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Re: orion Hirschfeld implications

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Fred Cryer wrote:

>There is such a lot of freight that that poor site in Qumran is being made
>to bear. At last summerīs summit in Jerusalem, Josef Patrich, of Haifa
>Univ., maintained that the dwellings in Qumran that can be shown to have
>been inhabited in the first CE as opposed to storage and production
>facilities only leave room for a settlement consisting of ca. 12-15 people.
>Jodi Magness, predictably, disagreed with him, but thatīs not my point. My
>point is we shouldnīt run the risk of stretching the interpretation of a
>given site in order to shoehorn some theory or other about the texts into
>agreement...
>
>Fred Cryer

Prof. Joseph Partich has indeed said and written many interesting and
informative things about Qumran. Here are two quotations from Prof.
Patrich, from BAR Jan/Feb 1998, pages 33 and 83, respectively:

PATRICH: We are not balanced, because three of us claim that Qumran is a
sectarian [religious] site, and Yizhar [Hirschfeld] believes it served
another function.
	I want to add another pecularity at Qumran--the large halls. [....]
	Another factor is the large hall that served as a dining room
[number 77], especially with such a quantity of tableware located
nearby.[....] In my opinion, this dining room is another feature that
points to the sectarian nature of the site.
***
SHANKS: Yossi [Patrich], you too have said Qumran is a sectarian site. Do
you avoid identifying the sect as Essene?
PATRICH: This is a difficult issue. The question has to do partially with
archaeology but mainly with comparing what we know from literary sources
about the Essenes--Josephus, Philo, Pliny--and what we know of the sect
reflected in the scrolls. Altogether, there are many similarities, and I
would say that the Dead Sea sect residing in Qumran was a kind of Essene
group.

regards,
Stephen Goranson
goranson@duke.edu