THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND OTHER HEBREW MSS PROJECT:

This site contains articles by Norman Golb of the University of Chicago on the Dead Sea Scrolls and related matters from the nineties and early naughties. I am not persuaded by Golb's theory that Qumran was a military fortress to which sectarian and non-sectarian literary archives from Jerusalem were brought during the first revolt against the Romans, but I find his work very stimulating and it has influenced my views in a number of areas. Here is the summary of a student paper on Golb's work from my 2001 Qumran course, and pasted below is my summary of the seminar discussion (from the majordomo archives, 30 April 2001).

NORMAN GOLB AND THE ARCHIVES OF JERUSALEM

We made list of Golb's strongest arguments, and there seemed to be a general consensus that his objections to the Essene hypothesis, or at least its traditional formulation, were more persuasive than his attempt to formulate a positive theory of his own. The strong arguments included:

* the very large number of scribal hands in the manuscripts;
* the lack of manuscripts that bear the normal physical characteristics of scribal autographs;
* the lack of documentary records (note that 4Q342-58 are probably texts of the Bar Kokhba period recovered from Nahal Hever, not Qumran texts);
* The large textual and redactional variations in the supposedly Essene foundation documents--actually, I believe Golb doesn't mention this, but it does support his theory inasmuch as it points away from the library being gathered by a single, well-defined group;
* the confusion in Pliny over whether the Essenes were still living at the mentioned site near the Dead Sea after the Roman conquest in CE 68-70;
* the finding of a copy of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (perhaps a sectarian text, but not certainly) at Masada;
* the debunked scriptorium in the Qumran ruins;
* the lack of explicit mention of celibacy in the sectarian texts and its incompatibility with most (all?) of them;
* the evidently allegorical interpretation of Isa 40:3 in 1QS 8.14-16, which weakens the supposed explicit mention of the group going out into the desert.

We noted, however, that his contention that the Qumran library was too varied in content to be a sectarian/Essene collection could be turned on its head, in that most of the caves had sectarian works in them and that there was a curious lack of texts that espoused obviously different viewpoints. Where, for example, are copies of works like 1 Maccabees?