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orion Orion: Arch, palaeography
1. Brad Harrison has good comments regarding interpretation of
the site at Qumran. Isn't it a scandal that there is no published
excavation report--the section drawings, the pottery, the inscriptions
(!), et al from Qumran? And as Jodi Magness said at the recent
Jerusalem conference, she is able to look at the stuff--that is not
the problem--but she can't talk about it, can't use it, can't comment
on it in publication, because that cannot be done without violating
someone's third- or fourth- generation inherited proprietary rights
over unpublished materials. What insights might someone like
Brad be making and reporting right now--if there was access
to this primary information. Is there something more productive
that anyone can do about this other than wait for God to act?
2. On palaeography, Davies is right: this high-precision
palaeographic date estimation done routinely in DJD editions for
Qumran texts is very bizarre. Cross's date estimates published in
1961 are used unchanged today. If this was real science there would
be engagement with the data and modifications of those date peg
estimates. I found one case of an engagement with Cross's script date
estimates on the basis of data, but it seems to have attracted no notice.
Puech in 1983 (RB 90: 481-533) discussed Inscription A of the Tomb
of Jason. Puech reports a reading of "the 22nd year". Rejecting
the possibility of JHrcI for other reasons, Puech concluded on what seem
to be good grounds that this writing is therefore dated in the 22nd year
of Alexander Jannaeus, or 81 BCE. But the script compares to types
which are dated in Cross's script charts at 50-25 BCE. Puech commented,
"On devrait remonter un peu toute la chronologie relative habituellement
acceptee pour cette periode" (p. 495) ("it is necessary to raise a little
the palaeographic dating chronology customarily accepted for this
period")--presumably by the c. 25-50 years difference from Cross's date
estimates. Of course it might be objected that this is only one piece of data.
But this one dated piece of writing happens to be 100 percent of the
absolutely dated exemplars known for this century. So the question
comes down to: which is to be preferred--palaeographic date estimates
for a century of scripts on the basis of one dated item (the Tomb of Jason),
or palaeographic estimates for 1st BCE scripts on the basis of
comparison with no dated items from the century at all (Cross 1961)?
Greg Doudna