Since about noon yesterday my mailbox has been crammed with friends, associates, students, and colleagues asking if I had seen the latest breaking story on the Dead Sea Scrolls published by Time magazine and posted on their Web site. Until I looked I assumed this must be Time’s follow-up on the bizarre saga of Raphael Golb, son of noted Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, Norman Golb, that I and about fifty other bibliobloggers had commented on last week.
I could not have been more mistaken. The Time story, titled “Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls ‘Authors’ Never Existed,” was indeed bizarre, but it had nothing to do with the alleged criminal activities of Mr. Golb. Rather, it was a strange piece, authored by Tim McGirk, reporting on the theories of Hebrew University professor Rachel Elior regarding the non-existence of the “Essenes.” This is all fine and good, and certainly Prof. Elior deserves and has received a hearing for her ideas. The problem is, according to McGirk, “Elior’s theory has landed like a bombshell in the cloistered world of biblical scholarship,” and indeed “has shaken the bedrock of biblical scholarship.” This is so ridiculous as to be laughable, but equally surprising, since one has come to expect the high quality of reporting on religion and the Bible in Time that one associates with the work of veteran religion editor David Van Biema.
It would be interesting to know what “cloistered world” Mr. McGirk imagines exists among Dead Sea Scroll scholars and why he thinks Elior’s ideas would be any kind of bedrock-shattering bombshell? At the end of the interview Prof. Elior braces herself for the attacks of her “opponents” whom she charges have not even read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I have no idea whom she has in mind, or what group of Dead Sea Scroll scholars she imagines out there who don’t even read the original texts they work on! One might expect something like this from the National Enquirer or Star Magazine, but certainly not from Time.
The issue itself is a fascinating one, and has been discussed in the most meticulous detail, with all viewpoints extensively aired and critiqued by those in the field. Two dominant issues have emerged:
1. Did the group that composed the sectarian documents collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls live at the ancient excavated settlement we know as Qumran?
2. Is the group that composed the sectarian documents collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls named or otherwise known to us in other textual sources from the late 2nd Temple period?
By far the majority of scholars who work on the scrolls–and believe it or not, they have actually read them, are convinced that the Jewish group known and otherwise described as the “Essenes,” by classical authors Josephus, Pliny the Elder, and Philo, is to be identified with the sectarian authors of the Scrolls, and that this group lived at Qumran. The reasons for this two-fold identification are abundant and the arguments are tried and tested. I would refer readers to two very outstanding summaries:
James Vanderkam and Peter Flint, in The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Harper, 2002), chapter 10, titled “Identifying the Group Associated with Qumran,” pp. 239-254.
James H. Charlesworth, ed, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Anchor/Doubleday, 1992), “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus,” pp. 1-74.
Making this connection between how the Essenes are described ideally by authors such as Josephus, and the group’s self-description in the Scrolls, in no way implies any kind of perfect or absolute correspondence. Josephus also describes the Pharisees and Sadducees, shaping his language to accommodate his Roman readers who were familiar with Stoics and Epicureans. Scholars have long recognized that Josephus puts the Essenes into a kind of Pythagorian garb, for apologetic purposes. But such stylistic descriptive genres and conventions have nothing to do with whether Jewish groups such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, or Essenes, really existed.
The question is not whether the “Essenes” wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls but whether the sectarian group reflected in the scrolls corresponds to the group called “Essenes,” in the tendentious and idealistic literary descriptions of Josephus, Pliny, and Philo. In other words, if one wants to learn about the group who wrote the scrolls, one goes to the scrolls themselves. But that is not to say that the classical descriptions have no comparative value. In fact, when one looks at the parallels, summarized in the materials cited above by Vanderkam and Charlesworth, the similarities so far outweigh the differences that one would be hard pressed to imagine Josephus, who did not have the Scrolls, coming up with such a “make-believe” group.
It is also noteworthy that various aspects of the “material” evidence from the Qumran settlement, for example, the all male cemetery, the latrines located to the northwest of the “camp,” evidence of sacred meals, and the ritual pools leading into the segregated settlement, correspond to elements found in both the Scrolls as well as the literary descriptions of the Essenes.
So far as the language the group that wrote the Scrolls used to describe itself, whether New Covenanters, the Yachad, or the Sons of Light, a good case can be made that “Essenes” is actually a Greek term for the Hebrew word “Ossim,” that is, “Doers,” namely the “Doers of the Torah.” This seems to be a phrase known to Paul, as well as the related phrase “works of the Torah,” in Romans 2 and Galatians 3.
So all things considered the Time article is most unfortunate in that it implies, as so many sensational media stories dealing with the Bible and archeology do, that the “experts” are somehow either blinded by presuppositions or too invested in some status quo. In fact, so far as free and open exchange and debate of every possible viewpoint I would say the field of Dead Sea Scroll studies probably wins a prize.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here is the Time article in full:
Monday, Mar. 16, 2009
Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls ‘Authors’ Never Existed
By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem
Biblical scholars have long argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the work of an ascetic and celibate Jewish community known as the Essenes, which flourished in the 1st century A.D. in the scorching desert canyons near the Dead Sea. Now a prominent Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, disputes that the Essenes ever existed at all — a claim that has shaken the bedrock of biblical scholarship.
Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus and that his faulty reporting was passed on as fact throughout the centuries. As Elior explains, the Essenes make no mention of themselves in the 900 scrolls found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947 in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea. “Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls,” Elior tells TIME. “But they didn’t exist. This is legend on a legend.”
Elior contends that Josephus, a former Jewish priest who wrote his history while being held captive in Rome, “wanted to explain to the Romans that the Jews weren’t all losers and traitors, that there were many exceptional Jews of religious devotion and heroism. You might say it was the first rebuttal to anti-Semitic literature.” She adds, “He was probably inspired by the Spartans. For the Romans, the Spartans were the highest ideal of human behavior, and Josephus wanted to portray Jews who were like the Spartans in their ideals and high virtue.”
Early descriptions of the Essenes by Greek and Roman historians has them numbering in the thousands, living communally (“The first kibbutz,” jokes Elior) and forsaking sex — which goes against the Judaic exhortation to “go forth and multiply.” Says Elior: “It doesn’t make sense that you have thousands of people living against the Jewish law and there’s no mention of them in any of the Jewish texts and sources of that period.”
So who were the real authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Elior theorizes that the Essenes were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by intriguing Greek rulers in 2nd century B.C. When they left, they took the source of their wisdom — their scrolls — with them. “In Qumran, the remnants of a huge library were found,” Elior says, with some of the early Hebrew texts dating back to the 2nd century B.C. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known version of the Old Testament dated back to the 9th century A.D. “The scrolls attest to a biblical priestly heritage,” says Elior, who speculates that the scrolls were hidden in Qumran for safekeeping.
Elior’s theory has landed like a bombshell in the cloistered world of biblical scholarship. James Charlesworth, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls project at Princeton Theological Seminary and an expert on Josephus, says it is not unusual that the word Essenes does not appear in the scrolls. “It’s a foreign label,” he tells TIME. “When they refer to themselves, it’s as ‘men of holiness’ or ’sons of light.’ ” Charlesworth contends that at least eight scholars in antiquity refer to the Essenes. One proof of Essene authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he says, is the large number of inkpots found by archaeologists at Qumran.
But Elior claims says these ancient historians, namely Philo and Pliny the Elder, either borrowed from each other or retailed second-hand stories as fact. “Pliny the Elder describes the Essenes as ‘choosing the company of date palms’ beside the Dead Sea. We know Pliny was a great reader, but he probably never visited Israel,” she says.
Elior is braced for more criticism of her theory. “Usually my opponents have only read Josephus and the other classical references to the Essenes,” she says. “They should read the Dead Sea Scrolls — all 39 volumes. The proof is there.”
I knew Prof. Smith quite well as he so graciously helped me with my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul (Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise 1989) at Chicago back in the 1970s, just when all the controversies broke over first his Harvard volume, and the popular Harper volume Jesus the Magician to follow. His devotion to my project gained him nothing, and he was at Columbia, and had nothing officially to do with Chicago or my committee (I wrote under Jonathan Z. Smith), but he loved ideas and recognized in my fledgling attempts to enter the field of “Jewish magic,” a beginning scholar who wanted to produce something of quality. He spent hours heavily annotating my dissertation chapters and wrote me these wonderful handwritten notes with citations and suggestions that I treasure to this day. I will never forget when a photo-copy of the manuscript of Sefer HaRazim arrived in the mail, prior to it being available in print, compliments of Prof. Smith. He would not even let me pay him for the copy costs or postage. Over the next twenty years we often spent time together at the annual meetings and on other occasions and he came to visit us when I was teaching at William and Mary. He was a regular participant and contributor to our SBL seminar over the years dealing with Greco-Roman idea of the “Divine and the Human.” I think I can say I knew him fairly well, both professionally and personally. Those of us who did know him find these charges of mendacious duplicity and forgery inconceivable and insulting to the kind of scholar and human being that Smith was.
