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.

A story is just breaking tonight around the world regarding the text found by Prof. Garfinkel at Elah over a year ago. It has apparently now been deciphered and dated and can be reliably put in the 10th century BCE, the time of the “Monarchy.” This is a major breakthrough in terms of the debate between the “minimalists” who argue the Biblical narratives are post-Exilic and those who maintain that we have texts at least 500 years earlier.

See the Eureka press release with photos here.

I was away in Israel on two separate trips in December, 2009 and want to catch up on quite a few news items, books, and notices that I have not had time to post. Some of this might be old news by now but I wanted to go ahead with a series of posts, for the record, and in case some of you too have been very busy with the holidays and end-of-the-year activities.

The discovery of the 1st century CE ruins of a house in Nazareth on the grounds of the convent near the Church of the Anunciation by the Israel Antiquities Authority excavation directed by Alexandra Yardenna has been up on the IAA Web site for some time but had not yet received much attention. On December 21st a more popular press release was put out with video interviews and photos, and was picked up worldwide–just in time for Christmas. The story in HaAretz is representative of the coverage and has some good pictures and there is a nice MSNBC video report here, plus a Fox News interview with Yardenna here (you have to endure the ads at the beginning). Despite the orchestrated timing, the story is quite important for understanding Jesus and his village background, growing up just outside of Sepphoris, the major urban center of Galilee and capital of Herod Antipas. The discovery also addresses the issue, raised by a few scholars (e.g. Rene Salm and Frank Zindler), as to whether the village of Nazareth even existed in 1st century Roman Galilee. Until now no remains of living areas, preserved to this extent, had been dated solidly dated to the time of Jesus and Josephus does not mention the village in his inventory of Galilean towns.

I was filming in Nazareth in December and was able to see the area firsthand. Both the size and style of the house points to the kind of modest Jewish village typical of the time and fits well with what many of us had postulated regarding Nazareth itself, see Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus (chapter 2) and my own discussion in The Jesus Dynasty (chapter 5). Nazareth was a very small hamlet, perhaps sheltering a few dozen families, and its significance and name might well derive from its inhabitants laying claim to Davidic lineage–the Hebrew word netzer, meaning “branch,” from which the name is taken, is used in Isaiah 11 to refer to the royal house of David. The presence of stone vessels, found in the excavation, also indicate its inhabitants were observant of ritual purity laws of the Torah.

As it turns out, the drawing that the artist Balage Balogh, who was commissioned by Crossan and Reed in Excavating Jesus, and by me for illustrations in The Jesus Dynasty, seems to have captured pretty accurately how such the village might have looked in the time of Jesus. This latest discovery, along with the tombs and agricultural remains, seems to reflect a coherent picture of a rather typical 1st Jewish century village located near a natural spring in the valley surrounded on hills, with Sepphoris just to the northwest. This location also fits our early Christian tradition of Miriam, mother of Jesus, growing up in the outskirts of Sepphoris where her parents Joachim and Anna lived.

One might hope that further archaeological investigation of such a significant site might be undertaken in the future but unfortunately this excavation was a “rescue” operation in a very densely populated area surrounding the Church of the Annunciation. It appears unlikely that much more than this area will be exposed, at least in the near future.

The “Tomb of the Shroud” which was discovered and investigated in 2000 by Shimon Gibson, Boaz Zissu, and me, with a team of our UNC Charlotte students  in the summer of 2000, continues to yield up many scientific secrets about life and death in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. I related the basic story of the exciting discovery of this freshly robbed tomb in the Introduction to my book The Jesus Dynasty in 2006 and Shimon Gibson has recently provided a more thorough analysis in his new book, The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence (HarperOne, 2009). We published a preliminary report in the journal Hadashot Arkheologiyot (vol. 111: 2000, pp. 70-72, figs. 138-139) but a major monograph is planned for 2011 and various aspects of the research are beginning to appear in scientific journals. Although the burial shroud itself continues to receive great public interest (see the latest in today’s The Daily Mail), other aspects of research on this tomb are quite notable. DNA profiles were done on all the bones in the tomb, so far as we know for the first time in an ancient tomb in Jerusalem from the Herodian period. We also have the only substantial example of male hair from the period (lice free, cut reasonably short, and well groomed), and most important, the earliest case of leprosy ever found–in the Holy Land or elsewhere. The significance of the latter discovery is a major contribution to our understanding of ancient disease and has recently been published in the current issue of the Public Library of Science Journal. Yesterday’s Jerusalem Post had a nice feature update on the tomb and its secrets, highlighting the leprosy finding:

Remains in tomb near Old City show first known case of leprosy
Dec. 15, 2009

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich , THE JERUSALEM POST
DNA taken from the shrouded remains of a man discovered in a tomb next to the Old City of Jerusalem shows him to be the first human proven to have suffered from leprosy, according to Hebrew University researchers and North American and British collaborators. They published their findings in the December 16 issue of the PLoS One – the US Public Library of Science journal.

Prof. Mark Spigelman and Prof. Charles Greenblatt of the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at HU in Jerusalem, along with Prof. Carney Matheson and Kim Vernon of Lakehead University in Canada, Prof. Azriel Gorski of New Haven University and Dr. Helen Donoghue of University College London performed the molecular investigation. The archeological excavation was led by Prof. Shimon Gibson, Dr. Boaz Zissu and Prof. James Tabor on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The burial cave, known as the Tomb of the Shroud, is located in the lower Hinnom Valley near the Jaffa Gate and part of a first century CE cemetery known as Akeldama, or “Field of Blood” (mentioned in the Book of Matthew 27:3-8, and Acts 1:19 in the Christian Bible). It is located adjacent to the spot where Judas is said to have committed suicide.

The tomb of the shrouded man is also located next to the tomb of Annas, the high priest (6 CE to 15 CE), who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest who betrayed Jesus to the Romans. It is thus believed that this shrouded man was either a priest or a member of the aristocracy. Gibson suggests that the view from the tomb would have looked directly toward the Second Temple.

The tomb is very unusual because it is clear that this man, whose remains are dated by radiocarbon methods to 1 CE to 50 CE, did not receive a subsequent burial. Secondary burials were common practice at the time, when the bones were removed after a year and placed in an ossuary (a bone box made of stone). In this case, however, the entrance to this part of the tomb was completely sealed with plaster. Spigelman believes this is because the man had suffered from leprosy and died of tuberculosis, as DNA of both diseases was found in his bones.

Historically, disfiguring diseases such as leprosy led to the sufferer being ostracized from their community. However, a number of indications – the location and size of the tomb, the type of textiles used as shroud wrappings, and the clean state of the hair – suggest that the shrouded individual was a fairly affluent member of Jerusalem society, and that tuberculosis and leprosy may have crossed social boundaries at that time.

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, until now assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as textile historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to demonstrate.

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

The excavation also found a clump of the shrouded man’s hair, which had been ritually cut before he was buried. These are both unique discoveries because organic remains are only rarely preserved in the Jerusalem area owing to the soil’s high humidity levels.

Spigelman and Greenblatt state that the origins and development of leprosy are largely obscure. Leprosy in the Jewish Bible may well refer to skin diseases such as psoriasis. The leprosy known to us today was thought to have originated in India and brought over via bacteria to the Near East and Mediterranean countries during the Hellenistic period. The results from the First Century Tomb of the Shroud fill a vital gap in our knowledge of this disease, they said.

Furthermore, the new research has shown that molecular pathology clearly adds a new dimension to the archeological exploration of disease in ancient times and a better understanding of the evolution, geographic distribution and epidemiology of disease and social health in antiquity.

The co-infection of both leprosy and tuberculosis here and in 30 percent of DNA remains in Israel and Europe from the ancient and modern period provided evidence for the postulate that the medieval plague of leprosy was eliminated by an increased level of tuberculosis in Europe as the area urbanized.

The 12th Annual Bible and Archaeology Fest, sponsored by the Biblical Archaeology Society,  will be held in New Orleans, November 20-22, the same weekend that the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) hold their annual meetings. The program looks particularly good this year and is packed with a thick roster of speakers and fascinating topics:

Anson Rainey, Tel Aviv University
Whence Came the Israelites and Their Language?

April DeConick, Rice University
The Magical Judas: Iscariot’s Gospel and Gem

Aren Maeir, Bar Ilan University
Fleshing out the Bible at Philistine Gath: The Interface of Bible and Archaeology

Avraham Faust, Bar Ilan University
The Assyrian Peace: A Reexamination

Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Early Christian Counter Forgeries

Ben Witherington III, Asbury Theological Seminary
Oral Texts and Rhetorical Contexts

Bruce Zuckerman, University of Southern California
Technology and Antiquity: The Latest on Recovering Ancient Texts and Artifacts

Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College
Jesus and the Exorcists: What We Learn From Archaeology

Dan Schowalter, Carthage College
Architecture and Power: Excavations of a Roman Temple Site at Omrit in Northern Israel

Gloria London, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: The Talmud Talks Trash

James Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary
Should the Gospel of John be Used in Jesus Research?

James Tabor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Media Hype, Academic Squabbles, and the James Ossuary: Getting the Facts Straight

Jane Cahill, Tell el-Hammah Archaeological Project
Banquet Q&A Panelist

Jim Hoffmeier, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Exploring David’s Strange Antics after Defeating Goliath

Leonard Greenspoon, Creighton University
Ten Common Misconceptions about Bible Translation: How I Learned to Live with—and even Love—Modern Versions of the Bible

Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Was the Gospel of Thomas Familiar with the Synoptic Gospels?

Mark Wilson, Asia Minor Research Center
In the Footsteps of Paul in Asia Minor: Are there Still Roman Roads to Follow?

Peter Flint, Trinity Western University
The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint

Sandra Richter, Asbury Theological Seminary
The Israelites and the Environment: An Ancient Code Speaks to a Current Crisis

Steve Mason, York University
The Historical Problem of the Essenes

Sean Freyne Trinity College, Dublin
The Archaeology of Roman Galilee: What we have and have not learned about Jesus the Galilean

Yosef Garfinkel, Hebrew University
*Plenary Session Speaker*
Khirbet Qeiyafa: A Fortified City in Judah from the Time of King David

You can get complete information about program times, costs, registration, and hotel accommodations at the BAR Web site:

http://www.bib-arch.org/travel-study/bible-fest-2009.asp

The BAR Bible & Archaeology Fest, the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, and the annual meeting of ASOR each require separate registration. For details on SBL and ASOR see these links:

http://sbl-site.org/meetings/default.aspx

http://www.asor.org/am/index.html