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Re: orion response to RG, etc.

Dear Russell Gmirkin,
	We disagree on many things. Many of these have been stated before,
so I'll not retype them all at length here. I consider, generally, that you
ignore the relation of Qumran archaeology, the texts (which don't include
1,2 Macc), and the Essenes. Just a few footnotes for now. The or a TR could
be associated with Qumran; I merely said, this time, you had not excluded
this. To argue that my view of MMT as Essene is a minority view (is it? I'm
not sure) and thus dismiss it is odd in a defense of your own minority
proposal. Both of our current reconstructions include elements raised in
the 1950s; you write as if some of your hypotheses have not been answered
long ago. I was under the impression that Philip Davies had asked  you, and
commented about,  Hellenism, M's date, and other matters on orion; If I am
mistaken, my apologies. If my asking you to respond to John Kampen's book
on Hasideans and i,2 Macc is inappropriate or irrelevant, my apologies. I
can understand that you currently wish to devalue etymology, since the
texts tell us they are Essene, by etymology and other ways as well, and,
after centuries of dominance, since JJ Scaliger in 1582 declared the
etymology from 'asah a "hallucination" and supported HSY (before recanting
in a less-read text) the support for Essene via HSY is finally fading
(according to my unscientific sampling). I thought you should first show
why Maccabees is relevant, not for the history of its times, which no one I
know doubts, but for the (Essene) Qumran texts, which have a different
worldview. You have preferred, so far, not to do this. It appears that you
adopt Macc as your worldview for the time. What it considers good and bad
you accept and then project onto the Qumranites/Essenes. But there were
various Jewish views then.  This is your right, indeed, but an iffy
procedure for a historian. Until you deal with the gap in perspective and
your dismissal and shelving of what we know about Qumran , what's the point
of long posts with more emphasis on rhetoric and spin than relevance?  If
you can satisfy the former, then we could move to the latter; for just one
example, you say your scenario matches the scrolls but, according to 2 Macc
4,  it was not Menelaus who killed Onias, but Andronicus.
	sincerely,
Stephen Goranson  goranson@duke.edu
P.S. Some on orion find the reality of the Essene relationship to the
Qumran texts and site inconvenient for their purposes and have asked for
silence on the subject. Shelfing the Essenes, or relocating them, or
redating them out of the way of one's preferred view of history, may or may
not persuade some on orion, but it hardly speaks for the vitality,
integrity, and coherence of the intellectual positions of those who resort
to such strategies.
P.P.S I suggest that the similarities between the intiation procedures in
Serek ha-yahad and that reported (via a sorce) in Josephus War 2 (and also
reflected in a Qumran ostracon) are exceedingly similar and of a high
degree of significance, so I disagree with Prof. A. Baumgarten on that
point. Orion readers, can, of course, read Serek hayahad and Josephus,
compare  these with anything else available, including the references
provided by A. Baumgarten, and decide for themselves. I would be interested
in hearing who thinks they are remarkably similar, and who not. Shall we
have an open and free discussion on this question?