XKV8R

wha???

the 'sectarian' mss are attempting to establish an alternative to the temple priesthood. it makes sense that folks bashing the temple priesthood are living in a crappy ex-fort in the desert. what doesn't make sense is arguing that a bunch of folks from jerusalem (and its temple) attempted to preserve their libraries of self-critical docs, but forgot to hide the good ones.

that's like saying, 'i love evangelical jesus and hate scientology. oh no, my house is on fire. quick, grab all of my multiple copies of dianetics and hide them so they'll be safe. maybe grab some bibles. but let my thomas kinkade paintings, my charles dobson, max lucados, lee strobels, and my joel osteen books all burn. now go out to someplace remote we've never been, like palm springs, and break into someone's house, take some of their tupperware (they won't mind), and hide the dianetics in a bunch of caves that we can somehow know about, but no one else can find for 2000 years....

:huh:

ok. archaeology.

XKV8R

what? i'm eliminating evidence? i'm not the one saying that we should interpret the site without the scrolls. they are objects. they should be dealt with as such. some scholars interpret the entire site as sectarian establishment from the beginning because they are interpreting the site through the lens of the scrolls (=wrong). other scholars simply dismiss the scrolls first, never mention them, or essentially call them intrusive, and then interpret the site (=also wrong). this is why we get a chorus of folks saying 'monks' (=wrong), worship the sun (=lol wrong), jesus' brother's place (=wrong, but sell lots of books) and a varied group of alternative interpretations saying villa rustica (=wrong), fortified farm (=wrong wrong), pottery barn (=better, but wrong), seaside trading post (=way wrong), and always a fortress (=ridiculous wrong).

how about you start with what you have. then publish it (which still hasn't been done!!! who woulda thunk the dss would be published before the archaeological reports???). then you get some different opinions on the interpretation. then you analyze them. then you go to conferences and write papers (maybe go on iidb =free plug) and debate it. why analyze the site based upon one artifact (the dss) or after dismissing artifacts (like many do)???

essene, no, but sectarian, yes. question is, which? i just don't feel like these guys were hodgepodge jews with the miqva'ot in 138 and 68 (and that's a minimum interpretation of the pools).

agreed. which is why no one believes in god. oh wait....

lol. deal.

agreed. all of the evidence in context.

as long as it's prigat and it's tut-banana and it's cold. or some glida. (oh, and magen and peleg did just that. the trash, not the glida.)

lol. ya, that one. and 'flow basin a' while we're at it.

and the bar-kokhba scrolls? did they come from jerusalem? or were they placed in caves by folks familiar with them, perhaps people living out there? if you're looking for a hiding place, why stop at qumran when there's masada? at least we have evidence of hiding docs (and people) there....

if people were living at and expanding the site from 140 bce to 70 ce, i hope there are more than a few scribal hands. in fact, there had better be lots. and, for the sake of argument, let's say that the whole essene initiation process is genuine (again, for argument). wouldn't scrolls be part of the wealth that is contributed to the communal pot?? it explains the diversity (of age, thought, and scribal hands) and placement of the scrolls. why can't that be at least one valid explanation?

like masada, where there is specific evidence of this.

thank you. i pause to genuinely thank you for this. at least there are some of us left who still admit we may be wrong or there may be other answers. the fact that you do not blindly insist on your personal interpretation and only your interpretation, is the way the academy should work. the truth is, we don't know for sure. in all seriousness, this is refreshing.

ok, enough kissy face. back to debating.

they already relate to the site. they were found in the context of the site (especially caves 7-9 behind the southern long wall). lots of the things described in the dss fit the site. but i agree, they have been overused as lenses to interpret the archaeological remains. really. waaay too much. an altar? sacrificial bones in jars? really? a 'last supper' table?

XKV8R

question: was the northwest tower originally freestanding at one point? thoughts?

andrewcriddle

IF one accepts Magness' reconstruction (with the elimination of phase Ia) then the northwest tower was originally part of a larger structure and not freestanding.

IMHO Magness is right here, because her reconstruction eliminates the implausible decades long abandonment between phase Ib and phase II .

Andrew Criddle

spin

You didn't consider context I see. And what's this about an alternative calendar? Ezekiel plainly uses the same calendar. In fact where books of the Hebrew bible mention calendars, most of them indicate dates which reflect the 364-day calendar, with few exceptions (2 Chr & Esther and there are vestiges of another calendar in Kings).

The problem is understanding how they are part of the context.

Shifting perspectives is not a useful approach. There is no need to deal with the butterfly effect regarding how the scrolls got to Qumran. But...

And need to be understood for what they are before contaminating any overview with false assumptions. There have been at least three competing views as to what the scrolls are:

1. texts produced at Qumran by a sect -- the old scribal school folly (falsified by the number of scribal hands);
2. texts brought to Qumran (gradually?) for the use of a sectarian community living there; and
3. texts brought to Qumran from Jerusalem to be hidden and not directly related to the lives of the people living at Qumran at the time of hiding.

The last two are possible, are they not? If the last one is correct, then reading the scrolls into the immediate context of the settlement can only lead to blunder. If the second is correct, then there may be a good case for using the scrolls. But how do you decide? It is my understanding given our current state of knowledge you can't. So what do you do, take the chance? Let's toss a coin. :banghead:


spin

spin

OK, what's right here with the scrolls? What do you suggest is the right way when you don't know how they are related to the site?

Do you note that villa rustica, fortified farm, pottery barn and trading post are all efforts in the same direction? -- getting to understand the site from the archaeological evidence, which clearly indicates the production of pottery and glass...

Didn't help when de Vaux died. The field notes are insightful.

Which artifacts are being dismissed now and by whom?

Archaeologists tend to form theories as they go and the theories get incorporated in the reports, yet most people seem to be able to live with that, in that they can usually read around the theory for the evidence.

I'm not sure that this is a correct approach. The average artisan or peasant, you think was a sectarian of some sort? Did people living in your average village in Judea 2000 years ago feel that they were in one of the Josephan sects? Did the 'am ha-aretz really do more than follow the religion of their ancestors the best they could?

Didn't your local village have mikva'ot? Besides both L.138 and L.68 were later in the evolution of the site. L.68 was obviously after the water system was extended first to L.56, then on to the south-east (two separate stages). L.138 was constructed after L.132 stopped being used as a catchment basin.

Flow basin, schmo basin. That was only needed before the aqueduct and the dam, when it would have caught run-off rain water for the brief but torrential time it came, then the basin brought it into the water channel which took it to be stored. Probably after a few days it was empty. When the dam was built, the catchment basin was no longer needed, hence the channeling of the water directly and skirting past what was the basin in L.132.

Poor comparison. Vast difference in scale. Vast difference in purpose.

The idea would be to hide them, not take them on a long march. Do you think the people who hid texts in caves around Jericho should have taken them to Masada as well? Did the books in the copper scroll get hidden at Masada? And hiding at Masada? In nooks in a synagogue? Naaa.

Stretching it back to 140 BCE, huh? Qumran didn't exist then and probably didn't for another fifty years....

You must be joking. If a scribe had a writing life of say forty years, you'd expect him to have copied thousands of scrolls. How many hands are repeated in the DSS? Very f***ing few. There are so many hands used that they simply could not have been produced in a scribal school at Qumran. Such a scenario makes nonsense of the facts. Whoever thought of that one must have been on dumb-pills for the day.

So you are here opting for a variation on the second scenario of the three I proposed in my previous post.

You need to explain yourself regarding Masada, as you seem to have a different understanding than I do about the evidence. For me there weren't many scrolls found at Masada, and they were found in positions such as safe places around the synagogue, where you'd expect scrolls to be stored.

(7-9 have no apparent relation to the deposit. They were living caves and almost no texts were found in them -- you might expect someone personally had a text or two. No mats nor pottery were found in cave 5 and IIRC cave 4 was not too different. Both these caves seem to have been used only to hide texts.)

What can you expect from Jewish texts regarding Jewish people?

Writing tables? Ooops. :Cheeky:


spin

andrewcriddle

The scrolls were found in several different caves probably deposited there at substantially different times.

In order for the scrolls to be irrelevant for understanding the Qumran settlement all the substantial manuscript deposits have to be explained under option 3 which IMHO is unlikely.

(IMVHO the deposits in cave 1 are likely to be more or less directly associated with the Qumran settlement. The cave 4 manuscripts are more doubtful.)

Andrew Criddle

Amaleq13

Isn't spin's point that they are not like the other objects mentioned in that they are mobile rather than permanent structures?

That seems to me to be a rather relevant difference.

XKV8R

and i don't. magness is the only one i know of who tries to eliminate ia. she has to argue away the sociopolitical climate, the pottery, and the coins.

magness sees that de vaux attributed no coins to his period ia (135–104 BCE), yet discovered over one hundred and forty coins dating to the reign of jannaeus, evidence magness uses to argue for a later initial phase dating than de vaux.

however, silver seleucid coins were discovered dating to the reigns of demetrius ii (145–139 bce) and antiochus VII (139/8–129 bce), both of whom predate the reign of john hyrcanus. this leaves a gap in the numismatic record between the reigns of simon maccabaeus (142-134 bce) and alexander jannaeus (103-76 BCE), perhaps indicating an occupational gap in the settlement.

methinks a few coins predating hyrcanus could speak to a small and very brief occupation at the site (like a fort). while de vaux agrees that silver coins remained in circulation for a much longer period of time than bronzes, the five bronze coins discovered at qumran dating to antiochus iii and antiochus iv (175-164 BCE) are better examples of coins that stayed in circulation for an extended period of time (we know there's no qumran way back then). the coins dating to ~130 bce, seem to support actual occupation, especially since it fits the sociopolitical context and what de vaux understood to be the pottery evidence.

de vaux also points out that seleucid currency was not replaced by jewish currency in palestine until the reign of hyrcanus (135-104 BCE) and hyrcanus only began minting coins at a late stage in his reign (~110 BCE) the fact that coins of hyrcanus are rare to begin with should temper the fact that only one coin of hyrcanus was discovered at qumran.

i understand magness' terminus post quem reasoning for dismissing the coins that date to before the reign of jannaeus. but magness proposes eliminating de vaux’s period ia altogether, and i think this is too much. she then has to argue that the pottery attributed to period ia is so similar to ib, that they all must be the same. and while the influx of jannaeus coins may signify a marked increase in population or commercial activity at qumran, jannaeus was also know to mint more coins than his hasmonean predecessors, accounting for at least part of the increase.

politically and historically, a dating of the original structure to the mid-hasmonean period fits the numismatic record, the historical, the scrolls, etc. but in order to do this, one needs to accept a fort or some other sort of reuse/reoccupation model for the site. magness argues the site is originally constructed by the essenes for their purposes, so she down dates it to the late hasmonean period, and in some places i've read, the early roman (like 60 bce). i don't agree.

these are two different issues. methinks she's right about this. just wrong about eliminating ia.

XKV8R

so are coins.