To supplement Ian Young's comments on the Jerusalem origin of the scrolls, Hershel Shanks in _Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls_ (1998), pp. 134-141 has this lucid assessment: "... it seems extremely unlikely unlikely that a relatively small wilderness settlement like Qumran would have its own exclusive library of more than eight hundred scrolls ... this would have been an enormous library in ancient times ... that the scrolls were not written at Qumran is also suggested by the extremely large number of scribal hands ... while no systematic study has yet been made, scholars have identified only three scribal hands that appear in more than one scroll. Together, those three wrote fewer than a dozen scrolls. [and here Orion is cited in a footnote, and lo and behold, I see my name!--GD] Undoubtedly these numbers will increase with further study, but nonetheless, the fact that hundreds of scribes produced these documents tends to refute the notion that they were produced at Qumran ... If the library was brought to Qumran, as seems likely, given the variety of scribal hands and the number of documents, there is little doubt that it came from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was obviously the place, a day's walk from Qumran, where a library of this magnitude would be maintained." Shanks goes on to propose that all of the scrolls, as a library, came from Jerusalem at the time of the First Revolt for safekeeping, from either the Essenes of Jerusalem 'or perhaps some other group whom we cannot identify'. Interestingly, Shanks contrasts this Jerusalem origin view to what he says is Golb's temple-library origin for the scrolls, but actually Golb does not propose a temple-library origin. (That was Rengstorf.) Golb has the libraries of various groups in Jerusalem, which would include Jerusalem Essenes. So Shanks and Golb both have Essene texts going from Jerusalem to Qumran. Golb just has a lot of non-Essene texts too. Greg Doudna For private reply, e-mail to "Greg Doudna" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from Orion, e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: "unsubscribe Orion." Archives are on the Orion Web site, http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il.
