Customer Reviews

Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran

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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.

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.

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.

The Qumran-Essene hypothesis, that the fortress at Qumran was occupied by a tiny group of celebate hermits, has never made sense. The perpetrators of that scenario have spent 50 years showing more interest in garnering prestige and awards than in discovering the truth about this ancient, invaluable, and irreplaceble library from the very roots of western civilization. Professor Golb carefully uncovers those roots and highlights the weaknesses of the prevailing arguments. As an expert in scroll scholarship, Jewish history and Near Eastern lnaguages, a far wider subject area than just the Dead Sea Scrolls, he is one of the first to see what the archaeologists, linguists palaeographers, and other narrow specialists have failed to see or refused to see during their 50 years of trying to rewrite the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls instead of reveal it; namely, that these scrolls, unlike others that are known from around the World, have no connection with the locality of their discovery, cover too wide a range of religious and philosophical tenets to be the work of a small sect, and are almost certainly but a part of a much larger library of books and collected writings - probably one associated with the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. A fascinating study and an illuminating contribution to Dead Sea Scroll scholarship.

If you only read a few books about Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, look no further. This book is the one you are looking for. The value of this book can be equated to the value of NUMEROUS books on the same subject. One reason this is so, is because it spends throughout time discussing and criticizing other authors, archaeologists, and Qumranologists. I feel with confidence after reading this book that the scrolls were certainly not composed by an "Essene sect."

An equally appropriate title for this work could be "A History of the Dead Sea Scrolls." It deals with all the work that has been done since their discovery, the excavation of Khirbet Qumran, and many other important relevant topics.

Though I very much enjoyed this book I wish that the author could have dealt more with his theory and not just his criticism of the traditional Sectarian theory. He believes the scrolls were of Jerusalem origin and Khirbet Qumran a Jewish military fortress, but does not go in depth to elaborate as much as he does pointing out all of the other researchers' fallacies.

But this does not cut down the importance of reading this book to anyone interested in looking into the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you are such a reader, THIS BOOK IS A MUST:)

The decades long narrative about the Dead Sea Scrolls is an illustration of why beginnings are important -- and how in the end academics can act just like everyone else.

From the beginning, the scrolls were cast as the products of an Essene community living southeast of Jerusalem. It didn't matter that there was little evidence for such a community -- what mattered was that the "Qumran community" story became the prevailing paradigm for understanding this archeological find. Having established this as a paradigm, facts, discoveries, and findings there around the scrolls were bent to fit the narrative.

All knowledge begins with information, and we posit hypotheses that will explain the information. Good science will then modify the hypothesis as further information becomes available. A scientific discovery is almost never complete: we're constantly changing our understanding as findings come into play.

The problem is that scientists are men and women like the rest of us. And instead of modifying hypotheses in light of evidence, they sometimes bend evidence to attempt to make it fit the hypothesis.

Golb posits that this has happened with the scrolls initially found in a cave in 1947. Father de Veux and others proposed the hypothesis that the scrolls were the products an Essene community (the Essenes having been mentioned by ancient sources). So far, so good. It was probably a good thesis 50 years ago. But now there is evidence -- carefully, almost painfully documented by Golb -- which indicates that the thesis no longer fits the facts. However, some scholars continue to cling to the original thesis, unchanged by the vast array of information found since 1947. In this book, Golb seeks to amass the information which challenges this theory, and propose theories which more easily -- in the words of Owen Barfield -- "saves the appearances."

Those who debunk old theories sometimes go too far. Some have done that with the scrolls, positing that instead of being important, they are of little value. Golb seeks a via media, showing how the scrolls found are extremely important to understand the nuances of the first century Judaism and of the nascent Christianity of that time., and of how literature in first century Jerusalem was a multidimensional and interesting body of work.

I bought this book back when the Dead Sea Scrolls had finally been set free because the old men who had kept control of them for 50 years no longer had the only available copies. Someone had made photographs when they were first found, and those photographs were freely distributed by the organizations that owned them. In some cases they showed more than the originals that had deteriorated because of bad handling.

Norman Golb was a very angry man by that time. He had been kept from seeing the scroll fragments for most of his career while others, who he didn't think had his credentials, and probably didn't, had been given access by their teachers when they were still students. His belief that the scrolls were the remains of several libraries from Jerusalem had been ignored for most of his career, and others who came to similar beliefs didn't give him credit for getting there first. Others who didn't agree with him, didn't explain why.

I've given the book three stars because of its tone. And also, because, at this point all of that anger makes the book difficult to read.

On the other hand, he has a point, both about the scrolls themselves and the ruins which he believes was a fort, not the home of a pacifistic group. He also has a point that because what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls is almost any document that came out of a desert cave in what is now Israel it is unlikely that all of it came out of a single group of Jewish believers. If they did then we have a wealth of documents from a single, mostly unknown group, and nothing from any of the other groups who were much better known before 1947 when the first scrolls were found.

If you have interest in the scrolls you should read this book. It will change your mind. On the other hand, it is a long and sometimes tedious account, filled with many details. I'm not saying that they are unimportant, I'm just warning the reader that much of the text is rather -- dry and academic.

Professor Norman Golb presents a fascinating and persuasive study of the Dead Sea Scrolls with his book "Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scroll?" (1996). His is a compelling and well-resourced (with 25 pages of end notes and 9 pages of selected bibliography) argument proposing that Qumran was never a home for the ancient Essenes. He additionally suggests that those who think Qumran was a monastery for a single sect are mistaken. (Golb says the first generation of modern "Qumranologists" misunderstand Qumran's archaeological discoveries.)

Golb believes Qumran (in south central Israel, near the mouth of the Jordan River) was one of the country's many ancient fort locations. Built by the warrior king Alexander Jannaeus (about 90 BC) this fortification (only about 15 miles from Jerusalem) was strategically located to protect the Holy City's eastern approach. Golb recognizes the Qumran "scriptorium" as the probable military garrison's meeting hall, its 1200 grave cemetery as the likely causalities from the AD 70 Battle of Qumran (when the Romans destroyed its location), that the unearthed tower and ramp foundations are military structures, and that Fort Qumran was built halfway between Jerusalem and Fort Macherus (a typical ancient military tactic).

Golb's original analysis of Qumran doesn't stop with reviewing its military position. He also does not believe that the Qumran scrolls are "documents" (They have no author's name, dates of composition, nor locations for their compositions. Omitting all three of these characteristics is somewhat unusual in antiquity.) and prefers to term them simply "manuscripts". Believing that all the scrolls came to the wilderness for safe hiding from the Romans, he says that none of them were penned in Qumran. This supports his Fort Qumran theory (the scrolls were take to the area of a distant fort for their protection). Golb thinks the scrolls arrived from Jerusalem, which defines the scholarly "Jerusalem Origins Hypothesis" (pages 148-40).

Of particular interest is Golb's autobiographical narrative about arguing with other Dead Sea Scroll experts. Attempting to present the truth about Qumran, while adjusting its emerging history, he speaks to his disputes with the "Qumranologists". Through this disputive process Golb discovers and introduces perhaps a fourth ancient religio-politcal party- the "Yahad" (page 150)- autonomous from the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. The divisive quarrel with other Scrolls experts ends in a 1993 court decision with an Israeli judge ruling in favor of scholarly suppression of the Dead Sea Scrolls! Perhaps the whole truth about Qumran will never be known or told.

The book hosts a multitude of maps, black and white photos, drawings and data tables through its 461 paperback pages. This book is a gripping narrative. It convinces that Qumran is not all that we have been told. This book tells us more!

It is recommended to all history students, Bible studiers, teachers of antiquity, and Dead Sea Scroll buffs. It is an excellent gift candidate. Get your copy soon!

On page 10 Golb wrote, "Since no coins of the reign of Herod the Great (40-4 BC) were found in the excavation..." But De Vaux did find coins of Herod the Great, and reported this plainly, for instance on pages 22-23 of Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Later digs found Herod coins, also.) This is one example of inaccurate presentation of the facts. The book is not reliable factually, nor in its interpretations. Let's take a more complicated example, the text known as 4Q448. Golb's long section on this starts on page 256. Ada Yardeni discovered what had been overlooked by previous readers: this fragment mentioned King Jonathan, otherwise known as Alexander Jannaeus. So, most would agree, it has potential to tell us something about history. Golb wrote belittling the skills of Yardeni and her publication colleagues. Golb claims to give the right reading of the beginning of the poetry in which the king's name appears. I think a scholar or 2 or 3 accepted his reading for a while years ago, but I can't think of any scholar today who uses Golb's reading. Furthermore, 4Q448 is increasingly seen, not as Golb thought, as a hymn of praise of King Jonathan, but a condemnation of him. Then, not long after, Golb found that he agreed with Yardeni on the reading of an ostracon found at Qumran. He changed his tune, and had high praise of Yardeni as a skilled paleographer (as she is). So his interpretation of 4Q448 is unreliable.
Golb claimed the sequence of Qumran discoveries misled historians--but that is merely a non-falsifiable claim. Golb claims Qumran was a fort, but the walls are not fortified. Aside from a small skirmish in c. 68 CE between Romans and (probably) zealots who came after the Essenes fled east, there's no Hellenistic/Roman battle evidence. In fact, in most periods of history, Qumran was uninhabited, because it is not strategically located. Golb downplayed or ignored sectarianism. But the initiation described in the scrolls involves giving all one owns to the yahad--a big step--and this is also described of Essenes in Josephus War Book 2. Sadducees, according to Josephus, persuaded "few," and were an aristocratic group, smallest of the three probably. Sadducees are not known for writing books, except perhaps for a "Book of Decrees," which is not found at Qumran. Sadducees were Torah-only conservatives; they did not believe in named angels nor resurrection--teachings present at Qumran, and matching Essene teachings. Just as there are no Sadducee texts among the circa 900 Qumran texts, similarly, there are no Pharisee texts there: rather, the Qumran texts apparently belittle Pharisee oral tradition. Qumran texts disapprove of the temple administration (on purity and calendar practice, for example). The pro-Maccabee book 1 Maccabees, though likely available then in Hebrew, is totally absent at Qumran. Neither, in all the Qumran calendar texts, is there a single mention of the pro-Hasmonean festival of Hanukkah. Hirschfeld proposed locating Pliny's Essenes at a site uphill of Ein Gedi; among the many archaeologists unpersuaded by Hirschfeld's site are Magen and Peleg, and Magness and Amit. The best reading of Pliny locates Essenes on the "north-west shore" of the Dead Sea, as C.D. Ginsburg wrote in 1870, and as did several others before the scrolls came to light in 1948. Golb's book is out of date in regard to scholarship on Pliny, who never set foot in Judaea and who used a source on Essenes from the time of Herod the Great (for details see the online paper, "Rereading Pliny on the Essenes: Some Bibliographic Notes").
Of course not all the scrolls were penned at Qumran--though Qumran now has more inkwells than any other published site in the area and era--but who ever claimed that they were? Sure, some were brought from outside, likely including Jerusalem, but not all Jerusalem only, nor all at once. Golb's book never provides real evidence that the scrolls came at once from Jerusalem. It appears to be just a story of what he imagined or wished had happened. The book offers more about his sense of grievance than about history backed with evidence. Where's the evidence for his proposal? If the texts were deposited from Jerusalem libraries, why are there not marks of ownership for retrieval?
As is increasingly being realized, the Hebrew origin of the name Essenes is in the scrolls as a self-designation. That is, the many Greek spellings (e.g. Ossaioi) of what in English we call "Essenes" come from Hebrew, osey hatorah, observers of torah. Of course, the Pharisees and Sadducees would not call them that. But scholars through the centuries knew that this was the Hebrew origin; for example. Ph. Melanchthon, writing in 1532: Chronica...Wittenberg, 1532 f68v. "Essei / das ist / Operarii / vom wort Assa / das ist wircken." Here's a 1550 English version: The Thre Bokes of Cronicles...London. "The thirde were Essey, the whiche when they perceived that both the Phariseyes and Sadduceyes folowed their appetites under the coloure of honest titles, nether did ought in a maner that were worthy their profession: therfore semed it them good, to declare the straitnesse and severitie of lyfe with the dede, and would be called Essey, that is workers or doers, for Assa, whence the name Essey commeth, sygnifieth to worke..." The real opportunity for historians is to learn more about Qumran and Essenes, subjects which ineluctably overlap. Though there once was a problem getting access to the scroll texts, they are now all available. We have ancient text that (some of it as interpreted pre-1948) placed Essenes in the Qumran/Feshkha area; we have no ancient text that tells Golb's story that all the scrolls came from Jerusalem--(implausibly) during the siege--to Qumran, but texts that contradict that story (scrolls salvaged by Josephus in Jerusalem, others up in flames; hiding in Jerusalem, not outside; and items looted to Rome--remember the Arch of Titus, which shows items taken from the Temple to Rome). The theories excluding Essenes contradict one another; none is a viable alternative. Who Wrote these scrolls? Some of these scrolls, Essenes. For additional information on the relevant history, see the online paper, "Jannaeus, His Brother Absalom, and Judah the Essene."
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls *do* self-identify as Essenes. The evidence is in the scrolls and discussed in detail in Goranson, Stephen. "Others and Intra-Jewish Polemic as Reflected in Qumran Texts." In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, 2:534-551. Leiden, 1999, and in VanderKam's essay in that volume.