DSS exhibit in Paris

A DEAD SEA SCROLLS EXHIBITION IN PARIS:

Dead Sea Scrolls Pose Enigmas in Rare Paris Exhibit of Fragments: Review

By Jorg von Uthmann - May 31, 2010 (Bloomberg)

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 was, along with the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the greatest archaeological sensation of the 20th century. An exhibition at Paris’s National Library puts the scrolls in their historical and theological context and questions the mainstream hypothesis about their origin.

It’s the first show of this kind in France. That’s all the more amazing as French scholars were deeply involved in the deciphering of the scrolls and the tens of thousands of fragments on papyrus or parchment.

Most of the work was done at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique in Jerusalem under the direction of the Dominican archaeologist Father Roland de Vaux.

To fund excavations at Khirbet Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea, De Vaux sold, in 1953, 377 fragments to the French government. Presented in airtight cases, they occupy the center of the theatrically staged show.

[...]

There are no specifics on the contents of these fragments.

And this is interesting:

Following Father de Vaux, most experts believe that the scrolls were composed by the Essenes, an austere Jewish sect praised by historian Flavius Josephus and located by Pliny the Elder in the desert near the Dead Sea.

The organizers of the show don’t buy that interpretation. Josephus and Pliny, they argue, are unreliable and contradictory sources; the Essenes appear neither in the New Testament nor in the vast rabbinical literature nor are they mentioned in the scrolls themselves.

The curators seem to agree with the Israeli historian Eyal Regev, who denies the existence of a Qumran community: It is, he says in his book “Sectarianism in Qumran” (2007), “an invention of scholars.”

UPDATE (2 June) More here (next post).