MORE ON THE GOLB ARREST:

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar defends son arrested for impersonating rival
By Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)
Tags: israel news, dead sea scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls scholar whose son was arrested last week on suspicion of impersonating an rival scholar says his son understood his opponents were trying to silence him.

Professor Norman Golb, of the University of Chicago, believes that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not written by the Essenes, as mainstream scholarship holds.

"Raphael, my son, is very devoted to my research. He realized years ago that there was an effort to close the door on my opinions. And so he started debating bloggers who were against me, using aliases. That's the custom these days with blogs, as I understand it," Norman Golb said.

No it isn't. At least not among serious academic bloggers - or serious political bloggers either. Making up aliases to give the impression your views have lots of supporters is known as "sock-puppetry" and people caught doing it are rightly ridiculed.

This is an odd situation, where the son denies the impersonations and the father defends the son for doing them. But this could be the result of media garbling or misunderstanding and I wouldn't make too much of it.

Raphael Golb's arrest is the latest in a long saga of conflicts among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. Although researchers have condemned Raphael Golb's alleged acts, some scholars in Israel accept Norman Golb's contention that some of the most prominent Dead Sea Scrolls academics do silence their opponents.

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I have not found that to be true at all. Golb's theory is not accepted because it isn't convincing. The key problem with it in my view is that it claims that the Qumran texts are not a sectarian library, and anyone who reads them carefully will see that this just doesn't work (i.e., the library clearly is sectarian). But I have always found Golb's work interesting and have said nice things about it from time to time. He did raise the very useful point that the number of scribal hands in the Scrolls corpus was too large for the manuscripts all to have been produced locally. My own working hypothesis is that the Qumran library consists of a number of sectarian ("Essene" or whatever) libraries that were brought to Qumran, presumably for safekeeping during the war with the Romans. These may well have been consolidated with a library that was already there.

Background to the arrest story here (dead link now fixed!) and follow the links back. Earlier comments on Golb's work are collected here.