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Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?
Scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a fragment of which appears below, say that crucial excavation documents are still being embargoed. Twenty years ago, a similar public battle was waged to get the scrolls themselves published. by Eric Herschthal A more recent quote by the scholar Norman Golb argues that they belonged to Jerusalem Jews escaping a Roman attack. “Taken from Jerusalem libraries and personal collections at a crucial hour and hidden away,” Golb’s quote reads, the scrolls are “the remnants, miraculously recovered, of a hoard of spiritual treasures of the Jewish people.” More daring than past Dead Sea Scrolls 
“It’s not the moment to say which is the most believable or correct,” said the exhibit’s curator, Susan L. Braunstein, with regard to the competing scholarly theories. “We don’t have enough of the archaeological evidence published; there’s no smoking gun.” Braunstein was referring to the underlying problem her exhibit otherwise does not mention. An ongoing controversy over unpublished archaeological documents still holds up a more definitive answer to this arcane academic debate. If it seems like a rerun of the original controversy surrounding the publication of the scrolls 20 years ago, that’s precisely the point critics are trying to make. “I’m sorry to say it’s true,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeological Review. “If you dig and don’t publish, it’s destruction.” Shanks led the campaign to get the Dead Sea Scrolls published in their entirety over two decades ago. Until then, the scrolls were kept in the hands of a close-knit group of scholars affiliated with de Vaux, a French Dominican priest and archaeologist at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. But de Vaux’s field notes from his excavations at the Qumran site, near where the scrolls were found, in the 1950s, remain unpublished. In an odd twist, it’s these papers that scholars — who mostly defend newer variants of de Vaux’s increasingly challenged Essene-sect hypothesis — argue might vindicate their ideas. “What you have is the same exact thing as [the controversy that surrounded the publication of] the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Jodi Magness, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll archaeologist who defends de Vaux’s original Essene theory. “But it’s worse because it’s longer.” The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, but only a quarter of them were published shortly thereafter. It wasn’t until Shanks led his battle in the 1980s that the remaining texts that were finally published in full by the early-1990s. But other critics say that those whose theory is increasingly under challenge are feeding it to the press. They also point to more practical impediments: de Vaux’s field notes were never properly organized nor written according to today’s publishing standards; a lack of money; and political pressure from the Israeli, Jordanian, French and American governments who have said in the past that any publication regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls — found at Qumran, in the West Bank — should wait until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is settled. “All we can do is wait patiently,” said Pnina Shor, head of the conservation department at the Israel Antiquities Authority. The body now safeguards the Dead Sea Scrolls and lends them to international exhibits. The Ecole Biblique, which de Vaux headed until his death in 1971, has in fact published the first two volumes of four that comprise de Vaux’s field notes. Jean-Baptiste Humbert, the successor to de Vaux, said in an interview from Jerusalem that the third volume will be published within the next three months and the fourth and final one “within a year after that.” Still, he said his most ardent pursuers — who largely defend one of several variants of de Vaux’s theory — will not find much evidence in them to support their theories. He increasingly sides with the newer ideas about who might have used the texts. “Everyone inside the Ecole Biblique, we separate from the Father de Vaux interpretation,” he said. “The Dead Sea Scrolls could not have been the library of the people at Qumran.” n On a recent visit to the exhibit, the prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar Lawrence H. Schiffman pointed to the images of baths, plates and clay pots displayed in glass cases — “1,200 dishes? 11 mikvehs?” he said. “I don’t know what they were doing if they weren’t a religious sect.” Schiffman, who will give a lecture about the scrolls on Oct. 30, is a professor at New York University and author of “Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their True Meaning for Judaism and Christianity.” He falls in line with the traditional group of scholars who argue that a religious sect of Jews living at the Qumran site used the texts. De Vaux originally posited that they were the extremely monastic, celibate Essene sect; Schiffman amends this to say they were the Sadducees, a Jewish sect of priests that was less ascetic, married and “lived normal lives.” This might explain other evidence like hairnets and baths, which the exhibit highlights and that suggests women lived at the Qumran site, too. But at least one fact has proven problematic to the traditionalists: not a single fragment from more than 900 scroll scraps has been found at the Qumran site itself. The scrolls were found in four nearby caves, but not the actual settlement at Qumran, just west of the Dead Sea. The archaeologist Magness — a traditionalist who is increasingly a minority in the archaeological community — argues that two known fires in the first century C.E. could have burned any fragments that might have been there. Still, the missing evidence and other archaeological finds have led to newer theories, like the one first expressed by Golb, who teaches at the University of Chicago. Perhaps, as he argued in his book “Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?” the site was a military fortress, and the religious texts found in the surrounding caves came from elsewhere. He points to skeletal wounds from human remains dug up at Qumran that suggest war injuries; a copper scroll found at Qumran that describes Jerusalem treasures; and the extreme asceticism of the Essenes described by the first century writers Josephus, Pliny, and Philo that recent archaeological finds seem to counter. “It’s a matter of evidence,” Golb said. The newer archaeology “is what the sectarian theory can’t explain.” Golb is a text scholar, though, not an archaeologist. And he finds himself in the minority among Dead Sea Scroll scholars who largely back variants of the traditional sectarian theory, like Schiffman’s Sadducees theory. But Golb’s Jerusalem-origin theory is increasingly attracting archaeologists who have excavated the site in recent years. In 2002, Katharina Galor, an archaeologist who teaches at Brown University, organized the first conference dedicated exclusively to the archaeological findings — not the work of scroll scholars, the majority of whom support the traditional sectarian hypothesis — that pushed forward many alternative theories. “The majority of archaeologists today will no longer defend that the scrolls are beyond a doubt from the Qumran site,” Galor said in a recent phone interview. More recently, in 2006, two archaeologists working on the site for the Israel Antiquities Authority, Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, published a report arguing that the Qumran settlement was a pottery factory. Therefore, whoever lived there were not members of a religious sect and would not have used the scrolls, which contain one of the earliest known Hebrew Bibles. Magen and Peleg are quoted on the exhibit walls in text that reads in part: “We maintain that these scrolls had no connections with the site, but were rather brought by refugees who had fled during the First Jewish Revolt against the Romans.” Newer arguments posit that, at the very least, the people who used the scrolls were in contact with the surrounding communities, and therefore were less exclusive, less “sectarian,” and perhaps even secular. While some of the Dead Sea scroll fragments are remnants of the Hebrew Bible, others are simply legal documents and poetry. The exhibit highlights much of the new archaeological evidence that might challenge the original de Vaux hypothesis. But it does not take a side, whereas most Dead Sea Scroll exhibits in the past have — and heavily favored the de Vaux theory. For instance, the first Dead Sea Scroll exhibit in 1993, which began at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., then traveled to the New York Public Library, explicitly took a side in the then nascent scholarly debate over who used the texts. “This exhibit is going to take the point of view there was a sect and that most of the scrolls were connected to that sect,” the NYPL’s exhibit curator, Leonard S. Gold, said at the time. As recently as last year, though, Golb argued that most American exhibits still only focused on the traditionalist theories. In a paper titled “The Qumran-Essene Hypothesis and Recent Strategies Employed In Its Defense,” he criticized a traveling scroll exhibit at science museums in Seattle and Charlotte, N.C., from 2006, which he said neglected the evidence that might favor alternative theories like his. “Consider how absurd it would be if these science centers exclusively championed one side in the current intense debate over the status of Pluto,” he wrote. As for Schiffman, who will in part discuss the controversy at his upcoming lecture, he agreed that not enough popular attention has been given to the differing theories. But he said The Jewish Museum exhibit does a better job. Walking back from an undergraduate class on the scrolls that he teaches at NYU, he said the Israel Antiquities Authority, which lent the museum its scrolls, could do more, however. They should put more pressure on the Ecole Biblique to publish de Vaux’s excavation papers, he said, wondering what they might mean for traditionalists like him. “You see, the joke is that Humbert and his friends [at the Ecole Biblique], that’s why they don’t publish de Vaux’s paper,” he said. “It’s because it’s going to substantiate his original point.” n “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World” runs through Jan. 4 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. (212) 423-3271. |
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