OH GOOD:
MYSTERY OF DEAD SEA SCROLLS AUTHORS POSSIBLY SOLVED (LiveScience).
Despite the inflated headline, for which the author, Owen Jarus, should not be held responsible, this seems to be a good article. It is accurate in the parts that discuss things I know about and it summarizes some recent research that does indeed potentially bear on the vexed question of the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.
Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.
The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.
[...]
Robert Cargill is interviewed in the piece as well.
I am not an archaeologist or other specialist in ancient material culture and I don't have a strong opinion on whether the Qumran sectarians lived at the site, although I certainly would not rule it out. But where other specialists disagree among themselves, there is no point in being dogmatic. A connection between the Qumran sectarians and the Essenes is plausible, although I resist reading the Classical accounts of the Essenes alongside the Dead Sea Scrolls in a harmonistic way. I do think it likely that, whoever lived at the site at the time of the Great Revolt against Rome in 68 CE, many of the scrolls were brought to the site from outside, presumably from other communities of like-minded sectarians in Judea. See also earlier posts
here and
here.
It would be nice if this new research did shed some light on the problem of who lived at the site of Qumran in the late Second Temple period, but only time and the process of discussion in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature will tell.
UPDATE: The
Daily Mail also covers the story and, for once, has the more temperate headline:
Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written by mysterious sect. There are some nice photos of the site and the scrolls in this article. (Bad link now fixed. Sorry about that.)
