I was surprised to see Slate's deputy editor David Plotz asserting as fact (rather than a hotly disputed topic of controversy) that "Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls." As is now well known, an entire series of major historians and archaeologists have concluded that Khirbet Qumran was never inhabited by any sect, that the scrolls are the remains of libraries from the Jerusalem region, and that they contain writings of many different groups in ancient Judaism. See, among other works, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? by University of Chicago historian Norman Golb, Qumran in Context by Yizhar Hirschfeld, and the report by the official Israel Antiquites Authority team led by Drs. Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, available at <link>. See also, e.g., The Three Temples by Rachel Elior of the Hebrew University, who has identified a corpus of around 100 scrolls which, according to her, were demonstrably written by Temple priests in Jerusalem.

Surely Mr. Plotz is aware of these research developments, which have been widely reported on in the New York Times and other major news sources; or, if he is not aware, he ought to have done his homework. What we have here, in fact, is a field of scholarship polarized between two salient theories, and it seems highly inappropriate for a journalist to casually take sides in such a debate as Mr. Plotz has done.

I must also point out that Slate has had not a single word to say about a developing scandal involving the collaboration between American "science" museums and members of the old Dead Sea Scrolls monopoly, who have created a series of exhibits from which the opponents of the Qumran-Essene theory are systematically excluded (see Norman Golb's editorial on the matter at <link>). These exhibits violate basic scientific norms, and one would expect a publication like Slate to take an interest in the matter. For further details, see <link> and the other sources linked there.

Finally, it must be mentioned that the creators of these exhibits and of the "documentary" films being shown in them are, for the most part, Christian scholars, with ties, in several instances, to Evangelical "educational institutions" (see <link>
for one notable example).

Thus, Mr. Plotz says he has no religious agenda, but the exhibitors apparently do. One would expect a more discerning approach to current controversies in the field of "bible scholarship" than the amateurish, and religiously slanted, views presented as fact by Mr. Plotz.