Of course, Ian Young, I do not exclude Jerusalem as *one* possible
source of some Qumran mss. (To use your phrasing, I do not "...take
Jerusalem...out of the picture....") But, so far, I find no evidence that
*all* of the mss--nor even any particular one of them--came from there.
You raised the question why these mss were collected. Simple:
Essene sectarians. Since the scrolls are an Essene sectarian collection,
there is no one geographic source; rather, the source was a group of Jewish
people, variously located, including at Qumran.
By the way, you use the term "enigma." Authors or publishers
sometimes put such words in DSS titles. For example: Norman Golb, Who Wrote
the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Search for *the Secret* of Qumran (my stars). But
is there a "the secret"? Surely, there are many uanswered questions, and
even, for example, "cryptic" scripts. But to say there is a secret, one of
them, may not be a useful a priori. Essenes lived there; we need not by
main force ignore them in order to "solve" a "secret." Essenes, 'osey
hatorah. (By the way, see the current JAOS for an interesting note on an
esoteric Babylonian text, maybe Persian period, compared to Qumran texts,
with an interesting phrase concerning keeping or observing or watching.)
A few other notes. The scrolls, or fragments, that we see are
merely what was extant there, survived, and was found. Some texts, very
likely, were taken away from Qumran, anciently. Zealots were active in the
area in 68, Josephus wrote. Essenes probably fled from Qumran, some of
them, with some scrolls, to the East of the Jordan. The Copper Scroll was
left, I have suggested as a possibility, because it was an outdated list of
future-temple-hoped deposits. Epiphanius tells us Essenes and Ossenes
survived east of the Jordan and east of the Dead Sea (and cf the earlier
"land of Damascus" move).
A jar which de Vaux reported was like Qumran "scroll jars" was
found in a later burial in Quweilbeh, Abila, Jordan. That is a rare
parallel; regetably now misplaced (?). (By the way, cf texts on parchment
and millet seeds in a hermetically sealed stone jar in Kurdistan (J. of
Hellenic Studies 1915). And inkwells, in that Jordan tomb chamber. And in a
"third century A.D." burial in the area see the wall painting, "Woman
writing in a codex." That is getting perhaps far afield. Yet recall women
leaders of Ossenes. And recall Qumran Testimonia. Admittedly, that 'codex"
looks more like a notebook than a bound-leaf page collection (p. 64, A.
Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus, 2000).
In any case, perhaps consider Essenes, and them taking some texts.
best,
Stephen Goranson
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