Scrolls’ Scribe and Sectarian Spaces

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 2008

One of the mysteries of the approximately 900 documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls is whether they form a single collection—most often described as an Essene library—or whether they come from several different collections (perhaps brought to different caves by refugees fleeing from the Romans). Some have proposed that as many as 500 different scribes wrote the scrolls found in 11 caves near the ruins of Qumran.1 Now we have new evidence, which, however, only adds to the mystery. Ada Yardeni is one of Israel’s leading paleographers. Ancient handwriting is her specialty. Her examination has revealed that one […]

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Endnotes

See Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 97–98, 151–152.

Ada Yardeni, “A Note on a Qumran Scribe,” in Meir Lubetski, ed., New Seals and Inscriptions, Hebrew, Idumean and Cuneiform (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), pp. 287–298.

Eyal Regev, “The Archaeology of Sectarianism: A Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Kh. Qumran,” paper presented to the 2007 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in San Diego, California.