The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed.

Jodi Magness

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462419
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title and winner of the Biblical Archaeology Society's Publication Award for Best Popular Book on Archaeology

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been described as the most important archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. Deposited in caves surrounding Qumran by members of a Jewish sect who lived at the site in the first century BCE and first century CE, they provide invaluable information about Judaism in the last centuries BCE.

Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran site continues to be the object of intense scholarly debate. In a book meant to introduce general readers to this fascinating area of study, veteran archaeologist Jodi Magness provides an overview of the archaeology of Qumran that incorporates information from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other contemporary sources.

Magness identifies Qumran as a sectarian settlement, rejecting other interpretations including claims that Qumran was a villarustica or manor house. By carefully analyzing the published information on Qumran, she refines the site's chronology, reinterprets the purpose of some of its rooms, andreexamines archaeological evidence for the presence of women and children in the settlement. Numerous photos and diagrams give readers a firsthand look at the site.

Considered a standard text in the field for nearly two decades, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls is revised and updated throughout in its second edition in light of the publication of all the Dead Sea Scrolls and additional data from Roland de Vaux's excavations, as well as Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg's more recent excavations. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will find here an overview of the Qumran site and the Dead Sea Scrolls that is both authoritative and accessible.

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to the Archaeology of Qumran

Qumran is one of the most famous and remarkable archaeological sites in the world. It is famous because of its physical proximity to the caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. It is remarkable because without that association it probably would never have attracted much attention. Every day, busloads of tourists are unloaded at the site. Many of them must be disappointed, for after having heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls and having visited Herod’s visually stunning palaces at Masada earlier that day, they find themselves at a small, unimpressive ruin (see Fig. 9). The main attraction is Cave 4, which is easily visible from the site (see Fig. 2) and which many visitors must mistake for the cave in which the first scrolls were discovered (Cave 1). Cave 4 is a humanmade cave cut into the marl terrace on which Qumran sits (see below), whereas Cave 1 is a natural cave in the limestone cliffs a little over one kilometer (over half a mile) to the north and is not visible or easily accessible from the site.

Qumran was not a major tourist attraction before the late 1980s. When I worked as a guide in the Dead Sea region in the late 1970s, Qumran was virtually deserted. The only visitors’ facilities consisted of a crude shelter next to the ruins (open on all sides, with wooden benches under a reed roof) and a lone vendor from Jericho who sold cold drinks from a portable cart. Today, a huge, air-conditioned tourist center (with extensive souvenir shop, restaurant, and snack concession) dominates the entrance to the site. The admission fees (collected by a friendly Israel Parks Authority employee in an air-conditioned booth) include the viewing of a short film about Qumran.

Qumran’s popularity is largely the result of increased public awareness of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Much of this came about during the 1980s, when scandals surrounding delays due to alleged Vatican or scholarly conspiracies were widely publicized by the media. By the early 1990s, all the Dead Sea Scrolls had been “freed”—that is, all the scrolls, even those that were still unpublished, were made accessible to everyone. This pretty much put an end to the conspiracy theories surrounding the scrolls. At the same time, the controversies surrounding Qumran were just beginning.

Until the 1980s, the interpretation proposed by Roland de Vaux (who directed the excavations at Qumran in the 1950s) was widely accepted among scholars. According to this interpretation, the site of Qumran was inhabited by the same community that deposited the scrolls in the caves. These people were members of a Jewish sect that de Vaux and others identified with the Essenes mentioned in ancient historical sources. This consensus was shaken by a pair of Belgian archaeologists named Robert Donceel and Pauline Donceel-Voûte. The Donceels had been invited by Jean-Baptiste Humbert, who is now the staff archaeologist at the Dominican École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem (the French School of Biblical Studies and Archaeology in Jerusalem) to help prepare the material from de Vaux’s excavations for publication. In a Nova television special about the Dead Sea Scrolls that was broadcast in 1991, the Donceels dropped a bombshell: in their opinion, Qumran was not a sectarian settlement, as de Vaux believed, but a villa rustica—that is, a country villa! Although the Donceels left the project, they have published some of de Vaux’s finds as well as several articles with their interpretation.

A few years later, Norman Golb, a University of Chicago professor who studies medieval Jewish manuscripts, published a book in which he identifies Qumran as a fort. Golb argues that the scrolls originated in the Jerusalem temple and were deposited in the caves for safekeeping without any connection to the site or its inhabitants. During the 2000s, his son Raphael Golb, a New York real estate attorney, used online aliases (sock puppets) in fake email accounts and blog posts to attack and discredit Dead Sea Scrolls scholars who disagree with his father, the most prominent among them Lawrence Schiffman of New York University. Eventually Raphael Golb was arrested and convicted of identity theft, criminal impersonation, forgery, aggravated harassment, and the unauthorized use of a computer. Many of the counts were overturned on multiple appeals, and he ended up serving a two-month prison sentence and was disbarred. The appeals process resulted in New York’s highest state court striking down an aggravated harassment law that made it a misdemeanor to communicate with someone “in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm” and with the intent to do so, which Raphael Golb and his attorney argued violated the constitutional right to free speech. This bizarre case was one of the first legal tests of the limits of freedom of speech relating to harassment and bullying on the internet.

In the meantime, a number of scholars have proposed other interpretations including that Qumran was a manor house, a commercial entrepot, or a pottery manufacturing center. Although none of the alternative theories has gained widespread acceptance, they have attracted a great deal of publicity and succeeded in raising questions about the validity of de Vaux’s interpretation.

One problem surrounding the archaeology of Qumran is that a full and final (scientific) report on de Vaux’s excavations has never been published. De Vaux wrote several detailed preliminary reports (in French), and an overview of the archaeology of Qumran (translated into English), but died in 1971 without having published all the material from his excavations. Although archaeologists who fail to publish the material from excavations in Israel are supposed to lose the rights to publication after ten years, this time limit is rarely enforced. If an archaeologist dies without having published the material from an excavation, it is “inherited” by their home institution. For example, when Yigael Yadin died in 1984, the unpublished material from his excavations was inherited by his home institution, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The university, together with the Israel Exploration Society, divided the unpublished material from Yadin’s excavations at Hazor and Masada among faculty members at the university’s Institute of Archaeology, who were put in charge of overseeing the publication process. As a result, I was invited to prepare the publication of the military equipment from Masada. This same procedure caused the delays in the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In other words, instead of scholarly or Vatican conspiracies, the delays were caused by the fact that the scrolls belonged to the members of the original team that de Vaux had assembled. These scholars had the right to reassign the publication of their material (for example, to their students) and to grant or deny access to it.

In 1991, universal access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was made possible because the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which has copies of all the scrolls on microfiche, decided to make them freely available. Since then, all the scrolls have been published and are now accessible on Google online. This is not the case with the material from de Vaux’s excavations at Qumran. No “copies” exist of the archaeological artifacts from Qumran, most of which are now stored in the basement of Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum. The unpublished records from de Vaux’s excavations are also inaccessible. Without Humbert’s permission, no one is allowed access to the unpublished artifacts or records from Qumran. In 1991, Humbert allowed me to look at the pottery from Qumran stored in the Rockefeller Museum, but I have had no further access to any of the material since then. Although we still await a final excavation report, in 1994 Humbert and a Belgian archaeologist named Alain Chambon published a large volume containing original photographs from the time of de Vaux’s excavations, plans (line-drawings) of the excavated areas, and de Vaux’s original field notes. The original edition, in French, was translated into German and English. A second volume, published by Humbert and an archaeometrist (a specialist in ancient materials analysis) named Jan Gunneweg in 2003, is not a final excavation report either but an edited volume containing studies on aspects of the archaeology of Qumran.

In 2016, Humbert and Chambon published the first volume which might be considered a final report on de Vaux’s excavations (including a chapter on the oil lamps by Jolanta Młynarczyk). Excavation reports typically present the raw data first and then the interpretation. By raw data I mean that after an introduction, the first chapters usually describe the stratigraphy (sequence of occupation levels) and architecture, followed by specialist chapters on categories of artifacts and analyses such as pottery, coins, glass, inscriptions, and faunal (animal) remains. Usually the excavator’s interpretation is presented independently of the raw data, either at the end of the chapter on stratigraphy and architecture or in a separate chapter. In contrast, the 2016 volume begins with chapters devoted to Humbert and Chambon’s reinterpretation of specific features at Qumran, including the animal bone deposits, the cemetery, a room they identify as a toilet, and a group of basins in the courtyard of the main building which they claim was a Greek bath. The second part of the volume contains lists of loci (excavated spaces), architectural elements, and plans. Humbert and Chambon add new locus numbers to de Vaux’s, including creating new loci and giving numbers to walls. The third part of the volume is the excavation report, organized by area. The 2016 volume does not present the main part of the site but only the “peripheral areas” outside the main building and secondary building, which Humbert and Chambon believe are later additions to a preexisting core. This volume contains virtually no new documentation or information from de Vaux’s excavations. Instead, Humbert and Chambon analyze de Vaux’s previous publications, correlating pottery and coins with their new phasing based on the dates of excavation. The newly published documentation comprises a small number of photographs and sketches of plans and sections supplemented by plans and section drawings prepared by Humbert and Chambon, as well as pottery illustrations. We shall return to Humbert and Chambon’s interpretation of Qumran in Chapter 5.

Archaeology involves the interpretation of an incomplete dataset because only a small fraction of the original remains has survived over time. In the case of Qumran, not only is the archaeological record incomplete but so is the information from de Vaux’s excavations. For this reason, most of the interpretations and conclusions presented in this book are tentative. However, I believe that although the eventual publication of all the material from de Vaux’s excavations might make it necessary to modify some details of these interpretations and will enrich our knowledge of the site, it will not substantially alter the current picture. This is because enough archaeological information has been published to give us a fairly accurate understanding of the site and its inhabitants. Although I have modified or revised some of my own views about Qumran over the last couple of decades, my understanding of the site as a sectarian settlement in the first century BCE and the first century CE has not changed.

What Is Archaeology, and What Excavation Methods Do Archaeologists Use?

The Oxford Companion to Archaeology defines archaeology as “the study of the past as evident in the material remains available to us.” In contrast, history is the study of the past based on information provided by written documents. In other words, although both archaeologists and historians study the human past, they use different methods or sources to obtain their information. Archaeologists learn about the past through the study of the material remains left by humans, whereas historians study written records (texts). These sources of information often provide different (although not necessarily mutually exclusive or conflicting) pictures of the past. For example, since many texts were written by or for the ruling classes (elites) of ancient societies, they tend to reflect their concerns, interests, and viewpoints. In contrast, although archaeologists often uncover the palaces and citadels of the ruling classes, they also dig up houses and workshops that belonged to the poorer classes of ancient societies. Archaeological evidence can be used to complement or supplement the information provided by written records, and in cases where we have no written records (such as in prehistoric societies), it is our only source of information.

Some ancient sites were occupied for only one brief period or phase. However, many sites in Palestine were occupied over longer periods. At such multi-period sites, the buildings and debris from the successive phases of occupation accumulated, forming a series of levels one above the other like a layer cake. In the case of many biblical sites in Israel, there can be twenty or more different occupation levels, forming an artificial mound called in Hebrew a tel (Arabic tell). The famous tels of Megiddo and Hazor provided the models for James A. Michener’s 1965 novel, The Source. Archaeologists refer to these occupation levels as strata (singular, stratum), and to the sequence of levels as stratigraphy. At Qumran, de Vaux distinguished at least three successive occupation levels (which he called periods) during the relatively brief existence of the sectarian settlement (first century BCE–first century CE).

Although it is helpful to visualize the strata of ancient sites as a layer cake, the reality is never that neat and simple. This is because the inhabitants frequently disturbed earlier levels when constructing the foundations of buildings or when digging pits. In the course of such activities, they cut into or through earlier strata, churning up earlier material (potsherds, coins, etc.) with the dirt and stones. This means that at multiperiod sites, we always find earlier artifacts mixed in with the later material. For this reason, we use the latest artifacts to date the stratum we are excavating and disregard the earlier material (at least for dating purposes).

Imagine we are standing inside a modern school building in Philadelphia that was built in 1972. When the school was built, a deep pit (trench) was dug into the ground for the foundations. At the time the floor was laid, it sealed the foundation trench and everything in it. If we dig under that floor today, we should find nothing later than 1972 in the fill. However, we would almost certainly find objects from earlier than 1972 in that fill, such as old Coke bottles, coins dating to the 1950s and 1960s, and so on. Now let’s suppose that the latest datable object we find under that floor is a penny minted in 1968. This coin would provide what archaeologists call a terminus post quem (Latin for “date after which”) for the construction of the school. In other words, the coin would tell us that the school was constructed in 1968 or later, but not earlier. Now let’s suppose that the school was destroyed by an earthquake in 1985, which caused the building to collapse, burying everything inside. The objects found on top of the floors would represent the items in use at the moment the building collapsed. They would also provide us with a terminus ante quem (Latin for “date before which”) for the construction of the school. In other words, if the latest objects found buried in the collapse were books printed in 1985, we would know that the school building must have been constructed on or before that date. One of the most famous examples of such a catastrophic destruction is the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash and mud. Walking through the excavated streets of those towns today gives us a glimpse into what they looked like at the moment of destruction (see Fig. 44).

During excavation, archaeologists destroy the evidence they dig up. This is because once a shovel of dirt or a stone is removed from the ground it can never be put back in the same way. For this reason, archaeologists record the excavation process using every means possible. If you have ever visited an excavation, you might have noticed that archaeologists dig in squares measuring five by five or ten by ten meters on a side. The squares form a grid. The squares are separated by banks of earth about one meter wide called baulks (or balks). This system enables archaeologists to measure and record the exact location of every excavated object and feature (by feature, I mean something that is constructed as opposed to an artifact, which is a portable, humanmade object). The recording is done by measuring levels (absolute heights within the excavated squares), keeping daily diaries, making drawings and taking photographs, and now with the aid of computers and 3D modeling. Ideally, once a final excavation report is published, it should be possible for the reader to reconstruct the site as it looked before everything was dug up.

Archaeologists use various devices to keep track of the point of origin (provenance) of every excavated artifact and feature. One way to do this is to subdivide each square horizontally and vertically. One of the most common subdivisions used in excavations is a locus (plural loci). Locus means spot or place in Latin. In archaeology it can be used to define any excavated feature. For example, a locus can designate an oven, a pit, a room, or any part of a room. It is simply a device to help subdivide the area being excavated, to enable us later to pinpoint the exact spot where an artifact or feature was found. For example, let’s say that we begin excavating a square on top of the modern ground surface. We would give the entire square one locus number (L1; L = Locus). About ten centimeters below the ground surface, we notice that the soil is changing in color and composition from reddish brown to dark brown mixed with lots of stones. At this point, we would measure the absolute height (with the same kind of equipment used by surveyors) and change the locus number (from L1 to L2). Five centimeters below this, we begin to come upon a line of stones cutting diagonally across the square, which looks like the top of a wall. We would again measure the absolute height and change the locus number, giving the areas on either side of the wall different locus numbers (L3 on one side and L4 on the other side). The pottery and other objects discovered during the excavation are saved and labeled according to their context.

This system of excavating and recording is the standard one used by archaeologists working in Israel to...