Dear George Brooks,
I wrote:
"It is quite possible that Pliny's source _believed_ the Essenes
practiced adoption ... Whether Pliny's source had accurate information or not
is another question; whether he was even concerned with accuracy is yet
another; his presentation is more literary and paradoxical than factual."
You replied:
"Do you **really** intend to dismiss out of hand the historicity of
Essenes adopting ANY children? ... I can understand your belief that a
kernel of a story became a myth for complete celibacy. But now you are
saying "oh, by the way, there is no kernel either."
There may be a case that the Essenes practiced celibacy and/or adoption.
If so, it would come out of Josephus and Philo. My main point above was that
the passage in Pliny was of questionable accuracy due to its literary genre
(paradoxography) and its tendency to model the Essenes as the mirror opposite
of Biblical Sodom. By questioning its accuracy, I did not mean to definitely
assert its inaccuracy on the point of adoption: I was raising questions, not
asserting answers.
Speaking briefly on Josephus and Philo, Josephus' source seems to rely on
1QS, but 1QS (and the scrolls generally) do not refer to the practice of
adoption, and 1QSa, obviously from the same group as 1QS, is explicit on the
age a young man could get married, the role of women judicially, etc. So
there is room to suggest perhaps Josephus' source misunderstood 1QS. If
Philo, Josephus, Pliny all trace back to Nicolas of Damascus' writings on the
Essenes, as seems likely, then Nicolas' error could have affected all these
sources. So it is possible that all three sources may assert something in
common and yet be in error, as the three sources may not be independent, but
potentially copying from the same incorrect tradition.
So it is possible that, yes, all three may be incorrect with respect to
Essene celibacy (and hence adoption). The authors of the Serekh texts 1QS,
1QSa weren't celibate (except when going out to war - see 1QM). On the other
hand, the Essenes of Herod's day (Nicolas wrote after 16 BCE or so) lived a
long time after the authors of 1QS, so their practices may have been
different. So I am on the fence on the accuracy of late descriptions of
Essenes, at least for now.
Best regards,
Russell Gmirkin
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