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Re: orion Re: moderator & Kilmon posts

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Stephen Goranson wrote:

> 1)      Jack Kilmon wrote: "I was under the impression...that Pliny
> was
> speaking/writing in the 1st  person from his excursion at a time when
> Qumran was in ruins."
>         Dear Jack Kilmon, I have written about this before and cited
> bibliography (available in the archives), so I'll be brief. I think
> Pliny's
> written source was M. Agrippa, writing circa 15 BCE.  But, my views
> aside,
> Pliny scholarship has corrected a mistaken view (based on an
> inscription
> misread over 100 years ago) that Pliny was in Judaea. Pliny scholars
> have
> shown that Pliny was not in Judaea.  Pliny compiled his book from
> written
> sources. His source here was from the time of Herod the Great. One
> indication of this, as shown by Menahem Stern, is that En Gedi was not
>
> listed as a toparchy in Pliny, but was in the later list in Josephus
> War
> 3.55. That's because, as Pliny's source wrote, En Gedi was destroyed
> (namely in c. 40 BCE). Only after the time of Herod the Great was it
> rebuilt sufficiently to be  listed as a toparchy. Qumran scholars
> sometimes
> repeated the error that Pliny visited Qumran, so you may have read
> that
> error. Many people, including myself until not long ago, repeated
> another
> error: that Pliny updated his written account to note the 66-74 CE
> war. But
> he didn't. That he didn't say Masada was destroyed is one indication
> of
> that. Further, reading Pliny to locate Essenes west of En Gedi fails
> both
> the text and the archaeology. I have submitted an article on the
> subject,
> and should it be accepted, I can supply the reference later.

    I will look forward to the article and reference.  I am interestedin
any archaeological or epigraphic evidence that there was an Essene
community at Qumran.  If we accept this, it is still not a given that
the site was the *primary* origin of the texts.  If the temple was the
primary origin, I would expect to see more diversity in the non-biblical

texts.  My vote still goes to the Essene Quarter of Jerusalem and the
possibility that the texts were tranported to Qumran temporarily to
"prepare them" for storage in the caves...perhaps placing the scrolls
in the jars there...for which their is a bit of archaeological evidence.

This would explain the many hands, the proximity to the caves and
the similar shards found at Qumran II.

Jack

--
D’man dith laych idneh d’nishMA nishMA
   Jack Kilmon (jpman@accesscomm.net)


 http://users.accesscomm.net/scriptorium