"Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the
scrolls," Elior tells TIME. "But they didn't exist. This is legend on a
legend."
While I am neither an archeologist nor an ancient Hebrew scholar, it seems at first glance as if Elior's main arguement is that since the Essenes aren't mentioned by name in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that they do not exist. (Even though Essene is not a Jewish term.)
She then counters with an ephemeral argument that the "Renegade Sons of Zadok" were operating in that area and were the copyists of the scrolls without any better proof. Makes a nice plot point for a Frank Herbert novel, but it doesn't seem to have any real bearing. It is likewise somewhat constraining that Elior posits that the Essenes could have only essentially have been an invention to appeal to Greco-Roman thinking. Can she possibly believe that Palestine of the time was so monochromatic that it was not processing all the spiritual currents intersecting, as it were, at the crossroads of of the world of mid-antiquity?
It's almost easier to suppose that if the Essnes had not existed, some group very like them must have. It's understood that Judaism had been influenced by it's close neighboring relations to Zoroastrianism, but Judaism had closer neighbors of course. Gnostic groups such as the Mandeans probably had their origin near Palestine of that time, if their own origin story is to be taken slightly verbatim. There was heavy Greek influence, and of course lingering tradtions from other religions, and even important competitors like the Samaritans. It's not a discussion that I know enough about to really crack the lid of.
However I know there are some smart minds here and I would be interested in your thoughts.
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Well, we do have three sources of historical nature which DO mention the existence of the Essenes ... Philo, Josephus, and Pliny, so we ought not to buy into a theory that they didn't exist at all.
ReplyDeleteMy own personal take is that there was no unified group that could be identified, just like Gnostic is a generic umbrella term for a whole slew of groups, often with incompatible theologies and cosmologies. Some scholars are also coming to the conclusion that the cache of writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the cache from Nag Hammadi were from several different groups, not just one.