The astonishing assortment of writings that are collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal, among many things, the ferment and formation that took place in Jewish religious and social life during the end of the Second Temple period. The findings include the earliest versions of many biblical books and the first known set of tefillin, alongside texts of religious teachings and worship previously unknown, as well as odd interpretations of Biblical prophets that have them foresee the rise of a charismatic, authoritative leader. Some of these scrolls suggest the existence of a kind of cult, a sub-group built around a revered teacher, such as a series of laws and rules for a community called Yachad; and the discovery of an archeological site near the caves where the scrolls were found led to the conclusion that these texts were collectively produced by a small Jewish cult located at Qumran, identified by some scholars with the ascetic movement known as the Essenes, described in Josephus.
Two influential mavericks who, in different ways, bucked the consensus of scholarship on these scrolls recently passed away. Hershel Shanks was a passionate amateur (a word that means “lover”), who, as a practicing lawyer, “caught the bug” of biblical archeology and scholarship when he spent a year in Israel with his wife and children. Upon his return, Shanks founded the magazine Biblical Archeology Review; for its first issue, he wrote every article! Despite its drab name, BAR became wildly successful as a popularizer of biblical scholarship and contentions, with over 250,000 paid subscribers in its heyday. Perhaps Shanks’s most significant contribution to the field was his campaign to open up access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which for several decades were closely guarded by a small coterie of scholars. Today, thanks in no small part to Shanks, the texts are all available online at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.
Norman Golb was a trained scholar and distinguished academic, whose primary focus was medieval Jewish history. Among other accomplishments, he discovered the earliest Jewish text from Kiev, early Jewish manuscripts from Rouen, and the author of the earliest known Jewish musical text. However, in mid-career he plunged into the Dead Sea Scrolls and developed a thesis for which he is perhaps best known, that the scrolls represent a library from Jerusalem that was hidden by refugees during the Roman siege of 70 CE. In his book Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?, Golb effectively, to my mind, demolished the theory that the enormous collection of manuscripts could have been written by a putative ascetic sect located in the settlement at the Qumran site. Despite his arguments, the Essene Qumranic origins hypothesis proceeds to this day virtually uncontested, in both popular and scholarly publications. (See the digital library cited above, for example.)
Footnote: Just this week, the Times published a story about what may be the most astonishing find in the history of biblical manuscripts. If not a forgery, the Shapira scroll is the only one dating from the First Temple and the sole attestation to the veracity of the Documentary Hypothesis. The original document, alas, is missing and may never be found. What a great topic for a book, novel or movie!
