Quoting David Stacey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
[....]
(Hasmoneans would not have tolerated any sort of 'independent' Qumran
not under its control).
[....]
Statements such as the above are not rare. But, I suggest, such statements may
be more asserted than demonstrated. Hasmoneans did not prevent, among other
things, sectarianism. Various realities existed without Hasmoneans necessarily
wishing for such realities. Saying that Jannaeus could have attacked
them there
is not equivalent to saying that he did so. And his wife and successor:
is there
good reason to assert that during her rule "independent" communities ("of any
sort") cannot have existed? And some of this calculus depends, doesn't it, on
the date the Hellenistic period settlement began? That a community of Essenes
lived on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, I suggest, was not among the
greatest of the Hasmoneans' (nor Herod's) worries.
Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson/jannaeus.pdf
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