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Re: orion: DSS pottery
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It strikes me that it is amazingly naive to imagine that something as
distinctive as a pottery type which seems to have been attested, if
sparsely, in disparate sites in a large region, should have existed for
only a short period of time. The jars in question will have been produced
for a considerable period of time. Only *one* of the contexts in which they
were found reveals a useful stratigraphy, namely in the Period I floors in
the Khirbet. That will of course not be able to tell us the date of
production and/or use of jars found in locales, such as the caves, which
lack stratigraphic information. Some Herodian lamps have been found in the
caves, too, which tells us, obviously, that people visited the caves during
the Herodian period. Well, the caves were apparently also visited by Jewish
searchers around 800 CE, according to the letter of Timothy I, and we know
that Muhammed ed-Dhib et al. also investigated them in 1947 and later. Why
anyone imagines they remained hermetically sealed and preserved until our
times is a mystery to me. Of course, it is *easier* to work with a theory
with only a few variables, but that doesn't argue well for its
verisimilitude.
Fred Cryer