Though I am perhaps not a card-carrying postmodernist--is such a thing possible? :-)--and though my knowlege of infinite deferral of meaning might be limited (though some science allowing for unknowns is mayhaps rather not must needs be a new thing, really), unless my soul perpetually knows, if I have a soul, and though I was tempted to begin comments by deconstructing the first sentence of Prof. Maxine Grossman's guest lecture, at http://qumranica.blogspot.com/ and though I do recall Stanley Fish standing by the Duke chapel door after a Holocaust denial ad was published in the student paper to affirmm that he knew plain talk that the Holocaust did happen, and though I have praised the clarity of most Max sentences, and though at the Sepphoris dig Max and I seeing a Yannai coin, saying "ah, PaleoHebrew," and "neat" or some such word, seems good, and though even partially kvetching about a free lecture (thanks) could be thought to be churlish, so let me stop this poor litany or (de)stabilizing to turn to a few comments about Qumran mss, (or ;) here goes.
Some historians have "suggested that" the Teacher of Righteousness "may have been a displaced High Priest" (page 1). I suggest that he was not (nor contemporary with Jonathan Maccabee), and the assumption that he was confuses history and perhaps influenced the paper a bit. For example, (page 8) on a "late date" of MMT manuscripts: "In this case MMT *cannot* be an actual letter dating to the time of the community's foundation, although it might preserve traditions about a real early conflict." May I venture to say, yes it can? Perhaps I am unclear what was intended as an "actual letter." Admittedly there are variants in the mss, so all as letter- perfect copies of any one exemplar is excluded. But, say, if Yannai was the wicked priest (the earliest MMT mss are estimated likely from his lifetime) and if Judah the Essene teacher of righteousness sent him a letter quite close in wording to extant MMT copies (parts B and C), even if the 6 or 7 (if the 7th is in cryptic text as Pfann proposed) extant copies are not that ms, MMT could, at least conceivably, have been a letter. (Though *not* halakhic, in its own vocabulary.) Or did I misread (or not give the "best" reading--an oldfashioned word in the lecture.) The Gettysburg address was actually delivered, though my schoolkid memorization and my teacher's presentation might have added or subtracted meanings too And a text can be two things at the same time, can't it? (I do not claim that is disallowed all through the paper, but when the method declarations are intended to be read on face value is not always clear to me.) For example, MMT could have been both a letter and could have come to be used in the role of a foundation myth (as some old BA sidebar might have raised, if I recall correctly). Is the "*cannot*" above shading toward totalizing or being overdrawn? In other words, I looked for conclusions, and one of the most emphatically-stated ones I found I found not at the moment persuasive. Question 2. After working methodologically, what then, in brief, are the main, even if provisional, conclusions about D and MMT in history? What can we or you reliably say? Thank you Max. all the best, Stephen Goranson "Opposition is true friendship" --Wm. Blake _______________________________________________ g-Megillot mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot
