Dear colleagues I hope to have found a proof that the Qumran scrolls cannot belong to one and the same collection (see the abstract below). and started to *speculate* about an explanation for this "fact." Since the article will still take some time to get published in print, I would like to share the discovery with other interested scholars in the field, in the hope to stimulate, already now, further attempts to embed this new problem and its possible ramifications in the discussion.
Please excuse therefore my boldness to invite you to take a look on an abbreviated version currently located on my (improvised) website (http://www.geocities.com/shunrata). It will soon be also available at the Nordic Qumran Network <http://www.helsinki.fi/teol/hyel/nnqs/> website to whose organizers I am most grateful. I would also like to thank the editor of the journal where a long version of this article is currently under review for the permission to prepublish the short version on the web. Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra ABSTRACT: Old Caves and Young Caves: Two Qumran Collections? An examination of the average age of the scrolls of each of the Qumran caves shows a huge gap between the "old" caves 1 and 4 (average age between 37 and 44 BCE) and the "young" caves 2, 3, 5, 6 and 11 (average age between 5 and 25 CE). A statistical analysis proves that the manuscripts from caves 1 and 4 cannot come from the same collection as those found in caves 2,3,5,6 and 11 (p<0.0001 for a Kruskal-Wallis test, similar numbers for a series of T-Tests), at least not as random samples. The scenario that all or most caves served as emergency hiding places for the Qumran collection around 68 CE has therefore to be discarded or fundamentally modified. Devorah Dimant has shown that the caves are intimately connected by genre and "Sectarianism." Most probably, therefore, the "old" caves 1 and 4 represent the manuscript collection of the same group as the "young" caves 2,3,5,6,11 but at an earlier point in history. Assuming Qumran was destroyed by fire around 4 BCE, caused most probably by an attack (Jody Magness), I try to address the question how manuscripts older than that fire survived. I therefore suggest the following scenario: cave 4 was an emergency hiding / library / depository around 4 BCE, and the mss from cave 1 were hidden also at that time. The young caves 2,3,5,6,11 represent the Qumran library at the second attack and fire around 68 BCE. Cave 4 either served as "stacks" during period II or was a kind of Geniza, therefore we find some but not many CE mss in cave 4. If the old manuscripts from cave 4 were already mutilated around 4 BCE, this could explain why they remained in that cave during period II. Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra, Ph.D. Mandel Scholar Scholion - Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies Rabin Building 1112 Hebrew University, Mount Scopus 91905 Jerusalem ISRAEL +972-2-58.80081 website: http://www.geocities.com/shunrata
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