MORE DEBATE ON THE QUMRAN EXCAVATIONS over at the Bible and Interpretation website:

The Enigma of Qumran

Qumran was not a place of learning and solitude: one can hardly be expected to find the quietude needed to study in the middle of a busy, loud, and dirty factory.

Yaron Ben-Ami
Bible and Interpretation
October 2004

This piece surveys the views of the archaeologists who recently completed ten years of excavation at Qumran and touches on views of other archaeologists. I am surprised to hear that the idea that Qumran was a military fortress is still on the table. I thought all the archaeologists rejected that because of the site's unprotected water supply. The factory proposal is new to me too. I'm not an archaeologist and I don't feel qualified to comment on the merits of the various positions. I'm just noting what the archaeologists say and watching the fur fly. But I do have a comment on the last paragraph of the article:

Dr. Itzhak Magen [one of the excavators] comments on how the scrolls got there: "They were brought here by everybody, including fugitives running away from the Romans. Some of them would have taken a scroll with them, but when they ran away from the Judean hills eastwards, they had to cross the water, which is something they didn�t want to do with a scroll." So the fugitives, Magen claims, tucked the scrolls away in the caves around the recently deserted Qumran. Therefore, these are not sectarian writings, either priestly or Essene. "This is the literature of Second Temple era Judaism. This belonged to everybody," he says, expressing a hope that this realization would throw new light on the scrolls� research.

This is something I do know about and have put quite a lot of thought into. If Dr. Magen's views are being quoted correctly, he's wrong. The Qumran library is a sectarian ("Essene" if you insist) library, it was not "brought here by everybody." There are lots of sectarian texts, often in different versions, and most or all of the rest of the library is compatible with their views. If this were a randomly collected library of Judean literature, we would expect a much wider range of views to be represented (e.g., copies of 1 Maccabees, the Psalms of Solomon, the Letter of Aristeas, and maybe even some early stuff from followers of Jesus). Gabriele Boccaccini has dealt in detail with what's missing in the Qumran library, and what it means, in his book Beyond the Essene Hypothesis. I don't agree with him at every point, but the sectarian nature of the Qumran library is clear.

That said, I don't think that Magen is entirely off base about the library. My own working hypothesis is that sectarians from all over Judea collected their smaller libraries and consolidated them to hide them at Qumran during the war, perhaps because Qumran was a major retreat center or the like for the sect (or perhaps not . . .). That would explain both the sectarian nature of the library and the multiple recensions of the sectarian and biblical texts in the library. More on that here.