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orion Essenes = 'osey hatorah?



    Stephen Goranson writes:	

> 	Understanding the development of "minim" can, I think, help explain
>  why the later rabbis were disinclined to accept the Essenes' self
>  designation as 'osey hatorah.
  
    The assertion that the Essenes called themselves 'osey hatorah ("doers of
the law") is a significant shift and a vast improvement over your earlier
published views that they knew themselves simply and somewhat nonsensically as
'osey ("doers").  It is also more consistent with the evidence you cite in
your original article and in later postings on this list, where your examples
of the word "doers" in the scrolls and (less relevantly) Christian literature
mostly occur within the phrase "doers of the law."  
    However, it is a much further stretch to posit that the phrase 'osey
hatorah somehow was transformed into Essene (via Ossene, a form attested no
earlier than Epiphanius, whose nomenclature for heretical groups is in any
case notoriously unreliable).
    Russell Gmirkin

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