ReViews

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The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices

Florentino García Martínez and Julio Trebolle Barrera. Translated by Wilfred G.E. Watson

(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995) 269 pp., $42 (paper)

New and exciting developments in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls—including the publication of previously unknown texts and the development of innovative perspectives on the archaeology of Qumran and the historical background of the Scroll writers—have captured the imagination of both scholars and amateurs alike in recent years. An area of Biblical studies that once was considered rather esoteric has been endowed with fresh interest.

Unfortunately, the new and exciting make only rare appearances in this volume, a collection of 12 papers by two well-known Spanish specialists in the Qumran literature. García Martínez, editor of Revue de Qumran and author of the recent Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, is the author of eight of the papers, while Trebolle Barrera, a member of the official team of editors, wrote the remaining four specially for this book.

The collection is a mixed bag, as the authors admit in the foreword. Some of the articles are broad overviews, others are specialized studies. Several of the essays date from the 1980s, long before the annus mirabilus of 1991, when scholars were given full access to all of the Qumran texts. This belies the authors’ claim to provide “complete and up-to-date information.”

The authors group their essays under three general rubrics: “The Men and Community of Qumran,” “The Bible, Purity and Messianic Hope” and “Qumran and the Origins of Christianity.” Nearly half of the collection’s articles fall into the first section. These articles provide an overview of the discovery, publication and contents of the scrolls. They contend that the Qumran community broke off from the larger Essene movement and retreated to the desert under the guidance of a succession of “Teachers of Righteousness.” The hypothesis depends heavily on two debatable assumptions, that the sect was headquartered on Khirbet Qumran—an idea under increasing fire—and that the text of 4QMMT records a schism within Essenism—a very precarious interpretation.

The second section surveys the impact of the Qumran discoveries on the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation and on the ancient application of that text to the problems of ritual purity and messianic expectation. The most interesting essay is García Martínez’s “Biblical Borderlines,” which discusses scrolls such as 4Q364-365 (“Pentateuchal Paraphrase”) that blend Biblical and non-Biblical passages to produce compositions that are not quite new works but are no longer mere copies of Scripture.

The three articles in the final section take issue with the views of Robert Eisenman, Barbara Thiering and John Allegro and seek to point out ways in which the Qumran texts can be used properly to interpret the New Testament. Most of the parallels suggested here (such as the light-dark dualism, the various messianic titles, the idea of the community as a temple) have long been known, and few of the newly published texts are brought into the discussion.

All of the essays give interesting and sometimes intriguing slants on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the authors’ adherence to many moot theories—such as the origin of the sect in the second century B.C.E. or the “monastery” interpretation of Khirbet Qumran—reduces the collection’s overall value. Repetitions of the same material between the two writers is tiresome and sometimes leads to inconsistencies; for instance, García Martínez says that certain expressions in 4Q541 suggest the Jewish background of the idea of a “suffering Messiah,” while Trebolle Barrera asserts that the same idea “is [not] likely to occur in any Qumran text.”

Trebolle Barrera’s contributions are also marred by various inaccuracies as well as a certain defensiveness. He says, for example, that E.L. Sukenik bought three of the original Cave One scrolls from the Bethlehem 063shop of Kando, but in fact Sukenik bought them from another dealer, Feidi Salihi. Barrera states that Bedouin discovered Cave Eleven in 1966; it was actually 1956. He also misstates the date Yigael Yadin published the Temple Scroll (1976 instead of 1977) and the date John Strugnell became head of the scroll publication team (1984 instead of 1987). He describes an Exodus manuscript, 4QExa, as one of the most important Biblical manuscripts from Qumran; but in fact there is no such scroll as 4QExa! Also, he is anxious to absolve the official team of editors of any faults and scolds the media and the general public for “distrusting the judgment of the expert majority”—including, presumably, himself.

Aside from these imprecisions, Trebolle Barrera is guilty of various misinterpretations. For instance, he apparently thinks that Robert Eisenman’s view is that Jesus may have been the Teacher of Righteousness (for Eisenman, the Teacher is James the Just) and he exaggerates the support carbon-14 tests gave to the paleographic method of dating manuscripts. Both he and García Martínez overstate the usefulness of the archaeology of Khirbet Qumran for dating the Qumran manuscripts and the history of the sect that lived there.

The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls is an erudite collection of material reporting on, and contributing to, Qumran research, but its approach and many of its ideas were dated even before publication. This, and its various other flaws of fact and attitude, make it a book that most will be able to live without.

Eretz-Israel, Joseph Aviram Volume

Vol. 25

(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1996)
English section 108 pp., Hebrew section 551 pp., $108
(available through BAS, 1-800-221-4644; add $20 for shipping & handling and allow 6–8 weeks for delivery)

“This volume of Eretz-Israel differs from previous ones,” writes Hebrew University archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor in a preface to 064the latest in this prestigious series, “in not including a list of publications of the person in whose honor the volume has been published.” Ben-Tor continues, “Joseph Aviram’s ‘list of publications’ includes thousands of articles and hundreds of books written by archaeologists in Israel and abroad. Though he may appear to be standing in the shadows, Joseph Aviram is, in fact, on centre stage: without him, very many of these studies might never have been published.”

Joseph Aviram is surely worthy of this dedication. He has been one of the pivots of Israeli archaeology for more than 50 years. In 1940 he became secretary of the Israel Exploration Society (IES); in 1954 he took on the same role for the faculty of humanities at Hebrew University. Together with his colleague and friend, Yigael Yadin, Aviram helped organize the great Israeli excavations of the 1950s and 1960s: at Hazor, at various sites in the Judean desert and at Masada. Following the Six-Day War, in 1967, Aviram and Yadin established the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University. As director of the institute from 1969 to 1983, Aviram played a key role in organizing the three major excavations in Jerusalem—at the Western Wall, in the Jewish Quarter and in the City of David. Since 1983 he has served as the director of the Israel Exploration Society. Aviram was awarded the Percia Schimmel Award for Archaeology in 1982; the 1989 Israel Prize awarded to the IES made special mention of him.

The English section includes a paper by Frank Moore Cross on an inscribed arrowhead from the first half of the 11th century B.C. Scratching one’s name on an arrowhead seems to have been something of a fad among military commanders at the time. Cross also discusses two arrowheads that seem to be spurious—a troubling development: “Procuring old arrowheads is not difficult, and the increased interest and value of such pieces no doubt tempts the modern manufacturer of antiquities, notably professional forgers of seals, to satisfy the demand.” (See also “Fake!” in this issue.)

Also of note for BAR readers is William Dever’s essay on “Archaeology and the Current Crisis in Israelite Historiography” (a topic discussed in his recent interview in these pages [July/August and September/October 1996]), Philip King’s article on “Jeremiah and Idolatry” (see his article, “Jeremiah’s Polemic Against Idols,” in Bible Review, December 1994), Lawrence Stager’s history of the site, “Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction” (see his article, “The Fury of Babylon,” BAR 22:01), and a contribution by Vassos Karageorghis, former director of the antiquities department of Cyprus, on the widespread problem of excavators failing to publish final reports. The volume also contains English summaries of the vast Hebrew section (contributed by a veritable Who’s Who of Israeli archaeology) and the Tables of Contents of all 25 volumes of the Eretz-Israel series.

Insight Guide to Jordan

Dorothy Stannard, ed.

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) 368 pages, $19.95

I took some people to Petra a while ago (a welcome result of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty!) and took the opportunity to use a guidebook a friend had given me: the Insight Guide to Jordan. It is a handsome book, well made and beautifully photographed. It is also by-and-large accurate; the history of modern Jordan and the people involved in its creation is a first-rate summary of a complicated subject. And the introductory chapters on the people, the crafts, the politics and the ways of life in Jordan are literate and elegant. The summary of ancient history is a bit weaker (it was Jacob, not Abraham, who led the Israelites down to Egypt) but still serviceable, although the three references to Petra as “Jeremiah’s doomed city” quite escaped me.

I really enjoyed using this guidebook until I got to the section relating to Israel.

Israel figures prominently in the historical survey, of course, and in the “places” section, where Jerusalem and the West Bank are included as part of Jordan: an odd and unhelpful editorial decision, in my opinion. A guidebook is supposed to be helpful, not ideological, and there is, after all, a clumsy, inefficient, sometimes expensive and mildly unpleasant border to be crossed at the Allenby Bridge before you get from Amman to Jerusalem.

But it seems important politically for the author that this be the case. The (non-Jewish) friend who gave me the book said, “These guys don’t like Israel.” I only needed to read that Arab migration to South America happened because “in the first half of the 20th century a large number of Bethlehemites [were] fleeing the Zionist encroachment on Palestine” to see what she meant. Still I had every reason to expect that the standards set in the Jordanian section would be maintained in the Jerusalem/West Bank section, too. I was wrong.

It is easy and tempting to list mistakes of fact, but more difficult to account for their existence and number. Some mistakes come from simple ignorance: Phasael’s tower was never burnt; the Tomb of the Kings is not “believed to date from Babylonian times”; there are no men, let alone Crusader kings, buried in the tomb of the Virgin Mary; the route of the Cross has been followed since the Middle Ages, at the earliest, and not before; Muhammed died in 632, not 633, and is decidedly not believed to have risen to heaven after his death; and no Orthodox Jew I ever met believes that praying at the Wall is idolatry. (This list could be much longer.)

Other mistakes occur in the use of statistics: The claim that “some 250,000 Jews, mostly from the former Soviet Union, have made their homes in the Occupied Territories” is absurd, and the statement that “Until 1948 most of Jerusalem’s Jewish residents were Eastern or Sephardic Jews (today most are American or Russian)” simply defies description.

Still a third category of error happens because of tendentious anachronizing; I found it dismaying to read that in “597–587 B.C. … Jerusalem, Palestine & Jordan fell to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar” (and imagine my astonishment when I learned that “Palestine falls [to Pompey] in 63 [B.C.] and is renamed Judea”) when the fact is that the name Palestine didn’t come into existence until Herodotus invented it, a century and a half after Nebuchadnezzar, and wasn’t used by anyone but him until Hadrian, 600 years after that, while the last of the three place names, Jordan, as a country not a river, dates from 1946.

Most difficult to explain are cases where the things aren’t where or like the book says they are; the Notre Dame de France building is not in the Christian Quarter (it’s not in the Old City at all), the Ophel is not in the Jewish Quarter (ditto), there is no visitors center at Qumran, etc. And when this guide claims that the Old City of Jerusalem is “set in the middle of a wide plain,” which it certainly is not, I find myself beginning to believe that Dorothy Stannard dislikes Israel so much that she has never even been there!

All in all, sloppy and shoddy work, and more’s the pity because the rest of the book is so good.

A person is entitled to his/her prejudices. But when an ideology (or an animus) gets in the way of doing a professional job on a guidebook, then it is no longer a personal problem of the author’s but a serious credibility problem for the publisher.

The Origins and Ancient History of Wine

Patrick E. McGovern, Stuart J. Fleming and Solomon H. Katz, eds.

(Philadelphia: Univ.of Pennsylvania Museum/Gordon and Breach) xxiii + 409 pp., $85

Archaeological evidence indicates that people have been consuming alcoholic beverages for at least the past seven millennia. At the time of European expansion in the 065modern era, most regions of the world were already making their own forms of alcohol.

Ethnographic and historical studies show that drinking—far from being merely a disruptive social problem, as portrayed in today’s media—characteristically plays important social, political and economic roles in societies. The psychoactive properties of alcohol have usually imbued it with powerful symbolic meanings in religious rituals and public ceremonies. Hence, as archaeologists are becoming increasingly aware, ancient drinking habits help to reveal larger social and cultural patterns and processes.

Among the various kinds of alcoholic beverages consumed in the ancient world, wine was of widespread significance in the Biblical regions. Throughout the early Near Eastern civilizations, its consumption became an institutionalized cultural practice. The Origins and Ancient History of Wine offers a fascinating display of the latest evidence in the scholarly pursuit of this subject. Archaeologists, ancient historians, enologists, biochemists and paleobotanists all contribute their expertise in the 20 chapters of this cohesive and very readable book. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of redundancy and technical language, but the contributions are of uniformly high quality. The authors explain how botanists and chemists analyze remains of grapes and wine detected in archaeological contexts, and they explore the social, historical and archaeological ramifications of wine production in ancient Egypt, the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean.

As chapters by Daniel Zohary, Harold Olmo and Jane Renfrew point out, all of the numerous varieties of domesticated wine grapes of Europe and western Asia belong to a single species called Vitis vinifera. The wild progenitor of Vitus vinifera is a subtype of the same species (Vitis Vinifera, subspecies sylvestris), which grows naturally around the margins of the Mediterranean and into Transcaucasia and the uplands of the Near East.

Pinpointing the exact time and location of the first domestication of vinifera is difficult because, although there are subtle differences in the size and shape of the pips (small seeds) of wild and domestic grapes, their ranges overlap and scientists need a large sample to differentiate between them. Nevertheless, there is general agreement in tentatively locating the first domestication of grapes at sometime before 6000 B.C. in the general area of Transcaucasia. The presence of domesticated grapes does not automatically indicate wine, however, and all the authors give careful consideration to various kinds of evidence specifically indicating wine production and consumption.

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Among the important new discoveries, discussed in chapters by Virginia Badler and by Patrick McGovern and Rudolph Michael, are physical traces of the earliest wine yet found. These scientists not only establish the presence of wine in jars at the site of Godin Tepe, in modern Iran, as early as 3500–3100 B.C., but they clearly explain the combined processes of chemical analysis and contextual argument that are necessary to make the case. (Since the book’s publication, McGovern and several colleagues have found evidence from another site in Iran, Hajji Firuz Tepe, that pushes the earliest date for wine back another 2,000 years into the sixth millennium B.C.^a)

Chapters by Marvin Powell, Richard Zettler and Naomi Miller, Guillermo Algaze, and David Stronach discuss the uneven evidence for wine in Mesopotamia and Assyria. They show that wine, though an object of trade at an early date, was generally a very costly good consumed only by elite groups in these societies. Wine was especially rare in southern Mesopotamia: As Powell notes, “Babylonia like Bavaria was essentially a beer drinking culture.” Ronald Gorny demonstrates that wine was produced further north, in Anatolia, from at least the beginning of the third millennium B.C.; in the second millennium, wine became a central symbolic element of Hittite culture.

Chapters by T.G.H. James and Leonard Lesko discuss the varied evidence for wine in Egypt (including tomb paintings illustrating the complete winemaking process) and show that wine was, as in southern Mesopotamia, an important elite beverage from at least 3000 B.C.

Albert Leonard throws new light on the famous two-handled “Canaanite jars” from the Levantine Late Bronze Age (about 1550–1100 B.C.): These vessels were prototypes of amphorae used throughout the Mediterranean during the first millennium B.C. to transport goods. Although the Canaanite jars have frequently been considered as evidence of early wine trade in the Aegean, new data indicate that they were all-purpose transport containers; thus greater caution is needed in documenting trade in wine.

The book contains a wealth of equally fascinating information on wine and social behavior in areas outside the Biblical realm. I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in wine and its ancient history, or indeed to anyone seeking a better understanding of society and culture in the early Eurasian civilizations.

The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Writings, Beliefs and Practices