DSS is Qumran "library"?

[RamboPreacher]

I have listened to various lectures and heard this said on more than one occasion that the Des Sea Scrolls is the Essenes/Qumran library.  how "accepted" is this in the scholarly community?  or is it just an easy way to reference them without having to get into a lot of detail information on dating, etc.  let alone the peoples of Qumran and whether the Essenes were a "monastic, scribal" community.  anyway, just a query.  I guess that it has been a long time since I assumed that the Dead sea scrolls (in their entirety), were considered a monolithic library to a particular group of people.

[Admin1]

I am not at all convinced that Qumran was an Essene community or that the DSS were put in the caves by whoever was living at the Qumran Community.

It seems to me that most in the scholarly community do accept it - however I've heard well presented alternatives that seem to be worthy of consideration.

[View from Here]

Beyond the obvious fact that people living at Qumran helped out with the hiding of the scrolls found in the caves, there is no evidence whatsoever connecting the scrolls with the inhabitants of the site itself.  See, e.g., the recent report of the official Israel Antiquities Authority team led by Drs. Magen and Peleg, at http://www.antiquities.org.il/images/shop/jsp/JSP6_Qumran_bw.pdf

[RamboPreacher]

Beyond the obvious fact that people living at Qumran helped out with the hiding of the scrolls found in the caves, there is no evidence whatsoever connecting the scrolls with the inhabitants of the site itself.  See, e.g., the recent report of the official Israel Antiquities Authority team led by Drs. Magen and Peleg, at http://www.antiquities.org.il/images/shop/jsp/JSP6_Qumran_bw.pdf

thanks for the link.  I will check it out.
how is it "obvious" that the people living at Qumran helped out with the hiding of the scrolls? - just wondering?

[View from Here]

Because a portion of the scrolls were buried in jars.  It's hard to imagine people lugging the scrolls from Jerusalem or elsewhere in heavy earthenware when sacks were enough for transportation purposes.  Jars of the same type were found within the Qumran site itself, as well as at other sites in the region such as Jericho.  The logical deduction is that people inhabiting the site supplied those jars to assist in hiding the scrolls.  Any stronger (or more "organic") link than that is speculation.

[RamboPreacher]

Because a portion of the scrolls were buried in jars.  It's hard to imagine people lugging the scrolls from Jerusalem or elsewhere in heavy earthenware when sacks were enough for transportation purposes.  Jars of the same type were found within the Qumran site itself, as well as at other sites in the region such as Jericho.  The logical deduction is that people inhabiting the site supplied those jars to assist in hiding the scrolls.  Any stronger (or more "organic") link than that is speculation.

of course the evidence of the location being where pottery was made, also works in.  maybe "someone" did bring them in bags and other forms of carry, then bought/bartered for the jars for safe keeping in the surrounding areas as they were storing or hiding them for an unknown amount of time.

[View from Here]

If, as seems to be the case, Jewish soldiers inhabited Khirbet Qumran during the revolt (i.e., if it was again used as a fortress during this period), one can also imagine that they were specifically instructed by authorities in Jerusalem to help out with hiding the scrolls.  The Copper Scroll describes many hiding places in the wadis of the region, the caves were thus apparently only part of a larger process.

[GeoffHudson]

As no fragments of scroll were found in Qumran itself, it does seem logical that the scrolls were not used or produced at Qumran before they were deposited in the caves near Qumran.  Thus the idea that they came from Jerusalem libraries seems very plausible.  They may have been the product of different groups, but they must surely have been deposited by one ruling group who treasured them, as the Roman army approached.   

[View from Here]

I tend to agree with you, at least to a large extent, in that the Copper Scroll lists a series of treasures (including "books" and "scrolls") whose hiding was clearly organized by one group of individuals who took what they were doing seriously enough to have a record of it engraved into a sheet of precious metal.  On the other hand, how does this help us understand why, for example, all of the cave 7 scrolls are in Greek? An equally plausible explanation for cave 7 could be that a different "group" also came (or was "sent": formally? informally?) down from the city around the same time, responding to the same necessity but perhaps only more loosely associated with the "ruling" group.  So it seems to me there are some questions we have no way of answering, but the general pattern is clear enough.

[GeoffHudson]

Vermes wrote (page 440 of The Complete DSS in English):

1."Compared to the quantity of Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts, The Greek documents found in two of the Qumran caves, Caves 4 and 7, are remarkably few, and this scarcity is significant in itself as regards the cultural identity of the Qumran Community." 

2."Among the nineteen minute fragments found in Cave 7 - which contained only Greek texts - two have been identified as relics of Ex.28:4-7 (7Q1) and the Letter of Jeremiah verses 43-4 (7Q2).  The former is said to be closer to the traditional Hebrew text than to the LXX.  Both are dated to about 100 BCE."

3."Seventeen out of the nineteen minute Greek papyrus fragments from Cave 7 have been declared by the editors to be unidentifiable."

With regard to 1, Vermes seems to imply that the Greek texts from Cave 7 are barely significant to our understanding of the authors of the Scrolls who he describes as the "Qumran Community" - I believe he is a supporter of the 'Essenes at Qumran' hypothesis.  The idea that the Scrolls found in the caves near Qumran were not 'Essene', but were taken from a Jerusalem
library (or libraries) and deposited  around the time of the first Jewish revolt has enormous implications for the related history. 

[GeoffHudson]

My previous post is possibly one example of why Vermes sees the writer's of the Scrolls as one community. 

Now the community could have been the priests - all 26,000 or so of them.  Their leaders, the High Priests, could have been those who ordered and deposited the Scrolls taken from Jerusalem, in the caves near Qumran.  If Hirschfeld is to be believed, some of the High Priests could have owned and operated Qumran in its different modes.  The Scrolls could have been deposited with the owner's consent, or even at the owner's instruction.  And if the Scrolls had been deposited on the approach of the Roman army in 66 CE, those giving the instructions to hide the Scrolls could have been the likes of Ananias and his son Ananus.

[View from Here]

Of course, there are those who believe that Vermes is no authority on these matters, but is simply a traditional scrolls scholar bent on defending the old Qumran-Essene theory in face of mounting contrary evidence.  See, e.g, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wrote_The_Dead_Sea_Scrolls%3F_(book) :

Power Politics and the Collapse of the Scrolls Monopoly
This chapter discusses Géza Vermes' involvement in the purchase of photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Oxford University under the condition that they only be shown to scholars selected by the official editorial team that controlled access to the scrolls. Golb states that "Vermes could not possibly have avoided knowing of the financial agreement that facilitated the transfer of photographs" (p. 236), and that Vermes' statement of November 8, 1991, "directly contradicted the position taken by him and the [Oxford] Centre in the [London] Times correspondence published three months earlier" (p.237). The chapter also describes how Vermes used the media "to promote his support for the traditional Essene hypothesis," but showed "disdain" for the similar use of the media by Dr. Robert Eisenman to promote a different view (p. 241).

[GeoffHudson]

This sounds just like Mr Charles Gadda talking, and it is of course the kind of tittle- tattle put about to muddy the waters.   While I am thinking of mud, Gadda seems to operate on the principle that if one throws enough of it, some will stick.

Secondly, your response completely avoids the point of my previous post.  I am not concerned whether or not Vermes believes that there were Essenes at Qumran, but I see value in his reasons  and the reasons of others for believing that the writings found in the caves near Qumran were the work of essentially one community - an idea that Golb and others reject without, it would seem, any real answers.  To me it seems that Golb is correct about the Scrolls coming from Jerusalem, and Vermes is correct about them being the product of one community.  And in my view, the community was simply the priests who practised the temple cult of animal sacrifice for sins.

[View from Here]

First of all, thanks for the compliment on me sounding like Charles Gadda.  I think my favorite is Did Christian agenda lead to biased Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit in San Diego? | The News is NowPublic.com, where he collaborates with the sordid B. Ralph to expose fifty years of dirty laundry.  But another good one is Charity fund involved in Dead Sea Scrolls conflict | The News is NowPublic.com, kind of like the icing on the cake.  Great stuff, I'd definitely rather read a new Gadda article than a new issue of BAR any day.

Speaking of mud-throwing, isn't that the basic modus operandi of scrolls research ever since Golb refuted the Qumran-Essene theory? Take BAR itself.  In one issue, they depicted Golb as a little bug on the magazine cover, then in an issue on "60 years with the Dead Sea Scrolls," they didn't even mention him.  Seems to me that Gadda should write something about BAR!

As for your scientific point, again I agree with you up to a point, but I think it's largely conjectural.  There are simply too many contradictions among the doctrines and ideas in the texts.  Let's agree for argument's sake that they were written by many different groups.  The question then becomes whether they were hidden by one group or many.  The Copper Scroll describes a hiding process that is logically attributable to one group (i.e., the group the authored the Copper Scroll).  But one of the caves at Qumran only contains Greek texts.  Can we be sure the "same group" treasured these along with the other texts? It's an intriguing possibility, but I don't see a strong case being made for it.  To me, given the circumstances of the Revolt, it seems more likely that some group went around with sacks gathering scrolls from various libraries, knocking on doors, saying "hey, we're getting scrolls out of the city, we're going to put them in caves, do you have anything you want us to hide"? Or one can even imagine a general pattern of people heading down to the Dead Sea, communicating with others doing the same thing, etc.  It's a slipperly slope, and some point I don't know what use there is in saying this does or does not mean a single group "treasured" all these scrolls.  It seems to me that the more important question is the first one, whether they were authored by one group or by many.  And there, Golb seems to have a crushing case against Vermes and the other Qumran-Essene ideologues.

[GeoffHudson]

Nineteen minute fragments of Greek texts from Cave 7 is hardly a crushing case for Golb's diverse sources against Vermes' single group.   

A deposit before the arrival of the Roman army could have been carried out in an orderly fashion, in complete secrecy with none of your silly "knocking on doors" advertising to all an sundry that most of Jerusalem's secret documents were about to be moved to a safe place.   

The single group who deposited the Scrolls more than likely belonged to the same group as the writers of the Scrolls.  These were, at the time of the deposit, I suggest, the messianic priests led by Ananias and his son Ananus, the destroyer of James.