Israeli Scholar claims there were no Essenes 3/25/2009 8:25:15 AM
There have been several articles published lately, including one in Time Magazine, about a new book that puts forth the theory that the Essenes never existed. Here is a copy of one of those articles (not the one from Time). Read it and let me know what you think.
Val
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"Rachel Elior, scholar of Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, claims in a new book that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, never existed.
"Elior has spent years studying the 930 documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in 1947 in Qumran, located on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea. There has been much debate over the origin of the scrolls, but most scholars believe that they were written by the Essenes, an ascetic sect that lived near Qumran.
"Elior contends that, because there is no mention of the Essenes in the scrolls themselves, it is unlikely that they were the authors. Instead, the authors identify themselves as following the practices of the high priest Zadok, indicating that they may be the Sadducees, a prominent class of Jewish priests who lived in Jerusalem.
Though other scholars have questioned whether the Essenes were the true authors of the scrolls, Elior is the first to argue that they did not exist. She bases her conclusion on the fact that there are no known mentions of the Essenes before the first century A.D., when Jewish historian Josephus, Jewish philosopher Philo and Roman author Pliny the Elder, wrote of them.
"Elior argues that a sect as large and as unusual as the Essenes would have been described in sources prior to the first century. “It doesn’t make sense that you have thousands of people living against the Jewish law and there’s no mention of them in any of the Jewish texts and sources of that period,” she said to Time."
