If you read carefully you will see that, far from denying that Essenes lived
at Qumran, I suggest that they may well have done but under the auspices of
the Royal estate in Jericho. As an industrial suburb Qumran had too great a
strategic and utilitarian value for it to be a 'closed theological society'.
David
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <g-megillot@McMaster.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 12:16 PM
Subject: [Megillot] Hasmoneans, control and not
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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