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Re: orion Re: Source Diversity for DSS

Jim West wrote:

> At 12:12 PM 7/23/97 -0500, you wrote:
> >Dave andFellow listers:
> >
> >    I would like to discuss the possibility of source diversity for
> the
> >various cave deposits.
> >What archaeological evidence supports all of the deposits having been
>
> >made in the same
> >general time period by the same group?
>
> What are the odds that they weren't?  Of all the caves, holes, and
> crevices
> in Palestine, are we to believe that different groups, at different
> times,
> happened to deposit materials of great similarity (considering the
> wide
> spectrum of possible materials) in one geographical location???

    When you say of  "great similarity" aren't you speaking only of
thesectarian material?  Couldn't the biblical texts and such as Aramaic
Levi
come from different sources?  There are some strong indications that
the copper scroll (3Q15) was an independent addition to cave 3 and
not by the Essenes...perhaps not at the same time.  It was not
associated
with the leather scrolls in the cave, written in a "village dialect"
unlike
any of the other scrolls and an orthography unlike any of the rest of
the materials...or anything else we know of, for that matter.

    Doesn't the copper scroll answer your rhetorical question?

> >  Much of the texts may have been
> >removed from
> >some of the caves in antiquity, with texts considered "less relevant"
>
> >left in the caves by
> >those who retrieved them.
>
> Did they read 'em in the caves and then decide which ones they wanted?

    If they were the ones who hid them to begin with, they would not
haveto read them.  Since scrolls had been discovered in the caves in
antiquity
as well, I doubt that the discoverers left them there.  How much of the
complete
scroll caches do we really have?

> It seems virtually unreasonable to suppose anything other than that
> the
> inhabitants of the ruins hid their libraries in the caves of the area
> as the
> Roman legion approached Masada.
>

    This we can save for later...gotta run.

Jack Kilmon
jpman@accesscomm.net