Virtual Qumran: New Qumran Article in the Jerusalem Post

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Ziv Hellman has written an interesting piece in the Jerusalem Post about Qumran entitled "The Qumran Quandry." Make sure to check it out.

Anonymous said...: Reportedly, "[Lawrence] Schiffman points to a major puzzle relating to the Essenes - they are not mentioned in any ancient Hebrew text. "The first time the word 'Essenes' is written in Hebrew is during the Renaissance," asserts Schiffman. This is particularly anomalous given that Josephus portrayed the Essenes as the third major political-religious movement in the late Second Temple period, alongside the Pharisees and Sadducees - yet, in contrast to the
latter two groupings, neither the New Testament nor the entire corpus of Talmudic writings ever once speak of the Essenes. Nor does the word appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves."
Though the Modern Hebrew for Essenes is not in the scrolls, the Hebrew original for the Greek spellings of Essenes, 'osey hatorah, observers of torah,
is in the Qumran mss, in texts (the pesharim) recognized on other grounds as Essene. That "Essenes" came from Hebrew was recognized, and in effect predicted, as early as 1532 by Philip Melanchthon in J. Carion, Chronica (Wittenberg, 1532)
folio 68 verso: "Essei / das ist / Operarii / vom vort Assa / das ist
wirken." And N. Serarius cited D. Chytraeus [Kochhafe], Onomasticon, as deriving Essenes from the Hebrew root 'asah and calling Essenes "factores legis" in J. Triglandius, Trium scriptorium illustrium de tribus judaeorum sectis syntagma (Delft: A. Berman, 1703) 107.

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson; July 22, 2008 4:35 AM

Tuesday, July 22, 2008