By Joan E. Taylor
Ever because the discovery of the useless Sea Scrolls in caves close to the positioning of Qumran in 1947, this mysterious cache of manuscripts has been linked to the Essenes, a "sect" configured as marginal and remoted. Scholarly consensus has held that an Essene library was once hidden prior to the Roman enhance in sixty eight CE, while Qumran used to be partially destroyed. With a lot doubt now expressed approximately features of this view, The Essenes, the Scrolls and the useless Sea systematically stories the surviving historic assets, and helps an knowing of the Essenes as an influential felony society, on the centre of Judaean spiritual existence, held in a lot esteem by way of many and guarded via the Herodian dynasty, hence showing as "Herodians" within the Gospels.
Opposed to the Hasmoneans, the Essenes mixed subtle felony services and autonomy with an austere routine of sensible paintings, together with a specialisation in drugs and pharmacology. Their presence alongside the north-western useless Sea is strongly indicated through self reliant assets, Dio Chrysostom and Pliny the Elder, and coheres with the archaeology. The lifeless Sea Scrolls symbolize now not an remoted library, quick hidden, yet burials of manuscripts from various Essene collections, put in jars in caves for long term renovation. The historic context of the lifeless Sea quarter itself, and its awesome usual assets, in addition to the archaeology of Qumran, ascertain the Essenes' patronage via Herod, and point out that they harnessed the medicinal fabric the useless Sea area offers to today.
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Sample text
One cannot necessarily look to an earlier source for better information than a later one. Later authors could insert more reliable information into unreliable sources, rather than modify reliable sources for the sake of their own rhetoric. In other words, there could have been an ‘invention’ of the Essenes as a historical group, as a result of simple extrapolation from prior sources, as various features were seized upon to create an idea of who the Essenes were that would function within a particular literary piece, so the resulting presentation would become a selective representation of some aspects of previous texts (and possible oral traditions) that are now unknown to us.
71 In fact, ‘shunned’ is too strong a word for what Pliny actually states, as we shall see. 72 This builds considerably on what our sources tell us, but fits completely with the scholarly tendenz in constructions of the Essenes throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which the dominant paradigm was of a normative 68 For a review of alternative theories see Magen Broshi and Hanan Eshel, ‘Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Contention of Twelve Theories,’ in Douglas R. ), Religion and Society in Roman Palestine: Old Questions, New Approaches (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 162–9.
19:2:2), a sect that continued to live in Nabataea and Peraea. 19 For discussion see Marcel Simon, Jewish Sects at the Time of Jesus, trans. by James H. Farley of Les sectes juives au temps de Jésus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 49–50; Schürer, with Vermes, Millar and Black, ii, 558–9; Geza Vermes, ‘The Etymology of “Essenes”,’ RQ 2 (1960): 427–43, has supported the suggestion that the word derives from Aramaic `asayya, ‘healers’, 17 28 The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea then Philo would have heard it said that the ¯ óóÆEïØ are called such because they are ‹óØïØ, ‘pious’ or ‘holy’, but—being unfamiliar with Aramaic—he assumed it was an explanation of Greek etymology rather than meaning.