Take Claims About Dead Sea Scrolls With a Grain of
Salt Opinion 

Norman Golb | Fri. Apr 13, 2007
Once again, controversy is brewing over the famous
Dead Sea Scrolls.


After widely publicized showings in Seattle and in
other cities, the largest Scrolls exhibit ever is
scheduled to open soon at the San Diego Natural
History Museum. A sophisticated media campaign has
accompanied all the current exhibits, aimed at
convincing the public of the truth of an old, and now
increasingly disputed, theory of the Scrolls’ origins
— namely, that they were written by Essenes living at
the ancient site near the Dead Sea known as Khirbet
Qumran.

The media campaign is but the latest instance of a
half-century of scholarly disregard for ancient Judaic
culture. Like the recently propagated claim that
ossuary coffins found in a Jerusalem crypt contain the
remains of the family of Jesus of Nazareth and of
Jesus himself, the traditional theory of the Scrolls’
origins is based not on scientific research per se,
but rather on conjecture and a tendentious
presentation of evidence — techniques feeding on a
largely faith-based fascination with Christian
origins.

Those who saw and studied the first of the Scrolls,
circa 1948-1952, too quickly surmised that they had
been written not by the Palestinian Jews at large but
rather by the small, pietist Essenic sect, which
represented only a minuscule portion of that
population. The Qumran site, close to the 11 Scroll
caves that stretched northward from that area, was
soon thereafter arbitrarily identified as the home of
this group.

A Christological element was then brought into the
picture, and the resulting theory has found massive
public acceptance, involving as it did claims that the
desert home of the Essenes had been located and that
its inhabitants in particular had helped fashion early
Christian ideas. Father Roland de Vaux, the first
editor in chief of the Scrolls publication project,
and himself a Dominican monk, championed the theory
and called Qumran an “Essene monastery.”

The later emergence of new text evidence — such as the
famous Copper Scroll, which contains an inventory of
buried artifacts and treasures of the Jerusalem
Temple, and is still called a “mystery” by traditional
Scrolls scholars — basically did nothing to change the
interpretation of these manuscripts. The Qumran-Essene
hunch quickly became the dominant theory, coloring
virtually all researchers’ efforts to understand the
Scrolls.

During the past two decades, however, scholars have
increasingly come to see that the totality of evidence
now favors an entirely different view: that the
Scrolls were the writings of various Palestinian
groups and individuals, and that a pressing historical
cause — the impending Roman siege on Jerusalem of 70
C.E. — was responsible for their sequestration in
desert caves.

The latest support for these conclusions comes from
archaeologists at the Israel Antiquities Authority,
who after 10 seasons of systematic excavations at
Qumran — excavations that revealed an entirely secular
settlement devoted to the manufacture of pottery —
have concluded in detailed studies published in the
United States and Israel that Qumran was not the home
of a sect and that the Scrolls could have come only
from Jerusalem and its vicinity.

The dispassionate investigation of the texts, as of
the nearby archaeological site, has thus opened the
way to a new understanding of Jewish thought and
experience at a crucial moment in the history of this
people. But traditional Scroll scholars, deeply
committed in their writings to a theory created
prematurely and in haste, have continued to assert
their belief in that old idea.

Concomitantly, a phenomenon of great concern has
developed, involving initiatives aimed at creating an
apologetic defense of the old theory so as to secure
its acceptance by the general public.

One example is the recent disingenuous claim —
rebutted on this page in February by Katharina Galor
and Jürgen Zangenberg — that the discovery of fecal
remains near Qumran proves that Essenes really lived
there. Another is a widely publicized DNA project
announced in 1995, the results of which have been
suppressed. And yet another is a dramatic 1997 Israel
Museum press release stating that a newly unearthed
ostracon mentioning Jericho “constitutes the first
archaeological proof… that a connection exists between
the Qumran site and the Scrolls found in nearby caves”
— a claim based on the erroneous reading of a single
word whose magnification subsequently proved that the
ostracon had nothing to do with Essenes or Qumran.

To this list can be added the current Scroll
exhibitions. The recommended reading lists
accompanying these exhibits exclude all publications
by scholars who are of the view that the Scrolls are
of Jerusalem origin. Indeed, no archaeologist
associated with this interpretation has been invited
to lecture at these venues. The exhibits themselves,
once compared with the actual findings as known today,
demonstrably mislead the public.

What these efforts and others similar to them share is
a fundamental, and inappropriate, disregard for
ancient Judaic culture. The complex history of the
Palestinian Jews on the eve of the First Revolt is
being pushed aside in favor of a bizarre,
Christologically colored thesis. The fervently
expressed “tomb of Jesus” belief, portrayed in a
self-styled documentary featuring costumed actors, is
but a spillover of the same phenomenon.

Current seductive exhibitions and other efforts to the
contrary, the Scrolls have, since their forced
publication, been revealing many new aspects of the
Jewish experience before Jerusalem burned and the
Temple priesthood forever lost its power. Let us hope
that the sectarian fallacy of the past half-century
will ultimately be set aside, and that scholars and
the public will come to focus on a profound and
decisive moment in the Jewish past. Norman Golb
teaches Jewish history and civilization at the
University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. He is the
author of “Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search
for the Secret of Qumran” (Scribner, 1996).

Fri. Apr 13, 2007