With all due respect, Joe, your conclusions appear to far
exceed your supporting evidence.
(1) If there were Essenes at Qumran, it is most likely they were there in
the capacity of agricultural workers. The Essenes are characterized as
agriculturalists in all the primary Greek sources, including Pliny's
passage famously putting them west of the Dead Sea. Dio Chrysostom says
the Essenes dwelled in a "blessed city" near Sodom, which can only be a
reference to Jericho, where they were also likely employed starting in the
Herodian period as agriculturalists. The Talmud refers to "men of
Jericho" who were agriculturalists whose practices differed from the rabbis,
and this is taken by some to be a Talmudic reference to the Essenes. I
think it is a fair premise that agricultural workers in this period would be
male. Even if your interpretation of the skeletal remains is correct,
and even if a majority of the burials at Qumran are Essene,
this would likely apply to the workers, not the owners / administrators of
this agricultural estate. The only burial that might
be associated with the owners / administrators of Qumran at this point is
the anomalous "monumental" burial (that some have fancifully attributed to
John the Baptist or the Teacher of Righteousness).
In this vein, Russ:
This is an exchange we had four years ago on
ANE
> Period II (c. 4 BCE - 68 CE) is best
interpreted
> as a Herodian revival of the site, its function
again agricultural.
Essenes
> may or may not have been
employed during this phase as agricultural
menials.
Russ,
since the site was first published in the 50's I have suspected that
K.
Qumran may have been involved in an extremely important
agricultural
product that was cultivated in this area...balsam.
Hirschfield's "camps"
may have been the workers and they may have been
Essene from a time past
when they may have processed it for use in the
temple. Processed Balsam was
very valuable and would need to be
extracted and bottled in an almost
fortress like facility. If much of
the output was used at the temple, it
would have to have been extracted and
processed under strict rules of
cleanliness and purity with mikvaoth for
the processors. I seem to recall
some small unguent like bottles were
found?
OK, going back a few more years:
Jerusalem Post, February 4, 1998 By ABRAHAM RABINOVICH :
"The month-long excavation produced no finds, except for a few pottery
shards
and part of a tiny glass bottle. These, however, are central to
Hirschfeld's
thesis, since they date the site to the latter part of the
First Century CE,
when Pliny may still have been alive. In themselves, says
the archeologist,
they do not provide any direct link to the Essenes. But
they do when taken
together with the passage in Pliny. "Without Pliny I
wouldn't have made this
claim," he says. The ancient village of Ein Gedi,
just west of the modern
road along the Dead Sea coast, indeed lies "below"
the stone cells.
The excavated site, at the foot of the cliffs rearing
over Ein Gedi, is 200
meters higher in elevation than the village and about
a kilometer distant on
foot. In antiquity, the terraced slopes between the
site and the village were
planted with balsam, which produced a rare and
expensive perfume highly
valued in the Roman world. Balsam was grown only
at Ein Gedi and Jericho.
Alongside the excavated cells are two pools from
the same period, which
collected water from one of the springs issuing from
the bottom of the
cliffs. The water was used to irrigate the agricultural
terraces. Hirschfeld
suggested that the Essenes were employed in balsam
cultivation."
You remember the "yahad" ostracon?
http://www.tfba.org/articles.php?articleid=3Let me pose a question which assumes a number of things under
debate. I will assume that Hirschfeld's "camp" is Essene and also, as
you say, that Qumran was an Agrarian "motherhouse" maintained by
Essenes. I will assume that Hirschfeld's "balsam bottle" is indeed
that. Balsam was a very precious, much-in-demand "money crop" that was
grown in the vicinity of Jericho. Seemingly, these plants were not
easily cultivated and required some special horticultural knowledge and
technique. These Qumran Essenes had to support themselves in some way
and the location is good for balsam cultivation in the en-Gedi area (remember
Pliny?).
OK...now back to the ostracon. If ln)d--h
is a correct reading...or a syntactical form of "bottle" to make it a
verb...how about "bottling?"...is it possible that Honi will buy the land from
Eleazar......(line 8)
"...when he <kmlytw> completes the
bottling" ??
The ostracon might tie in Hirschfeld's theory to
connect the "camps" to Qumran where the actual processing and bottling may
have taken place. Since the bucks rolled in when the balsam was bottled,
Honi..perhaps a cultivator...could afford to buy his land from old
Eleazar.
