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[Bart]

I am unable to get the complete article, can anyone help?

Archaeologists Challenge Link Between Dead Sea Scrolls and Ancient Sect

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD - NY Times

Published: August 15, 2006

Two archaeologists are raising new doubts about the link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and an ancient settlement known as Qumran.

[Solomon]

This has been a life-long interest of mine, so it's great for me that you raised this here, Bart 

The article you mention is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/science/15scroll.html

But two Israeli archaeologists who have excavated the site on and off for more than 10 years now assert that Qumran had nothing to do with the Essenes or a monastery or the scrolls. It had been a pottery factory.

The archaeologists, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported in a book and a related magazine article that their extensive excavations turned up pottery kilns, whole vessels, production rejects and thousands of clay fragments. Derelict water reservoirs held thick deposits of fine potters? clay.

Dr. Magen and Dr. Peleg said that, indeed, the elaborate water system at Qumran appeared to be designed to bring the clay-laced water into the site for the purposes of the pottery industry. No other site in the region has been found to have such a water system.

By the time the Romans destroyed Qumran in A.D. 68 in the Jewish revolt, the archaeologists concluded, the settlement had been a center of the pottery industry for at least a century. Before that, the site apparently was an outpost in a chain of fortresses along the Israelites? eastern frontier.

?The association between Qumran, the caves and the scrolls is, thus, a hypothesis lacking any factual archaeological basis,? Dr. Magen said in an article in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

He and Dr. Peleg wrote a more detailed report of their research in ?The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates,? published this year. The book was edited by Katharina Galor of Brown, Jean-Baptiste Humbert of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, and J?rgen Zangenberg of the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

This is not the first time that this specific claim has been made. Though interesting in itself, whether or not this interpretation is correct does not necessarily impinge on the scrolls themselves, and the debate on their interpretations. There is one possible, direct link, though:

Yizhak Magen the Israel Antiquities Authority says that the pots used to store the scrolls may have been produced at Qumran.

I think that on this, Magen is probably correct. DNA analysis of the scrolls shows them to consist of skins from local flocks of goat, sheep and ibex. My view of Qumran is that it operated much like a medieval European monastery - a production centre with the objective of fulfilling its own needs, parchment and pottery included. The argument that it may have made pots, if proven, does not conflict with that.

[Bart]

Excellent Solomon, thank you so much for this.  I agree, Qumran could well have been both a pottery 'factory' and a 'monastic scriptoium'. Is there any precedence for a European style monestary in the Middle -East around this time that you are aware of ?

[Solomon]

As in 'Christian'? No: I don't accept the existence of Christianity much before ca 180 CE, by which time Qumran occupation had ended.

As to it being like a monastery, I thought that was my own - liberal - interpretation of the archaeological evidence. However, opening Eisenman's The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians, I see that he describes it thus, also. (BTW I bow to Eisenman in all matters Dead Sea Scrolls.) He writes:

Qumran can almost certainly be considered a training center for the Jerusalem Priesthood. As the "monastery" is probably very near the site where Judas Maccabee and his nine "Zaddikim" hid in "caves" (accepting the testimony of 2 Macc), one cannot resist the admittedly speculative suggestion that it might have been "founded" by John Hyrcanus to commerorate his return to the "Sadducee" Party of his uncle, much as his father had embellished the family's ancestral tombs at Modein before him.

[Bart]

Scroll Origins Debated

By John Noble Wilford THE NEW YORK TIMES

New archaeological evidence is raising more questions about the conventional interpretation linking the desolate ruins of an ancient settlement known as Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in nearby caves in one of the sensational discoveries of the last century.

After early excavations at the site, on a promontory above the western shore of the Dead Sea, scholars concluded that members of a strict Jewish sect, the Essenes, had lived there in a monastery and presumably wrote the scrolls in the first centuries B.C. and A.D.

Many of the texts describe religious practices and doctrine in ancient Israel.

But two Israeli archaeologists who have excavated the site on and off for more than 10 years now assert that Qumran had nothing to do with the Essenes or a monastery or the scrolls. It had been a pottery factory.

The archaeologists, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported in a book and a related magazine article that their extensive excavations turned up pottery kilns, whole vessels, production rejects and thousands of clay fragments. Derelict water reservoirs held thick deposits of fine potters? clay.
Magen and Peleg said that, indeed, the elaborate water system at Qumran appeared to be designed to bring the clay-laced water into the site for the purposes of the pottery industry. No other site in the region has been found to have such a water system.

By the time the Romans destroyed Qumran in A.D. 68 in the Jewish revolt, the archaeologists concluded, the settlement had been a center of the pottery industry for at least a century. Before that, the site apparently was an outpost in a chain of fortresses along the Israelites? eastern frontier.

?The association between Qumran, the caves and the scrolls is, thus, a hypothesis lacking any factual archaeological basis,? Magen said in an article in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

He and Peleg wrote a more detailed report of their research in ?The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates,? published this year. The book was edited by Katharina Galor of Brown, Jean-Baptiste Humbert of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, and Juergen Zangenberg of the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

This is by no means the first challenge to the Essene hypothesis originally advanced by Roland de Vaux, a French priest and archaeologist who was an early interpreter of the scrolls after their discovery almost 60 years ago. Other scholars have suggested that Qumran was a fortified manor house or a villa, possibly an agricultural community or a commercial entrepot.

Norman Golb, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at the University of Chicago who is a longtime critic of the Essene link, said he was impressed by the new findings and the pottery-factory interpretation.

?Magen?s a very seasoned archaeologist and scholar, and many of his views are cogent,? Golb said in a telephone interview. ?A pottery factory? That could well be the case.?

Golb said that, of course, Qumran could have been both a monastery and a pottery factory. Yet, he added: ?There is not an iota of evidence that it was a monastery. We have come to see it as a secular site, not one of pronounced religious orientation.?

For years, Golb has argued that the multiplicity of Jewish religious ideas and practices recorded in the scrolls made it unlikely that they were the work of a single sect like the Essenes. He noted that few of the texts dealt with specific Essene traditions. Not one, he said, espoused celibacy, which the sect practiced.

The scrolls in the caves were probably written by many different groups, Golb surmised, and were removed from Jerusalem libraries by refugees in the Roman war. Fleeing to the east, the refugees may well have deposited the scrolls for safekeeping in the many caves near Qumran.

The new research appears to support this view. As Magen noted, Qumran in those days was at a major crossroads of traffic to and from Jerusalem and along the Dead Sea. Similar scrolls have been found at Masada, the site south of Qumran of the suicidal hold-out against the Romans.

Magen also cited documents showing that refugees in another revolt against the Romans in the next century had fled to the same caves. He said they were ?the last spot they could hide the scrolls before descending to the shore? of the Dead Sea.

In the magazine article, Magen said the jars in which most of the scrolls were stored had probably come from the pottery factory. If so, this may prove to be the only established connection between the Qumran settlement and the scrolls.

Despite the rising tide of revisionist thinking, other scholars of the Dead Sea scrolls continue to defend the Essene hypothesis, though with some modifications and diminishing conviction.

http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060828/NEWS/608280335

[Solomon]

I'm sure, Bart, that as time and study progresses, Qumran will generate a continuing debate. Proof is a very rare commodity in archaeology, which is why the language of the archaologist is peppered qualifications such as perhaps, maybe and probably.

Ritual Bath

The Dead Sea Scrolls show us that the Essene's were exclusive and secret; they believed in a kind of Gnosticism: a secret knowledge known only to priveledged insiders. They hated women, were intolerant of children, frowned on marriage, forgave each other but hated their sworn enemies, and practiced rigorous fidelity to infinite refinements of the physical Law.

They were fantical in their ideas of clean and unclean; bathing even before sitting down to meal as a matter of theological ritual. They were afraid even to cook a meal on the sabbath. Yet they fed the poor and helped widows and orphans, wedding the themes of the prophets to the restrictions of the Torah.


ARCHAEOLOGY OF QUMRAN
This picture shows the steps into a Quman mikvah (ritual bath). The steps show earthquake damage.

Josephus describes how the Essenes purified themselves through immersion before participating in their communal meals:

    "Then, after working without interruption until the fifth hour, they reassemble in the same place and, girded with linen loin cloths, bathe themselves thus in cold water. After this purification they assemble in a special building to which no one is admitted who is not of the same faith; they themselves only enter the refectory if they are pure, as though into a holy precinct" (War 2:129).

Could these stepped pools at Qumran have been multifunctional serving water for cisterns and ritual baths?  Jodi Magness writes, "the presence of steps and additional features (such as partitions) indicates that these pools were designed to serve primarily (if not always) as miqva'ot...


Jerusalem?s Essene Gateway
By Bargil Pixner*
Biblical Archaeology Review Volume 23 Number 3 May/June 1997

The resulting frequent foot traffic through the Gate of the Essenes surely explains why its sills were so well worn.

What I have identified as the remains of the Bethso appear in an 1875 diagram of the scarp of Mount Zion by Palestine Exploration Fund archaeologist Claude R. Conder. This drawing shows a platform with two converging sewage channels running parallel to the rock scarp. A military man, Captain Conder suggested that the platform might have been a horse stable that served as a hiding place from which city defenders could ambush enemy attackers. Today, a terrace is built over the platform and only the eastern corner remains visible.

The discovery of several miqva'ot (singular, miqveh [ritual baths) just outside the gate further supports the identification of this area as an Essene quarter. As I mentioned earlier, while digging near the gate we discovered some of the tunnels Bliss dug a hundred years ago. A few remained intact, among them one leading along the sewage channel. Carefully creeping through it at a depth of some 30 feet, I noticed several smaller feeder channels descending from the north. These suggested that the channel passing through the Essene Gate collected refuse water coming from throughout the quarter.

Working in that direction we found a double miqveh about 160 feet from the gate. Originally discovered more than a hundred years ago by Claude Conder, these miqva'ot were just outside the ancient city wall and were situated on top of a rock shelf from which one could descend 36 steps to a garden level with the Gate of the Essenes.21 One of the two baths had a divider between the steps of descent and the steps of ascent, as also appears in the Qumran miqva'ot. Presumably, the steps of ascent were for the purified bather to emerge without recontamination.

[Solomon]

October 4
Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Scott Noegel
Professor of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations,
University of Washington
Adjunct Department of History

Dead Sea Scroll Distinguished Lecture Series

Pacific Science Center is pleased to present eleven lectures in conjunction with the Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. A broad range of topics, from the archaeology of the Dead Sea scrolls to the Dead Sea scrolls and the Da Vinci Code will be featured. Some of the world's foremost experts and authors on the scrolls will be participating.

All lectures will take place at Town Hall
Town Hall is located in Seattle at Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street
All lectures begin at 7:30pm.
There is an additional noon lecture on October 18

Tickets are $15 per lecture.
On sale beginning May 8th on-line through www.pacificsciencecenter.org
or on the day of the event at Town Hall.

[Solomon]

Martin Abegg
Professor and Director of the Dea Sea Scrolls Institute; Chair, Religious Studies, Director MABS, Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, Canada

Dead Sea Scroll Distinguished Lecture Series

Pacific Science Center is pleased to present eleven lectures in conjunction with the Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. A broad range of topics, from the archaeology of the Dead Sea scrolls to the Dead Sea scrolls and the Da Vinci Code will be featured. Some of the world's foremost experts and authors on the scrolls will be participating.
   

All lectures will take place at Town Hall
Town Hall is located in Seattle at Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street
All lectures begin at 7:30pm.
There is an additional noon lecture on October 18

Tickets are $15 per lecture.
On sale beginning May 8th on-line through www.pacificsciencecenter.org
or on the day of the event at Town Hall.

[Solomon]

Peter Flint
Professor of Biblical Studies, Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, Canada:
Director Dead Sea Scrolls Institute Langley BC

Dead Sea Scroll Distinguished Lecture Series

Pacific Science Center is pleased to present eleven lectures in conjunction with the Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. A broad range of topics, from the archaeology of the Dead Sea scrolls to the Dead Sea scrolls and the Da Vinci Code will be featured. Some of the world's foremost experts and authors on the scrolls will be participating.
   

All lectures will take place at Town Hall
Town Hall is located in Seattle at Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street
All lectures begin at 7:30pm.
There is an additional noon lecture on October 18

Tickets are $15 per lecture.
On sale beginning May 8th on-line through www.pacificsciencecenter.org
or on the day of the event at Town Hall.

[Solomon]

Donald W. Parry
Professor of Hebrew Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls Brigham Young University

Dead Sea Scroll Distinguished Lecture Series

Pacific Science Center is pleased to present eleven lectures in conjunction with the Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. A broad range of topics, from the archaeology of the Dead Sea scrolls to the Dead Sea scrolls and the Da Vinci Code will be featured. Some of the world's foremost experts and authors on the scrolls will be participating.
   

All lectures will take place at Town Hall
Town Hall is located in Seattle at Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street
All lectures begin at 7:30pm.
There is an additional noon lecture on October 18

Tickets are $15 per lecture.
On sale beginning May 8th on-line through www.pacificsciencecenter.org
or on the day of the event at Town Hall.

[Solomon]

Scott Woodward, PhD
Director of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation

Dead Sea Scroll Distinguished Lecture Series

Pacific Science Center is pleased to present eleven lectures in conjunction with the Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. A broad range of topics, from the archaeology of the Dead Sea scrolls to the Dead Sea scrolls and the Da Vinci Code will be featured. Some of the world's foremost experts and authors on the scrolls will be participating.
   

All lectures will take place at Town Hall
Town Hall is located in Seattle at Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street
All lectures begin at 7:30pm.
There is an additional noon lecture on October 18

Tickets are $15 per lecture.
On sale beginning May 8th on-line through www.pacificsciencecenter.org
or on the day of the event at Town Hall.

[Bart]

Right off, I wonder what impact, if any, this might have on the Copper Teasure Scroll - Bart

The Chinese Connection
New discoveries from Asia suggest the Dead Sea Scrolls may not be as old as we think

4 Nov 2006. 01:00 AM
NEIL ALTMAN - SPECIAL TO THE STAR

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been guarded for 60 years like crown jewels, the possessions of a scholarly elite who were challenged only in the past decade to bring the scrolls to the public. Now, there is accumulating and compelling evidence that these supposedly ancient texts are medieval at best and have a connection with China.

That connection is raising questions about the manuscripts' true dating, origin and possible authenticity.

The scrolls were first discovered in a cave in Jordan's Qumran region near the Dead Sea in 1947. By 1956, archaeologists and Arab treasure hunters found 10 more caves at Qumran that held mostly fragments of some 800 manuscripts, commonly thought to have been written between 200 BC and AD 25.

Soon after the scrolls' discovery, a scholarly debate broke out over whether the writings were indeed pre-Christian, with many respected scholars arguing that the texts were much more recent.

Today, a growing number of scholars doubt the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a Jewish sect at Qumran but think they actually originated elsewhere. No one, however, has pointed to Asia, where new information has turned up, including a possibly new scroll called the Moshe Leah Scroll from China.

In 1991, I wrote articles for the Washington Post and Boston Herald about the idea that a number of previously undeciphered markings in the margins of two Dead Sea Scrolls were Chinese. Victor Mair, graduate chairman of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that the Chinese character ti, which was found on the Dead Sea Scrolls, meant "god, divine king, deceased king, emperor."

Word of Chinese characters in the scrolls triggered an interesting chain of events.

Early in 1992, Leo Gabow, then president of the Sino-Judaic Institute in California, sent me an August 1987 copy of his institute's journal, Points East, by which I came to know of Moshe Leah.

In the journal, Gabow wrote: "In July of 1983, a curious article appeared in the Israeli newspaper Maariv ... `A Jew Looking for Correspondents.' His name is Moshe Leah. He is 35 years old. ... His occupation: clerk in a printing company. He lives in Taiwan. ..."

Leah told Gabow his mother had told him that their ancestors "came to China from a land where they were deported to by their enemy. And a King of Babylon defeated our enemy ... and allowed Jews to return to Israel (516 BC), but our ancestor ... came to the Orient for the deal of tea and ivory with the tribes of Hsiung-nu (who dominated Central Asia at the time)."

Gabow also said that Leah "mentioned that his mother previously owned two ancient Hebrew scrolls that had been destroyed by a leaky roof. One scroll dealt with `Moshe's Law of the Book of Geshayeher,' possibly Isaiah, and the other scroll exalted human `virtues' in Chinese style (in Hebrew script)."

During the course of their correspondence, Gabow received two photos of Leah looking at the scrolls. The first photo was "of poor quality and the letters ... difficult to identify even with a magnifying glass. Photo number two (shown left) however, had considerably more clarity," Gabow wrote in the Points East article. Speculation immediately arose as to whether the language of the scroll in the photo could be Judeo-Persian or Judeo-Chinese or even Aramaic, Gabow wrote.

Through the years, Gabow contacted other scholars connected with the Sino-Judaic Institute to help unravel the mystery of the Moshe Leah Scroll. According to Gabow's article in Points East, Michael Pollak, vice-president of the Sino-Judaic Institute and a leading expert on Chinese Jewry, was the first to make a breakthrough.

"This I am sure of," Pollak wrote in a report cited by Gabow: "The lettering is Hebrew and is in Chinese calligraphic style. Especially the long, giraffe-like lamed."

Besides finding Aramaic words mixed with the Hebrew on the Moshe Leah Scroll, Rabbi Nathan Bernstein of La Habra, Calif., was also the first to think that the section of the scroll shown in the second Leah photo was from the Book of Isaiah, and other paleographers identified the text as Isaiah 38:8-40.

But interestingly, the Qumran Isaiah Scroll has no Aramaic in those chapters, indicating that the Moshe Leah Scroll was not a copy of a Qumran scroll.

Rabbi Emanual Silver, curator of the Hebrew section of the British Library, department of Oriental Manuscripts, saw the similarities, and Gabow says Silver wrote, "Anybody slightly acquainted with the Dead Sea Scrolls will notice at a glance the overall similarity of the hand that wrote the Moshe Leah Scrolls to that of certain documents of the Dead Sea caves, and anyone a little familiar with the Dead Sea texts will be struck by the resemblances in orthography."

Gabow wrote, "For the first time the Moshe Leah `Isaiah Scroll' is associated with Dead Sea texts" because of the similar style of writing.

Gabow later sent me the photos of Leah holding the scrolls.

Gabow also sent me texts in Hebrew from China. In one, known as the Genesis Manuscript (1489-1679) from the Kaifeng Synagogue, the mems (Hebrew "m") were also like those in the Dead Sea's Isaiah Scroll and the Moshe Leah Scroll.

More important, Gabow enclosed a copy of the Khotan text, a business letter written on paper that came from Chinese Central Asia and had been dated from the 8th century. It had numerous Hebrew letters matching those in Dead Sea texts: the unique wishbone-shape gimels, diamond-shaped kophs, S-shaped nuns, giraffe-neck lameds and mems.

If the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before Christ's time and then buried in caves until the 20th century, how could the same script show up in China in the 8th century ? or even later?

These paleographic details provide some solid evidence about the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dating them not in antiquity but in the Middle Ages, at the earliest, explains the connection to medieval texts, as well as unusual things like the Chinese symbol for God in the Isaiah Scroll. University of Pennsylvania's Mair dated this character, which also appears in The Order of the Community, another Dead Sea Scroll, no earlier than AD 100 and perhaps 700 years or more later.

Donald Daniel Leslie, an Australian sinologist and leading expert in Kaifeng Jewry, agreed with Mair's dating and wrote in Points East that it's unlikely the Jews and the Chinese knew much, if anything, about each other before the time of Jesus. Leslie wrote that "there is no hint in Western sources of any knowledge of the Chinese language or writing until perhaps a thousand years later."

In later scholarly reports, Bruce Brooks, research professor of Chinese and director of an international group of sinologists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, confirmed Mair's findings and other possible Chinese characters on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These Chinese connections, especially the symbol for God dating after Christ, and the fact that the characters are native to the Chinese Central Asian area, begin to explain the time frame of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their possible place of origin. Mair identified Chinese Central Asia as the area from which the Chinese symbol for God in the scrolls came.

When a text such as the Moshe Leah scroll shows up in China, the Asian connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls is no longer strange.

This new scroll would have perhaps come to light sooner had Gabow accepted Pollak's assessment that "it would be wiser to conclude that the Moshe Leah scrolls were very old family heirlooms."

Pollak's article on the Moshe Leah Scroll, in a January 1987 addendum in Points East, called for a reassessment of the writing and spelling styles of surviving medieval Hebrew manuscripts from Kaifeng. His conclusion is that "the possibility of a Dead Sea tie-in to these texts seems never to have been suspected in the past. That possibility ... now demands investigation."

Scholars still disagree about the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and research remains to be done, but all the scholars I have contacted have come to the same conclusion, that the Moshe Leah Scroll is not a forgery, nor is it based on Polish scholar Josef Milik's copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It would be in the best interest of the scholars who believe in the antiquity of the Dead Sea Scrolls to discredit the Moshe Leah Scroll because of its striking paleographic similarities to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

If those scholars acknowledge it as authentic, however, the obvious conclusion would be that the Dead Sea Scrolls would have to be dated in the medieval era ? after A.D. 500 ? at the earliest, and the myth of the Dead Sea Scrolls' antiquity will have run its course.

Neil Altman is a Philadelphia-based writer who specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

See also:
DNA and the Dead Sea Scrolls
https://historyhuntersinternational.org/index.php?topic=355.0

Using Technology to Reveal and Safeguard the Dead Sea Scrolls
https://historyhuntersinternational.org/index.php?topic=354.0

The Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus & The Da Vinci Code
https://historyhuntersinternational.org/index.php?topic=353.0

[Solomon]

I don't believe any of that, Bart. It doesn't relate to anything I know of the matter.
Anything biblical attracts cranks, frauds, hoaxers and forgers.
Solomon

BTW those links do not work.

Code:

[url=http://paste-url-here]paste-text-here[/url]

So that, for example:

Code:

[url=https://historyhuntersinternational.org/?page=63]Meet the Crew![/url]

Gives you this:
Meet the Crew!

[Bart]

It does have many scam elements. The unverifiable claim of ancient scrolls (conveniently) destroyed by a leaking roof, oral tradition/ hearsay, photos of something purported to be ancient scrolls, and many assumptions based upon those elements. One would think there was something left of these scrolls to examine. I had never heard of Chinese characters as marginal notations in the Qumran scrolls before. It seems one must track down and verify every detail in these kinds of stories before being able to accept them. That can be frustrating. Time will see how this oddity plays out I suppose.

- Bart

Thanks for the code, I'll have to fix those.

[Solomon]

This evidence supports the view that the scrolls - or at least a large and important part of them - were authored by the Essenes.

The hidden latrines of the Essenes
By Ran Shapira

In one of his detailed accounts of the Essenes, Flavius Josephus (Yosef Ben Matityahu), described one of the many laws that shaped the Jewish sect's way of life during the Second Temple period. While the Essenes sat in a circle, Josephus wrote, it was forbidden for them to spit into its center. Like many other laws outlined by Josephus, the details of this law appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls found in caves along the northern end of the Dead Sea. These scrolls are attributed to the Essenes.

The resemblance between the 1st century historian's testimony and the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls does not end with the law forbidding spitting into the center of a circle. Magen Broshi, former curator of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem, where the Qumran scrolls are housed, says there are dozens of parallels between Josephus' writing and the content of the scrolls. One of the main similarities regards purification rituals and the Essenes' meticulous hygiene.

Anthropologist Joe Zias, of the Hebrew University Science and Archaeology Department, recently found positive evidence of the Essenes' adherence to these rituals. Together with Dr. James Tabor, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina and parasitologist Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue of the CNRS Laboratory for Anthropology in Marseilles, France, Zias found the latrines that were used by the Essenes in Qumran. The three researchers say that, in addition to shedding a great deal of light on the unique culture of the Essenes in Qumran, the discovery represents an archaeological bonanza: Additional proof that the Essenes wrote the scrolls. Zias explains that when feces are left on the desert floor, exposure to sun and wind quickly annihilates intestinal parasites. But when feces are buried in the earth, intestinal parasites may survive for many months and their eggs may be preserved for as long as 2,000 years, as in the case of Qumran.

Close attention to hygiene
The presence of the eggs of intestinal parasites, typically present in human intestines, in a relatively limited area, in the place described in the scrolls and by Josephus, led researchers to conclude that they discovered the bathroom of Qumran's ancient residents. "Only ascetic members of a sect that paid such close attention to hygiene would bother to walk hundreds of meters beyond their camp to relieve themselves, and invest the necessary energy to dig a pit in which to bury their waste," Zias concludes.

However, Dr. Yitzhak Magen, staff officer of archaeology in the Civil Administration of the West Bank, was not impressed by the new discovery. Last summer, Magen and his colleague, Yuval Peleg, published findings based on 10 years of excavation in the Qumran ruins. Both researchers reached the conclusion that Qumran was not a monastery but an enormous ceramics factory. They found fragments of clay artifacts at the site and many pools, which they believe were used to submerge the sediment that surfaces, to this day, when local rivers overflow to produce tremendous, winter floods. Magen maintains that this sediment provides excellent raw material for pottery production. According to Magen and Peleg, the pools were not ritual baths; nor were they used by the Essenes, who immersed themselves in ritual baths twice a day. "In addition," Magen says, "the Qumran area and particularly the caves surrounding the site, are full of predatory animals and animals that consume carrion, like foxes, hyenas, and leopards. People who lived in this area for years were well aware of that. They feared these animals and certainly would not leave their camps to relieve themselves. Thus, it is unreasonable to assume that the camp's latrine was located at such a distance."

"It was not the Essenes who buried the scrolls in the caves near the Qumran ruins," Magen adds. "The scrolls were buried by Jews who escaped from Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple." One of the main escape routes from Jerusalem passed through Qumran. Jews, who were somewhat unfamiliar with the area and had no knowledge of its predatory animals, did not fear entering the caves to bury the scrolls, he proposes.

According to Magen, one finds ample evidence of this in the scrolls, themselves, as they are written in a broad variety of styles and they cover a great deal of content. "It is not possible to say that one man or one sect wrote all the scrolls," Magen says. It is more reasonable to conclude that they reflect the enormous diversity that typified Judaism during the end of the Second Temple period.

Magen's theory is the most recent in a series of conclusions that question the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Essenes. Since the first scrolls were found, in 1947, a number of suggestions regarding the identity of the authors of these scrolls arose, leading to occasional outbursts of angry discourse, fraught with thinly-veiled agendas. But the most solid conclusion, raised in the early days of Professor Eliezer Sukenik, who purchased the scrolls, was and remains that the Essenes wrote the scrolls.

"The best proof of that," Broshi says, "is evident in the 900 scrolls discovered in Qumran." Some of them describe a group of ascetic hermits, and the details match information provided by Flavius Josephus. "There are dozens of parallels between Yosef Ben Matityahu [Flavius Josephus] and the Dead Sea Scrolls." Broshi says that the conclusion that there were potters, rather than ascetics, in Qumran is unfounded.

Ascetics, not potters
According to Broshi, Qumran lacks the raw materials suitable to the production of ceramic pottery. Investigations conducted a few years ago, by Broshi and Professor Hanan Eshel of Bar-Ilan University, reveal that clay pots and other ceramic vessels found in Qumran were made with metamorphic rock that came from the hills surrounding Jerusalem.

In addition to that, clay pots must be fired in kilns, at temperatures of 800-900 degrees Celsius, and the Qumran area lacks raw material to produce energy of that magnitude.

"It is possible that the residents produced ceramic vessels," Broshi says, "but only for their own personal use - not as a source of income."

"Discovery of latrines neither proves nor disproves," Broshi comments.

It merely provides another piece in the larger puzzle, which, after 60 long years of research, few scholars still question.

"I do not know a single, serious researcher that maintains that Qumran was not inhabited by Essenes and that they did not write the scrolls."