19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read for any academic in any discipline!, March 11, 2001
Professor Golb's book is outstanding on two counts: (1) He shows, with very convincing evidence, that the Qumran ruins have little or nothing to do with the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and (2) He exposes the academic politics, personal egos and rivalries, and the dangers of dogmatic thought that have contributed to a completely erroneous viewpoint regarding the Scrolls.
On the first count, the ruins are clearly shown to be consistent with a fortress, and with no evidence of any scribe work. Furthermore, the collection does not consist of anomalous writings at the fringe of Judaism. Rather, they are very typical of Judaism 2000 years ago, with plurality of ideas and beliefs, divisions and competitions among its sects, and a general condition that fostered the environment that eventually led to Jesus and the birth of Christianity.
However, as important as the above findings are, they pale in comparison to the parts of the book in which Prof. Golb exposes the movers and shakers in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship to be petty, coniving, over achieving academics with personal scores, sensitive egos, strong biases (mostly against Jewish history), and a willingness to put dogma above the truth. For anyone in academia, the danger that ideas become dogma, and then prevent all other original ideas from further study and support, is a reality we all know too well. In this book, Prof. Golb traces the birth and development of the Essene dogma, and shows how destructive it has been to scholarship and the truth.
While the writing can be dense, the story is so compelling and the perspective so personal (Prof. Golb has been ridiculed for his ideas, as often happens with those who challenge dogma), that it is an easy read for anyone.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Logic conquers the academic establishment, March 28, 1999
This review is from: Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran (Paperback)
As an attorney, I was amazed at the resistance Prof. Golb encountered (and is apparently still encountering) to his compelling explanations of the provenance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this book, he makes an unappealable case for the Scrolls as coming from the library of the Temple, undoubtedly buried in the caves for safekeeping as the Romans began to menace Jerusalem.
Oddly, that is not what the book is really about. The true focus is the wagon-circling of those academicians who had built careers on the--as Prof. Golb demonstrates with inescapable logic--totally unfounded assumption that the ruins at Khirbet Qumran are the remains of a monastery where scribes churned out sectarian literature to be stored in the local caves. Beginning with the group surrounding the Dominican Roland de Vaux, which originally formulated the "Qumran-Essenes" theory largely out of air and good wishes, at least two generations of graduate students obtained their doctorates by excluding, working around, or simply suppressing evidence at variance with the received truth. Prof. Golb's dissection of their arguments would stand up well in any court.
Golb perhaps did not intend to pillory so brutally the lack of real intellectual rigor required of today's PhDs, but a reader is compelled to wonder exactly how severely these people are required to defend any conclusions they arrive at.
The one sour note in an otherwise fascinating work is the impenetrable recital of the academic-political intrigues surrounding the controversy. Golb was apparently defamed rather savagely in the process and a wish for vindication is understandable. However, he seems to overlook his own presentation as his best weapon. Having exposed his opponents as obvious hacks, he truly need do nothing more than sit back and watch his opponents squirm. Verbum sat sapienti for the second edition, which I eagerly await.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good alternative theory to the scrolls' origins, July 16, 2004
This review is from: Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran (Paperback)
The party line on the Dead Sea Scrolls (that is, the most commonly accepted explanation) is that most of the scrolls were produced by a sect of Essene separatists who lived in the recently excavated settlements at Qumran, near the Dead Sea. This explanation has many merits, including independent reference to the Essenes in this area by Josephus and Philo, an historian and a philosopher contemporary with the sect, and by Pliny. Qumran, according to this theory, was a monastic settlement, and one of the primary activities of the residents was the production of scrolls in a scriptorium. The scrolls provide a record of the beliefs and some of the practices of this sect.
However, not all subscribe to this point of view. Some, starting with various interpretations of the scrolls like to see proto-Christians and radical scenarios. Unfortunately, some have done this simply because it grabs the headlines. However, there are other dissenters, perhaps more likened to a loyal opposition, who have both the credentials and the credulity to make alternative cases of interpretation. Norman Golb is one such scholar, whose ideas of an alternative theory of the Qumran settlement and the origins of the scrolls is significant enough to merit mention in many of the latest Dead Sea Scrolls general surveys as a minority view that still has plausibility in some respects.
Golb, in his introduction, talks about his hopes and frustrations with trying to work with the established Scroll hierarchy. Suffering from the same sorts of issues that made access and interpretation such highly politicised topics, Golb felt he was not only an outsider, but sometimes a bit of an outcast, among the Scroll scholarly community.
Golb's main thesis here, presented after giving an overview of the history of the scrolls and the archaeological digs at Qumran (complete with maps, drawings and photographs), is that this is not a monastic community, and not really a scriptorium. Drawing information from an early article by Rengstorf, who thought that the Qumran settlement was anything but an Essene community, he developed the idea of Khirbet Qumran as a fortress, developed in part because of inconsistencies between the archaeological finds and the supposed activities of Essenes that would have required different architecture and different arrangements. This Hasmonean fortress is located in an admittedly strategic location, particularly for the various events and travel routes of the area during Hasmonean times.
Furthermore, Golb felt that the scrolls had far too many variations and contradictions to all be the product of one particular sect, or one particular community of people. Golb contends that the scrolls were actually the accumulated writings of many groups and sects from across ancient Judea, and were most likely the library of the Temple - these were then hidden in the caves in the vicinity of the known fortress at Khirbet Qumran, outside of Jerusalem, but not too far away, to protect the writings in the face of an imminent Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.
Golb has data to support his theories. One primary archaeological find is pottery - however, pottery of the sort found at Qumran has been found in other locations in the Judean wilderness, too. Second, there were no manuscript scraps or fragments found at Qumran, an unlikely scenario for a scriptorium, in Golb's assessment. Pliny's location of the sect is rather vague (above Ein Gedi), and might not point to Khirbet Qumran. No coin finds locate the scroll writers with the Qumrani remains. Romans had captured the site about the time of the fall of Jerusalem, perhaps even before. The Essenes were known to espouse celibacy (one of the reasons for their low numbers, and, rather like the Shakers in America, their recruitment didn't allow them to replenish their numbers, particularly in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem, when Judaism as a whole was forced into a reorganisation along what would become normative Rabbinic Judaic lines).
Golb traces the history of the research, translation and controversy surrounding the scrolls during the presentation of his alternative theory. The reader gets an overview of the discoveries from 1947/48 to more recent discoveries, the archaeological progress at the Qumran site, and the reconstruction and translation efforts over time. This is a story of political intrigue, involving international politics, academic politics, and controversies that fueled rumour mills and gossips for decades. Golb has a perspective that is more insider than most; and he discusses the personalities involved in a good amount of detail. He also includes the perspective of being a scholar on the outside of accepted dogma - how the idea of freedom of expression, open research and free exchange of views often gets squelched in the name of the integrity of a discipline; how careers become invested in a particular point of view, such that any opposing viewpoints can run the risk of gettiing their supporters exiled from the mainstream of the community. Rather like church and politics!
Golb includes a useful glossary of terms at the conclusion of the book, worthwhile regardless of the theory of origins of the scrolls one subscribes to, and a selected bibliography, topically arranged.
Golb's book is an interesting overview of the scrolls from a unique perspective, plausible and intriguing, a good alternative book to read from the more mainstream scroll texts.
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