[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: orion Orion: Ib and II dating

Dear Greg,

Howdy. Good to hear from the cold north.

>Ian's seventy-year gap
>in all likelihood errs only in being still too conservative.  

Ooh, yus, I was being conservative because I was too lazy to think about the
evidence for longer. After all there were 91 procuratorial coins (though 33
were Neronian), meaning post-6 CE, but I don't have any finer detail on the
matter.

>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!

But these are hard facts, Greg.

>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.

Oh, but how did it get there, Greg? Didn't grow legs and walk.

I guess judging the contents of that fill from one coin is like judging the
full importance of the dss based on the serendipity of the order of document
finds and releases.

"Eh, Moshe, let's confuse the hell outta them archaeo-whatsits when they
come along in a few millenia by burying this 'ere contemporary coin from
that good-for-nothing cheapskate Archelaus down 'ere where that old garbage
dump was."

>Finally on Pliny's Essenes, Pliny's Essenes do sound 
>like a legend of Qumran,

This is only possible if you make some a priori case for the document's
locational evidence. (Now, if the early dating of the end of 1b is correct,
then the Essene hypothesis is totally, inexorably irrelevant (most, if not
all, documents were already written, and I think deposited), and the
connection of the Essenes to Qumran would be an inconsequential deadend.)

>How can Stephen show Pliny's Essenes are dated 
>in the second half of the 1st BCE,

He (like the many others) has not shown any concrete connection between
Pliny's Essenes and Qumran.

>as distinguished from a 
>legend of earlier "Essenes" existing at that time? 

This begs too much, I think, Greg. Let one make some viable connection
between Pliny's Essenes and Qumran first.

>1b is where the action is.

And I love it.

Yours,

Ian