Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
A lavish mainstream article, just out in the latest issue of Smithsonian (January, 2010) is sure to further confuse the public on the status of the question–”Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Author Andrew Lawler has done his homework, but his article gives the impression that the dissenting theories of Yuval Peleg, Norman Golb, and even the Donceels, are somehow something new and earthshaking, challenging the so-called “Essene” hypothesis.
In fact there is widespread and general agreement among 98% of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the sectarian group that composed bulk of the Dead Sea Scrolls, call them “Essenes,” or any number of their self-designations (“New Covenanters” “Son of Light” “The Community”), did in fact inhabit the settlement at Qumran, hiding their scrolls in caves in and around the site around the time of the 1st Jewish-Roman revolt (66-73 CE). This is confirmed by the archeology of Qumran as well as its landscape and setting.
Curious readers and non-specialists should obtain as a most basic and comprehensive source, besides a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls in English (I recommend the Geza Vermes edition), the readable, comprehensive, and reliable volume by James Vanderkam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This book, more than any single source, truly offers a useful analysis of every aspect of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a fully documented discussion of the “Essene” hypothesis and alternative theories of composition.
So far as the Smithsonian article goes, fortunately Stephan Goranson and other readers have already begun to post various corrections, qualifications, and caveats under “Comments” on the Smithsonian website, for example:
The Hebrew origin of the name which came through Greek spellings into English as “Essenes” is indeed in some of the Qumran scrolls as a self-designation–in scrolls recognized on other grounds as Essene. This Hebrew root has been recognized as the source of “Essenes” by some scholars as early as 1532, and in every century since, in effect, predicting what appeared in some Qumran scrolls, as various scholars today (e.g. James VanderKam of Notre Dame) recognize.
For more details on this source, ‘osey hatorah, observers of torah (which their opponents would not call them), see:http://www.duke.edu/~goranson/Essenes_&_Others.pdf
Goranson, Stephen. “Others and Intra-Jewish Polemic as Reflected in Qumran Texts.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, 2:534-551. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
My own modest contribution to the subject, published with Joe Zias and Stephanie Harter-Laiheugue, is a journal article ” Toilets at Qumran, the Essenes, and the Scrolls, New Anthropological Data and Old Theory” in Revue de Qumran 22:4 (2006): 631-640, in which we pair the references to latrines in the Scrolls with passages in Josephus on the Essenes, showing how the physical site of Qumran (both cemetery and toilets) reflect the practices of the sect.
