>People who are interested in the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls know that there is a controversy among scholars on the nature and origin of the Scrolls.
The traditional view about the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they are the work of the Essenes or an Essene-like sect that lived at Khirbet Qumran, a site located near the shore of the Dead Sea in the Judean Wilderness. The traditional view also claims that the Essenes wrote their sectarian books and copied biblical texts and then, at the time Rome was threatening the community, hid the Scrolls in the eleven caves in which they were discovered in the 1950s and 1960s.
The alternative theory is best explained by Norman Golb:
“The Scrolls reflect religious and social ideas of various groups within ancient Judaism, that Khirbet Qumran was not a religious site either of Essenes or others, and that the hiding of the Scrolls in the caves arose out of the need of the Jews of Jerusalem, circa 68/69 C.E., to sequester their manuscripts and other valued possessions when they became aware that the Romans intended to besiege and invade the city.”
This description of the alternative theory is presented by Golb in a lengthy article, “The Dead Sea Scrolls at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center” and published on the web page of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Golb’s article was written in reaction to the exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. Golb believes the exhibit is designed to support the original Qumran-Sectarian theory. He came to this conclusion based on the fact that the exhibit excludes any information that supports the alternative view.
Readers who are interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and learning the reasons for the alternative theory will profit from reading Golb’s article. At the end of his article, Golb provides a list of books and articles that oppose the traditional theory of the origin and nature of the Scrolls. I highly recommend this article.
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary
Tags: Archaeology, Qumran, Essenes, Dead Sea Scrolls, Norman Golb
Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament 
>The San Diego Natural History Museum’s upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit has now also come under attack.At least two blogs have now published a letter from Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of religious studies who is curating the exhibit. For details and links, see http://pacific-science-scrolls-scandal.blogspot.com/. In her letter, Dr. Kohn denies allegations that the exhibit is “biased” and “unbalanced”. As Dr. Mariottini explains, Scrolls scholarship is currently polarized into two opposing groups, one holding that they were written by a sect living at Qumran, the other holding that no sect lived at Qumran and that the Scrolls are the remnants of the libraries of Jerusalem. This polarization is confirmed by the Cambridge History of Judaism, which features two separate articles presenting each of these two theories. In her letter defending the planned exhibit, Dr. Kohn admits that not a single opponent of the Qumran-Essene theory — not even the leader of the official Israel Antiquities Authority archaeological team that has concluded, after ten years of excavations, that Qumran was a pottery factory and that the Scrolls came from Jerusalem — has been invited to participate in the Museum’s lecture series (featuring 22 speakers), but she attempts to justify this decision by referring to the “scholarly consensus” on Scroll origins. It is difficult to square this assertion of “consensus” with the picture presented in multiple news accounts and the Cambridge History of Judaism. If Dr. Kohn has set out to defend the old Essene theory in the face of growing scholarly disenchantment with it, why doesn’t she just admit that the exhibit is indeed biased and unbalanced, instead of arguing herself into an impossible situation?
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