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Re: Are 1000 scribes too many? was Re: DSS Scribes


Fred, are there really people who still think that most of the scrolls
found in the caves had to be produced at Qumran?  I'm not sure that
you're not tilting at windmills.  In any case, I would insist that 
the archaeology of the site necessitates (1) that the scrolls from caves
4-10 be associated with the people who lived at Kh. Qumran, and (2) that
Kh. Qumran functioned as a religious site from 2nd century BCE until
at least 66 CE.  
Cheers,
Bill Schniedewind
UCLA

On Mon, 11 Nov 1996, Frederick Cryer wrote:

> With respect to the suggestions by Moshe Schulman and others as to 
> the putative "high turnover" of residents in Qumran:
> What we are witnessing here is a classical example of the ad hoc 
> embroidery on an hypothesis that has no other function than to "save 
> the appearances", i.e., to make room in the hypothesis for data which 
> are uncongenial to it. The example used by Thomas Kuhn in his fine 
> study of *The Copernican Revolution* is the addition of cycles and 
> epicycles to the planetary motions specified by Ptolemaic astronomy, 
> after observation showed that the strict Ptolemaic model was unable 
> to account for planetary movement in detail. Such an adjustment made 
> it possible to continue to adhere to the Ptolemaic scheme, but at the 
> cost of making the model more complex than the competing theory of 
> Copernicus.
> Here we have a single didactic "given" which a number of scholars are 
> unwilling to abandon, namely the idea that whatever society dwelled 
> in the settlement was responsible for the production of the scrolls 
> found in the caves. At every turn, new information makes this view 
> increasingly problematical--not, I hasten to say, impossible. But at 
> the moment it is astonishingly complex, and I urge scholars to ponder 
> whether it is worth adhering to, or whether it might not be a better 
> idea to rethink the basic model.
> 
> Fred Cryer
> Assoc. Prof./Research
> Univ. of Copenhagen
> fc@teol.ku.dk
> 
>