Apikorus

The interview book with Cross ("Conversations with a Biblical Scholar") is delightful, but it is not meant to be an introduction to the DSS. The section on the DSS therein provides a very personal account of Cross's early work at Qumran. Cross did write an introduction himself, entitled The Ancient Library of Qumran, an early book which was revised about 10 years ago. It is an outstanding monograph and presents Cross at his most readable. Particularly fascinating is the section on how the DSS have revolutionized our understanding of the transmission history of the Hebrew Bible.

My favorite introduction is the one by VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. His very recent book with Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is outstanding and replete with beautiful illustrations. Schiffman's Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls is also outstanding, although be forewarned that Schiffman is a bit iconoclastic in his identification of the Qumranians as a breakaway Saduccean sect. A rather important recent book is Jodi Magness' The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

See my reading lists at amazon.com for more recommendations!

spin

Magness is a good physical archaeologist, but when she starts getting out of that, she starts extruding Qumran through a heavy layer of presuppositions. I recommend one gets the archaeological facts, with care, and forget the rest. I haven't got the book, but I will certainly buy it when I have the opportunity. I have read a lot of her articles.

There is no good general book on the scrolls. They are all riddled with institutionalised guesswork. Both VanderKam and Schiffman who I recommended in a previous post are guilty, but provide a lot of information.

(A small example with Schiffman regards the tefillim found at Qumran which he assumes must be sectarian because they don't fit the mold of later Pharisaic tradition, simply erroneous logic. If anything, the Qumran tefillim, because they don't always feature the standard texts, should be taken to reflect a status quo ante rather than a deviant tradition. You cannot retroject Pharisaic Judaism into the scrolls and expect meaningful conclusions.)

The VanderKam/Flint book, I may have at home, but I'm on the other side of the world, working from memory at the moment and will be for months. Is this a collection of essays published by Brill/Eerdman or something else (in which case I don't have it)?


spin

Apikorus

Schiffman's scholarship is more dispassionate than one might a priori suspect, given his Orthodox Jewish confessional stance. But he does sometimes fall into the trap of retrojecting Rabbinic Judaism into the late 2nd Temple world. A particularly stark example of this is his early book, "Who Was a Jew?". Compare to the highly nuanced treatment by Shaye Cohen, in "The Beginnings of Jewishness".

There is a two volume set by VanderKam and Flint published by Brill, entitled "The Dead Sea Scrolls after 50 Years" (a collection of articles). The book I referred to is a popular one entitled "The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls". VanderKam is in my estimation a judicious scholar. It is impossible to completely avoid guesswork when writing about the scrolls.

spin

I've complained about a number of his off the wall ideas, though at the same time he is often as you describe him, so I do advocate his work with certain provisos.

OK, thanks. I know this work now that you describe it and I don't have it, though I've been through some of the essays. It contains a great amount of very useful information, if you can extract it. It also contains a lot of conjectural crap, when the scholars stop doing what they are good at and push their favourite silliness.

You're basically right about VanderKam except for his excessive crappiness in his DSSToday. This is a very simple introductory work, which is so lightweight it appears mainly to be a long string of predigested views with a relatively low fact ratio.


spin

Apikorus

I disagree. I think that VanderKam's DSST is an excellent introduction. It is just that though - an introduction. The recent book by Davies et al. ("The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls") also is quite nice, and with plenty of beautiful figures and photos.

I think good history writing - especially ancient history - requires a fair amount of conjecture. The most judicious scholars try to separate fact from fancy as best they can, and some will go so far as to pursue several distinct lines of reconstruction. I think that sometimes it is more useful to identify the important questions and proffer a variety of speculations than it is to attempt a definitive overarching view.

spin

He's hopeless when he deals with Schiffman and he spends a lot of time trying. He believes the Essene crap and cannot justify it. He doesn't understand Pliny. His is a general book that has almost no substance.

Phil Davies?

You can imagine that I think you're right off the track. Good history writing involves straying not further than a first hypothesis based purely on primary evidence. History is about reclaiming past events, not conjecturing about them. If you look at what has happened in most fields of ancient historical research, scholars have diversified their data reliance to use all sorts of other inputs to get at what happened. People are looking at economics, anthropology, biology and various other hard and soft sciences, to reduce the conjecture content and get closer to what happened. The quality of evidence has generally improved, though not in biblical "history" writing. (It's still filtering facts through biblical interpretation.)

One starts by asking good questions and attempts to deal with them. Conjecture gets crammed into footnotes or the epilogue.


spin

Celsus

This thread has been split from The Whitewashing of John Allegro

Joel

Apikorus

No, I think that more speculation is useful in writing about ancient history. Certainly I am enthusiastic over the advent of new analytical techniques being applied in "biblical archaeology" and as a scientist myself, I prefer a more scientific approach. But numerous scenarios can and should be explored. For example, Baruch Halpern has argued that there may have been an authentic Egyptian proto-Israelite group - one which merged with the notionally larger and autochthonous Canaanite group that emerged in the Judean highlands around the turn of the Iron Age. There's basically no material evidence which would directly corroborate Halpern's picture, but the fact that many of the early generation Levites in the Torah have Egyptian names (e.g. Moshe, Pinchas, Hophni, Miriam, Merare), the fact that they are an special tribe (hereditary priests, with no land allotment), etc. is tantalizing. Could such an Egyptian group have left (escaped?) during the 13th c. BCE, wandered across the Sinai and interacted with Midianite Shasu who worshiped yhw (referred to in Egyptian Bronze Age documents), then arrived in the Judean highlands, insinuating themselves in the nascent proto-Israelite group there? Lots of interesting possibilities here, and as long as a scholar maintains some proper perspective, I think it fascinating to pursue such lines of thought.

The difference between Ancient Israel and e.g. World War II as historical quests is enormous. The paucity of documentary evidence from ancient Israel demands that we engage in conjecture. And even archaeological results have to be interpreted - this is a point that many advocates of "dispassionate scientific analysis" generally fail to grasp (invariably because they've never been on a dig themselves). Kenyon's stratigraphy began a revolution in analytical archaeology, but even with all the new tools and techniques, it is hardly a precise science. Historians rarely read field reports, so even those whose work is informed by the "best" archaeological research are dependent upon what often are shaky interpretations by other experts. If one insisted on applying uniform evidentiary standards to both Ancient Israel and WWII, you'd either have no books at all about the former, or else a torrent of shitty books about the latter.

I think it outrageous to claim that VanderKam "doesn't understand Pliny" and to refer to "the Essene crap". This is just bluster. Golb has done good work in questioning the Essene hypothesis, but the prevailing scholarly view is that the Qumranians were Essenes (if this is what you were taking a swipe at). Indeed this is overwhelmingly the case. VanderKam is a major scholar, and his book is excellent. Considering the great number of abjectly kooky books about the DSS ("The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception" etc.), you'd do well to recommend VanderKam (or Cross, or Schiffman, or Davies, ...) to novices who might be reading this board.

BTW, yes, Philip Davies.

spin

Then you are not attuned to what has happened in the field of ancient historiography. I have already said that good questions are the right starting point. I guess speculation gets to good questions, but to every good question, you'll get a thousand crap ones, and that's a good ratio -- it's probably worse, but worth the effort. However, the speculation is not food for history books. It's what goes on in historians' minds and in informal discussions.

I think we should stick with data before listening to Halpern's speculations, learned though they may be. The data collected by Israeli archaeologists for Iron Age I which has been collated at least by Israel Finkelstein shows that there was no change of population, no influx of people, in the centre of Palestine. And going back there may have been highs and lows but the same picture applies. The physical culture admits no foreign influence whatsoever.

The Hebrew language shows no burden of Egyptian influence as one might expect from a "high" culture to a "low" culture over a period of several hundred years. In fact the Hebrew language shows no sign of having existed before the 9th c. BCE. It just may be that the Gezer "calendar" was written in Hebrew, but then again it may have been written in Phoenician. Besides, Hebrew is closer to Moabite and Edomite than it is Phoenician, though all from the same source. Hebrew, Edomite and Moabite had a source which split from Phoenician before it diversified. This means Hebrew is a relatively late language, so that there could not have been a Hebrew written tradition to preserve anything before David's time and probably after that time, presuming David was a real person. Of course the information could have been written down in Canaanite or Western Akkadian, but that is highly unlikely. There are no artifacts of such a situation, ie the language preserves nothing to indicate it in any form.


The Merneptah stele indicates that there was an entity called Israel (or the Egyptian transliteration of it) in Palestine before 1220 BCE, so we have further evidence of a continuing population already in Palestine. Now Egypt held sway in the area all the way down to around 1150 or later when the Philistines wrestled possession off them. Then the Egyptian regained control a century or so later, so we have a simple system for the transmission of elements from an Egyptian onomasticon.

I think it's a load of empty speculation based on nothing but desire.

Archaeology shows an expansion by the end of Iron Age I and the implications of that need to be developed, but while speculation runs riot as it has for 100 years, the hard work is going to be brushed aside and left for a few to do.

VanderKam doesn't even read what Pliny specifically wrote, despite quoting a translation of N.H.5:73. Pliny is specific: the Essenes flee from the coast of the Dead Sea, ie they don't live near the coast, right where Qumran is. En Gedi is below them, yet Qumran is nowhere near En Gedi. This led to a complex debate in the early 60's in Revue Biblique about the significance of "infra" (literally "below"), in order to make it fit Qumran somehow. Even De Vaux plays both sides of that debate, for if one fails there's still the other. VanderKam plainly doesn't understand Pliny, and if you want I'll get down to the linguistic details.

The leaders of the community outlined in the scrolls were the sons of Zadok, you know the high priestly family, ie a hereditary situation, whereas the Essenes were totally against heredity, the core being celibate. If you search internet you'll find a lot of problems with the Essene connection. The best philological scholars these days don't talk about Essenes. It's just the old school, who belonged to, or sucked up to, the international team. There is even a toilet seat in the Qumran complex noted by Magness, which was totally against Essene toiletry habits. The Essene connection is crap.

Bluster has nothing to do with facts. Your statement is unfortunately bluster, apparently based on authority, ie what your big guys think.

Golb's sort of alright. Schiffman was better with his idea of Sadducee offshoot.

Grin. I'll debate anyone on the subject. Try to get someone who knows his stuff to take the Essene position up.

I once pulled the book apart on internet. When VanderKam is dealing with literary studies he certainly has things to say, especially about angels, Enoch and Jubilees. Staus quo analyses of the scrolls usually end in dismal failure these days.

Yeah, rubbish, like Thiering and to a lesser extent Eisenman's James stuff.

Horses for courses. Though I have recommended DSST as it was easily digestable in conjunction with Reclaiming or Who Wrote the DSS.

Talk about bluster. He did good work categorizing scribal hands, but then he had to come up with his GUT version of palaeographic sequencing.

As you might remember I do recommend him with provisos. There are simply no good books as backgrounders to the scrolls. We are living in the wake of fifty years of error. The best scrolls book are the hardcore philological works which aren't well suited to beginners. These works are hard to be influenced by the methodological errors rampant in the field.

Davies has written a few beginner books that are relatively harmless... the one that comes to mind is his book on the archaeology of Qumran. He did a good study on the Damascus Document (better called by Schiffman the Zadokite Fragments).

I would certainly buy his latest on the scrolls. I've talked with him about various issues and I think he's one of the most open minds in the field today.

The scrolls, by the way, are my field.


spin

Rick Sumner

It was an excellent book, but the entire thing is really more of a personal account than anything--not to say that it's not packed with information--rather that that information is a side dish rather than the main course.

I've read the original edition--wasn't even aware there was a revised one. Any notable changes?

Ah, and here we must disagree. I'm with Evans, Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the best popular introduction to the scrolls I've seen. Contra Evans though, I'd suggest that more informed readers may want to give this one a miss. There's really nothing one familiar with the scrolls is going to learn from it, other than the bonus of getting Shanks' insights on his involvement with the saga of the scrolls, and a little extra information on shadowy figures like Kando. See Evan's review, a caveat I'd raise that Evans doesn't, however, is that Shanks lives in a fantasy world where lay-readers are going to have access to the BAR and BR archives. A lot of times a footnote would have been infinitely more useful had it contained a simple one or two line quote.

Is that the one where he proclaims Scrolls and Christian Origins research to be a "wholesale theft from the Jewish people?"

I must confess, that statement forever jaundiced my view of Schiffman. Fitzmyer observed somewhere or other (apologies for no reference, I can't remember where) that it was Schiffman's stance that largely inspired The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins.

Regards,
Rick