spin

That doesn't change the fact that at least 30 copies of Deuteronomy were found amongst the other Qumran texts and that the settlement at Qumran wouldn't support a population of over about 30, so you had at least one text per inhabitant!

Yeah, this is the same silly approach that others try. Just because someone is religious doesn't mean that you can change the demographics. Besides you assume your conclusion with the religious community stuff.

What do Essenes have to do with this affair other than that it's a popular though still unfounded assumption?

The scrolls, as I said, talk of the community leaders as the sons of Zadoq, the family of the high priest, though the Essenes were excluded from the temple.

Qumran appeared on the Dead Sea coast along with a number of other settlements built at the hands of the Hasmoneans in order to strengthen their hold on the Dead Sea and creative defences against the Nabataeans. Qumran has been misread by mainly non-archaeologists who have a fulfillment fantasy about Essenes at Qumran. It certainly was no "monastery" in origin. It probably could support a continuous settlement at first, relying on simple rainwater run-off for seasonal occupation of the site. The site was extensively used for pottery production. There is not a spot of evidence from the site to suggest that it was a religious settlement. To go through the poor showing of evidence would take up too much space...

Zounds, Pere de Vaux's "monastic" label crops up in unusual places! Just because he was a Franciscan, doesn't mean that you have to view Qumran as a monastery.

You shouldn't retroject modern situations into the past.

Naughty, going to EB.

You'll note that the writer is using a wide definition of DSS that includes any text found in antiquity, and not just near the Dead Sea, for Wadi ed-Daliyeh is not near the Dead Sea at all. By running all the different datings from the different sites together, EB has made one confusing article.


spin

rlogan

I guess the Essenes were big on Deuteronomy.

I mean, what if you had to go potty and everyone else was reading Deuteronomy at the same time?

Joan of Bark

Christians are living proof of the inconsistency of the Bible. There are thousands of Christian denominations in the world, all of them claiming to follow the Bible, and no two of them agreeing on exactly what it says.

Loomis

Nope. <edit>

The DSS helped prove that Deuteronomy 32:8 was tampered with. The consensus among secular bible scholars is that the guy who wrote it actually believed that El and Yahweh were two different gods.

The implications are profound:

God is actually a combination of two earlier gods!

Loomis

What about a two thousand year old turd?

If it still smells fresh then should we bow down to it? :devil1:

After all - a two thousand year old turd that still smells fresh must be well preserved.

Right?

Sauron

Or you had a repository or central library of sorts for safekeeping or the use of multiple communities. There might have been 100 copies of other books. By your own admission they were imported to the region. Given that, there is no mandatory relationship between (a) how many people lived there and (b) how many scrolls were stored there. The reality is that we just don't know, because the site has mixed provenance and we know that plundering occurred.

Unfortunately, it does mean that - because it was the religious orders who were more likely to be able to read and write.

You try to fall back on demographics, but you still apparently don't realize a basic fact about demographics: that a generalized statistic for an entire population sample may not hold true for a well-defined sub-segment. That is why even though the overall lifespan of all men is less than that of all women by several years, once you factor out tobacco and alcohol use (more prevalent in men than women), the longevity gap between the genders actually closes to within about six months.

By segmenting out the non-smoking, non-alcohol abusing portion of all males, you get a different demographic result than you would otherwise get, by just relying on the overall demographic mortality statistic.

Flatly incorrect. You tried to use generalized statistics on literacy as an argument against the Essenes being a religious community; I merely pointed out that you misused the statistic and don't understand demographic principles. Even the alternative viewpoint about the Essenes admits that they lived at the site - even if it disagrees with what kind of livelihood they were involved in.

The bulk of modern scholarship says that they lived at the site. If you disagree, feel free to present your evidence and publish a paper.

Which poses no problem for anything that modern scholarship has said about the Essenes maintaining a religious community at Qumran. Especially if the Essenes disapproved of the Judaean priesthood and had set up a rival priesthood - or if the scrolls were describing historical events that happened 50 or 100 years prior to being written down.

I'm aware of Magen and Peleg's viewpoint. Mostly because the Dead Sea Scrolls are on exhibit right now here in Seattle, even though I haven't gotten around to viewing them yet. However, theirs is still a minority position, certainly not deserving of the heavy-handed dismissal that you're exhibiting towards the current archaeological consensus.

Maybe you can address the presence of inkwells and writing utensils.

Why not? You object to this, but fail to explain why the example is wrong. As far as I can see, it's a perfectly acceptable way of explaining how articles in a building could be older than the building itself.

No, just a good way to get to a general summary of the state of modern archaeology on the topic.

Well, no. The writer is describing scrolls found in the Judaean desert area. The problem then, is not with the writer in Britannica, but in whatever media reporter decades ago who originally coined the catch-all phrase of "Dead Sea Scrolls". Probably in an attempt to create some kind of populist shorthand to describe the discoveries. Note the comment:

The first manuscripts, accidentally discovered in 1947 by a shepherd boy in a cave at Khirbat Qumrān on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, were almost immediately labeled Dead Sea Scrolls. Later (especially from the 1950s to the mid-1960s) finds in neighbouring areas were similarly designated.

Which squares up nicely with:

Between 1949 and 1956, in what became a race between the Bedouin and the archaeologists, ten additional caves were found in the hills around Qumran, caves that yielded several more scrolls, as well as thousands of fragments of scrolls: the remnants of approximately 800 manuscripts dating from approximately 200 B.C.E. to 68 C.E.

Tangent

Worst, there are only shiny pages left in your copy!

maddog

I think I can see an equivocation here, where one meaning of a word is shifted to another. In this context, "the text is trustworthy" is supposed to mean that "the copy I have has been copied accurately" whereas, if it is assented to, "yes, the text is trustworthy," then the meaning is likely to shift to "aha! see? the text is trustworthy, i.e., what it says, its substance can be trusted [i.e., to be true]." I'd prefer if the language "the text is trustworthy" not be used, to avoid the possible equivocation.

#1496

Sven

Has mdd344 given up? Or is he just busy reading up on the prophecy threads?

hatsoff

Even if he's just taking a long break, I'd still attribute that to his utter failure to defend his false assertions.

Why can't Christians educate themselves when it comes to the Bible and Church history? Is it so absolutely necessary to abandon common sense after embracing religion?