The Problem for Identifying the Qumran Community as the Essenes

One of my students sent me an email today mentioning an article of this week’s Time entitled Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls ‘Authors’ Never Existed. It reports that Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, claims that the Essenes never existed at all. Elior insists that “the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus.” [...]

Orthography of DSS

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by hundreds of diffrent hands. For example, the scribe of 1QS is slightly different from that of 1QH. The Table of Scribal Alphabets (orthography-dss.pdf) by Malachi Marin (The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vol. 1) helps us to compare and contrast between scrolls.