seems to have been a clear split in the priesthood towards the end of the Hellenistic crisis (perhaps earlier even, leading to the DSS complaints about the temple priesthood): the more conservative faction who opposed the removal of the wall and those in favor, who were like-minded with the Pharisees. This came to a conflict later under the Hasmoneans, lasting from the time of John Hyrcanus to that of Alexandra Shelamzion, who permitted the Sadducees to inhabit the smaller fortresses around Jerusalem (AJ 13.417). I find it interesting that the Sadducee conflict with the Pharisees was over well before the time of Hillel.

[John T]

Clearly Spin is not current on discoveries made decades ago.

Here is a short list of things now known:

The Essenes made pottery and lot's of it, no argument there. They needed jars and jars of water for their daily bathing rituals.
The Sons of Zadok are not blood relatives of Aaron per say but the "very elect" who joined the community of Essenes.
The Essenes were anti-Hasmoneans. No copies of 1 Maccabees can be found among the scrolls.

The list of facts against Spin's "willy-nilly" theory is long indeed. Perhaps he should read some current articles, say since the close of the last millennium?
What no one seems to argue against anymore, (then again Spin still just might) is that the DSS were written by a community that were apocalyptic in nature and waiting for the Messiah to usher in the "end of days."
The "end of days" message contained within the DSS is consistent with the message of Jesus and his brother James the Just.

But that is just a short list, not to mention the C14 carbon-dating evidence.

John T

[MrMacSon]

... the DSS were written by a community that were apocalyptic in nature and waiting for the Messiah to usher in the "end of days."

The "end of days" message contained within the DSS is consistent with the message of Jesus and his brother James the Just.

Interesting.

Who has determined this, and what parts of the DSS are used to say this?

Links & references other than http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... cience-tv/?

.
But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.

• <snip>

"Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews," said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls,

Recent archeological evidence suggests disparate Jewish groups may have passed by Qumran around A.D. 70, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which destroyed the Temple and much of the rest of the city.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... cience-tv/