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.

The "Essenes wrote (the) Dead Sea Scrolls?" - I'd like to know what, exactly, an Essene is? As a student of ancient history I was fortunate enough to work with the Belgian scholar Baduion Descharneaux (I hope he can forgive the spelling) on the horoscope scroll found in 4QA. It is a horoscope in the style of a typical Greek horoscope of the first century, if you will. That it matches some description of the Messiah is not stated. It could quite easily be an, albeit, odd, representation of the concept of a longed for 'hero', or align itself to the typical Greek classical notion that the past was glorious, the present is bad, and the future is only going to get worse - except.... Perhaps it conveys some hope. Maybe, even, it is Jewish in intention? Who knows.

What it is not, is a work generated, or even venerated, by any kind of Jewish group, that I know of, opposed to the Roman or the Greek world. It denies two theories. Firstly, these were not the writings of a sectarian, so called Essene, community. Secondly, it is doubtful that this group hid the scrolls and went on to die on Masada - if the writings belonged to their corpus of literature, why would zealots have ever had such a scroll as this Greek-style horoscope in their keep. This is why Strugnel's hypothesis (Essenes) makes no sense, but also why Eisenman's, equally, lacks validity.

The monastic style Essene is alien to the world of first century Palestine, but what is not, I think, is something more simple and more human. The notion of preservation. Trouble is brewing. 'Let's put what is most important somewhere safe'. That is it. And that means as much of it as we can. Nobody vetted these manuscripts, this explains the diversity of scrolls, they just took, over a relatively short period of time, what they could lay their hands on - probably with some degree of powerful patronage - and squirelled it away. The patron did not survive and the others said nothing as they had been charged to do. Whoever that patron was he is the DeMedici of that time, surely.

I believe two points bear this theory out: The inacessibility of the caves and the care and time taken to store the scrolls, which was time consuming and ultimately a destructive element. In essence, I believe, this was purely and simply and act of preservation by persons, historically, unknown.

The fault of modernist historians is that they inherently believe that the bigger the find the more important it has to have been as an event in the past. This is nonsense. Why should the hiding of the scrolls belong to a particular important group, rather than what I have described. Certainly it should correlate to a period of strife, but why anything, in terms of identity, more than that.

All history is subjective interpretation, however, imaginations run wild when it comes to finding something big. This is childish, like children believing fools gold is real, and then saying that this place was where miners used to live in tents. What comes next are stories about those 'actual' miners.