Stephen, You've mentioned before (and other important scholars have suggested) that the term Essenes could derive from Hebrew "osey (hattora)", doers of the Torah. The identification is hardly the established fact that you seem to imply (but then your post was on a different topic), but it's certainly an interesting suggestion. I was wondering, how is the term osey hattora distributed over the Qumran corpus? I guess it's safe to say that the majority of Qumran scholars these days consider some texts to be Essene/"sectarian"/Qumranian/yachad texts (Greg Doudna once suggested the term "HSDM-texts", considering the core of this group to be the texts designated by those four letters in the usual system, but we should certainly add also the pesharim), while some are of unknown/non-sectarian/general (if such a term makes sense) Jewish provenance. It would support your thesis, I assume, if the use of "osey hattora" was more or les restricted to the undisputedly "sectarian" corpus. I'm at home right now with only rather incomplete tools for searching the texts, but perhaps you know the answer by heart already? chag sameach & happy Easter (I forget the appropriate greeting for the mawlid an-nabi, which was just the other day) Søren
________________________________ Fra: [EMAIL PROTECTED] på vegne af [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sendt: to 13-04-2006 13:12 Til: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [email protected] Emne: [Megillot] James Tabor's new book: two notes Here are two notes (not a full review) on The Jesus Dynasty (April, 2006) by James Tabor. On page 120: "Josephus tells us that there were only 6,000 Pharisees and 3,000 Essenes. Philo...puts the Essenes at 4,000." It may at first seem a small (and inadvertant) error to bother mentioning. Josephus (Ant. 18, 20) actually wrote that Essenes numbered over four thousand, (UPER TETRAKISXILIOI; Philo (Quod omnis 75) gave the exact same figure, (UPERTETRAKISXILIOI of the Essenes ['osei hatorah in Qumran Hebrew self-designation], dedicated to the service (not healing) of God (therapeutai theou). The reason I think this is worth noting is because both Josephus and Philo rely here on a shared source, likely the Histories of the Stoics Strabo and Posidonius, as I suggested in "Posidonius, Strabo and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as Sources on Essenes," J. of Jewish Studies 45 (1994) 295-98. In my view, some other recent publications, not by Tabor (I'll provide references if anyone is interested), have distortingly underestimated the importance of sources in Josephus; that in turn can needlessly obscure information in Josephus on Essenes. Jim Tabor suggests that the James ossuary inscription may be entirely genuine, though a quick first reading did not persuasive me on that matter. Again, perhaps a minor note, but at one point the book appears to claim that the James ossuary may have come from a tomb in Talpiot, while at another point it appears to claim that the James ossuary may have come from a different tomb in Ben Hinnom valley. Those two arguments tend to undercut one another. Of course, these are fairly minor aspects of the book compared to some of its other pretty large claims, left for another occasion. best, Stephen Goranson http://www.duke.edu/~goranson "Jannaeus, His Brother Absalom, and Judah the Essene" _______________________________________________ g-Megillot mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot _______________________________________________ g-Megillot mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot
