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Re: Essenes, again.
Dear Russell,
>when would
>you date the incident when Manaemus the Essene predicted Herod the Great
>would be king? This took place when Herod was a "boy" (Ant. 15.373).
Sorry to answer a question with a question, but when do you think the news
that Sargon of Akkad was fished out of the river as a baby hit the press? or
that Tuthmosis III was told by Amun that he would become pharaoh? I didn't
think the Menahem story was one that anyone would want to take seriously.
Herod needed legitimacy when he became king, not before.
I don't know the prehistory of the Essenes (who does?), and I'm not willing
to say that they did not exist before Pompey's arrival, but their existence
at that time is just one hypothesis.
If the non-biblical dss were written starting from the time of Onias III's
exile, would you want to say that the Essenes were around at that time? (The
Essene hypothesis does require that they were around at the start of such
writings!)
Yours,
Ian Hutchesson
(Thanks for the explanation of the honorable name.)