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Re: orion Re: Cave 4 shelving
Virgil Brown wrote:
> Fred,
>
> >the "shelving", if there was any, is that someone reused it for some
> >other purpose. If the occasion was a temporary occupation of the site
> >by refugees, or whatever, the shelving may have ended up as firewood.
> >Alternatively, it may even have been removed prior to the deposition
> >of the texts...
>
> If there had been shelving, would a middle age visitor be likely
> to pull out the lumber and save the scrolls? Why not throw them into the
> fire as well?
I was wondering this myself. Nevertheless, with his last line Fred
more or less went where I was headed with my questions. I would like
to hypothesize that the shelves were gone before the scrolls ever saw
the inside of the cave. That seems a much more likely scenario to me
than the idea that wooden planks rotted away without a trace while
leather scraps hung around waiting to be found. Hence, I will toss
this idea out for discussion if anybody is interested.
The matter of jars in the cave, though, is somewhat more problematic.
Could someone give some bib info that I could check out? Someone
(Fred?) said that the Bedouin said there were jar fragments in there;
is their word all we have, were any more found when the scroll
fragments were being collected, how certain are we that they are of
the same type as the "scroll jars" of cave 1, etc. etc. etc. ?
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
Scholarese, n. A dialect that consists entirely of
multiverbal circumlocutions and polysyllabic verbiages.