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orion Orion: Ib and II dating
> Mr. Hutchesson continues to insist on a seventy or so year gap in
Qumran
> settlement, though very few Qumran mss are absolutly dated by internal
> evidence. Again I invite him to read J. Magness (DSD 2, 1995, 58-65) and
> other archaeological analyses and then to present the complete data.
> Many of the Qumran loci were used for the same purposes in Ib and in II
> which points to the same group using them after the fire. Again, the
> coin evidence, radiocarbon dating, pottery types and dates do not bear
> out his claim. Pliny's source (Marcus V. Agrippa, I think [JJS 45, 1994,
> 295-98]) wrote about Qumran as inhabited during this proposed gap. I see
> no point in long exchanges based on misinformation. (Yes Ezekiel is
> about the temple. Was it then necessarily written in Jerusalem?)
>
> Stephen Goranson goransons@uncwil.edu
Stephen raises the level of discourse on this list even
when there is disagreement, as here. Ian's seventy-year gap
in all likelihood errs only in being still too conservative.
There is no evidence for 1b ending after 63 BCE and no
evidence for II starting before mid-1st CE. The gap is
likely over a century, De Vaux's
early constructions notwithstanding. J. Magness's article,
for all its erudition, is still caught within poorly-supported
De Vaux constructions. A long gap, no continuity between the
habitation periods, and almost all of the major activity at
Qumran (the Loc 30 furniture, the inkwells, the animal
bone deposits, the jars buried in the floors, the major pottery
production, the Loc 89 pottery store, the "yachad" inscription
found in a 1b dump outside a wall of Qumran) . . . this is all
1B. 1B! Period II is some kind of short-lived resettlers
perhaps mid-1st CE who do not occupy the whole place
but basically clear out only enough
rooms and do enough remodeling to be functional, and then the
place is flooded with refugees about the time of the first
Revolt, including spillover into refugees camping in caves.
There is _no_ evidence of a fire ending 1b as De Vaux claimed
and as Magness assumes as well. There is a fire c. 68 CE, but
there is not a single locus in the Humbert and Chambon publication
of De Vaux's exacavation notes in which the two alleged fire
levels exist, 1b and then II, on top of one another. 1b was ended
neither by earthquake or a fire but rather (from all indicators) it
was an abandonment. Furthermore, once the earthquake is disconnected
from the end of 1b, there is no other reason to be in the
30's BCE at all for 1b's end. Instead of going with the evidence
toward an earlier end of 1b, Magness went forward to 4 BCE based
principally on the single coin of Archeleus in a 1b dump. This is
untenable for a number of reasons, principally the fact that there is
only one such coin later than Jannaeus in that dump (instead of
multiple coins), and secondly the absence of Herodian lamps in that
dump. Neither does the Archeleus coin date anything to the time of
Archeleus as both De Vaux and Magness assumed; rather it is
explicable as derivative from a later mid-1st CE resettlement and
housecleaning.
Finally on Pliny's Essenes, Pliny's Essenes do sound
like a legend of Qumran, but this, like the Qumran yachad ostracon,
would be 1b Qumran. How can Stephen show Pliny's Essenes are dated
in the second half of the 1st BCE, as distinguished from a
legend of earlier "Essenes" existing at that time?
1b is where the action is. It was not possible to question
De Vaux until the publication of Humbert and Chambon. Magness'
recent review of the H and Ch De Vaux notes correctly points
out much information that is still hard to get at in this
publication, but there is so much that now is available.
There was nothing insincere about De Vaux,
but the problem is everyone has been taking De Vaux's word on what
De Vaux said his excavations showed, without the ability to check
the evidence itself. Consequently De Vaux, like Cross, could
correctly refute any budding critics with the completely correct
putdown that they
did not know what they were talking about (since they could not
see the unpublished evidence). Now, however, De Vaux's
notes first published in 1994 can be used to check De Vaux's 1950's
constructions.
Greg Doudna
Research Associate
U. of Copenhagen Dead Sea Scrolls Initiative