Stephen
Excuse this interruption but I honestly have several questions which
I have wondered about for a long time, (almost 40 years), so here they are:
1). Have all of the Scrolls been carbon dated? If not, when?
2). Until all have been carbon dated, can we speculate anything?
3). There were multiple caves. Will we have to make a statement
regarding each cave? or will one blanket statement suffice?
(Could one cave have belonged to the Essenes, one to the Zealots
one to the Onias followers and one to "others" etc).
4). Why were some caves, apparently, with shelves and others a mess?
5). Can we presume the local tribes used the scrolls for firewood,
or otherwise destroyed other scrolls over the centuries, as is
mentioned in regards to the Nag Hammadi texts?
I hope I have not belabored the point. So many questions. So much to
read and so few answers for my questions.
Thank you for your patience.
Dick Ferman
On Sat, 26 Jul 1997, Stephen Goranson wrote:
> Tom Simms wrote that the median of the date measurements for AMS C14
> dates of tested Qumran manuscripts is 65 BCE. That corresponds to what I
> wrote (or at least it very, very closely corresponds; I said almost half
> of the ranges were post-63 BCE; for an exact number one would need to
> decide whether to exclude texts of uncertain provenance, etc.) For
> conversation's sake and for the sake of civility :-), I'll assume your
> date is correct.
> My *point* remains the same with either presentation of the data--or,
> more importantly, with the scientific journals' reports of the data
> (which anyone can read in Radiocarbon and 'Atiqot articles; and anyone
> can make a chart combining the results).
> Whether the precise numbers for the median and the mean are 65 or 63
> or so is a small difference. The *point* of my post was: what does this
> mean mean? Or, more precisely, what does the range of date probabilities
> mean? It means or shows--contrary to what posts by you and others have
> declared--that the Qumran scrolls cannot have been all deposited before
> 63 BCE or so. Or to be more precise: the data indicate that the chances
> of such a date of deposit are vanishingly small.
> Stephen Goranson
>