CHAPTER FOUR

THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNITY IN THE LIGHT OF RECENTLY AVAILABLE TEXTS

The topic I have been given is “The History of the Qumran Commu- nity.”1 This title implies as a starting point that there has been a Qumran Community. I fully agree with this starting point, and I do not think it is necessary to discuss here the theories that deny all connection between the scrolls and the people who lived in the Khirbet, such as the theory of Norman Golb who postulates that the scrolls come from different libraries of Jerusalem and that they represent the literature of the whole of the Judaism of the time.2 I think I refuted long ago the arguments put forth by Golb in his rst series of articles,3 and I have failed to discover any new solid piece of evidence to support his theory in his latest book, Who Wrote the Scrolls? 4 Suf ce it to say that Golb’s theory fails to

1 Paper read at the Copenhagen Qumran Seminar. I have kept the form of the oral presentation, adding only some bibliographical references. I want to thank the organiz- ers of the Seminar for the most congenial atmosphere in Schaeffergarden, all the partic- ipants for the animated and fruitful discussions, and especially Professor T.L. Thompson for the revision of my English text. 2 Among the various presentations of his hypothesis, I can list: N. Golb, “The Prob- lem of Origin and Identi cation of the ,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 1–24; “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?,” Biblical Archae- ologist 28 (1987): 68–82; “Les manuscrits de la mer Morte: Une nouvelle approche du problème de leur origine,” Annales ESC 1985, no 5, 1133–49: “Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?,” The Sciences (1987): 40–49; “The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Perspective,” The American Scholar 58 (1989): 177–207; “Khirbet Qumran and the Manuscripts of Judaean Wilderness: Observations on the Logic of their Investigation,” JNES 49 (1990): 103–14; “Die Entdeckungen in der Wüste Judäas—neue Erklärungsversuche,” in Qumran: Ein Symposion (ed. J.B. Bauer, J. Fink, and H.D. Galter; Grazer Theologische Studien, 15; Graz: Institut für ökumenische Theologie und Patrologie, 1993), 87–116; “Khirbet Qumran and the Manuscripts Finds of the Judaean Wilderness,” in Methods of Investiga- tion of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects (ed. M.O. Wise et al.; Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 722; New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), 51–70. 3 F. García Martínez and A.S. van der Woude, “A “Groningen” Hypothesis of Qum- ran Origins and Early History,” in The Texts of Qumran and the History of the Community. III. The History of the Community (ed. F. García Martínez; Paris: Gabalda, 1990), 521–41 [= RevQ 14/56 (1990): 521–41]. 4 N. Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of the Qumran Manu- scripts (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995). 68 chapter four explain the archaeological facts (such as the unprotected water supply, the presence of the cemeteries and so on), it is not compatible with the absence of compositions to which could be ascribed a Pharisaic origin, and it does not explain the homogeneous character of the collection as a whole or of the collection of each cave in spite of the diversity of compositions there included. In the words of Geza Vermes: “The soft underbelly of the Jerusalem hypothesis is revealed, apart from the pat- ent weakness of the archaeological interpretation, for Qumran is not a fortress, by the composition of the manuscript collection itself, de nitely pointing towards a sectarian library.”5 I do not think it necessary either to discuss the widely-publicized the- ories of R. Eisenman6 and B. Thiering.7 The chronological framework that these theories require has been completely disproved by the two latest Carbon 14 analyses of the manuscripts done with the Accelerator Mass Spectometry, the one done by the Institut fur Mittelenergiephysik of Zurich and published in 1991,8 and the one done by the Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility of the University of Arizona, Tucson, which will shortly be published, and which contained not only a larger number of samples but samples taken from historically more sensitive manuscripts such as 1QpHab, 4QpPsa, 4QSd and 4QDa,b. In my opinion, only four hypotheses need to be considered: three that in one way or another connect the community of Qumran with the , and a fourth that connects the community with the . The rst is the old hypothesis that simply identi es the community of Qumran with the Essenes; it was put forth rst by Sukenik,9 was devel- oped by Dupont-Sommer10 and Vermes,11 and adopted and established

5 G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (rev. [3d] ed.; London: SCM Press, 1994), 21. 6 R.H. Eisenman, Maccabees. Zadokites. Christian and Qumran. A New Hypothesis of Qum- ran Origins (StPB 34; Leiden: Brill, 1983); idem, James the Just in the Habakkuk “” (StPB 35; Leiden: Brill, 1986). 7 B.E. Thiering, Redating the (Australian and New Zealand Studies in Theology; Sydney: Theological Explorations, 1979); The Gospels and Qum- ran (Sydney: Theological Explorations, 1981); The Qumran Origins and the Christian Church (Sydney: Theological Explorations, 1983); the Man: A New Interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Doubleday, 1992). 8 G. Bonani, et al., “Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Atiqot 20 (1991): 27–32. 9 E.L. Sukenik, Megillot Genuzot I ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1948), 16–17. 10 A. Dupont-Sommer, Les écrits esséniens découverts près de la Mer Morte (4th ed.; Paris: Payot, 1983), 349–68. 11 In his various publications on the topic, since his dissertation of 1953, “Les manu-