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orion-list Qumran Graves
Dear subscribers,
Steven Goranson has asked me to present the results of the two publications
I mentioned in my mail a few days ago, and I am glad to do so at least
regarding the one directly dealing with Joe Zias' latest publication. My
article in QC deals with bone material from about half of the graves
excavated by Roland de Vaux. The first part tells the story how this
material eventually made its way to Germany to be examined by Dr. Olav
Röhrer-Ertl at the University of Munich. Olav Röhrer-Ertl, Ferdinand
Rohrhirsch and collegues have presented the first batch of their results in
a recent article in RdQ. Then I focus on the paper given by Joe Zias who,
after his brief own examination of the material in Germany, came to the
conclusion that the evidence in fact supported the (old) theory according
to which the scolls belong to the Essenes, that Qumran was an Essene
settlement, that the cemetery was of a community of strictly celibate
adults and that the only way of procreation in the group was through
proselytizing. Since my article in QC has been completed and sent to press
long before Joe Zias' report was published in DSD, and I am eagerly
awaiting the issue to be available at the library here, I cannot respond to
Joe Zias' article (yet). But I assume that the DSD article is mainly based
on these four conclusions. If there are more data in the article, we have
to talk about them later. - After a brief report on a Conference in
Eichstaett/Germany where the results of the years-long anthropological
research on the material (and much more which is all published in the
second publication I referred to earlier) was presented to the public, I
come back in more detail to the issues raised by Joe Zias in Boston. Here I
propose the following conclusions, all based on the results of the work
carried out by Röhrer-Ertl and his collegues (i.e. the same material Joe
Zias took as basis for his conclusions):
a) There is no conclusive evidence that the graves on the fringes are
bedouin. Neither the orientation or the shape of the burials, nor the fact
that there were beads found in the graves require us to suggest a much
later date for these burials than for the rest of them. Because a detailed
discussion is presented in my article, I would only like to stress two
things. First, what today is considered the fringes of the cemetery need
not have been on the fringes in antiquity (erosion), and second all (!)
bones examined by Röhrer-Ertl show the same degree of having been affected
a long time ago and over a long time by chemicals in the soil, something
not sufficiently taken into consideration by Joe Zias in his Boston paper.
As there was no way to get any results from C 14 due to the lack of
appropriate carbon material because of the very same chemicals (there were
attempts to run C14 dates on the bones, of course!), there is no secure way
to separate any of the bones from the rest. Unless Joe Zias or anybody else
has new C14 data, we simply have no way of settling the question by
referring to "objective" scientific C14s. The claim that the bones are "200
years old" promulgated on the conference rests on a severe methodological
error: this date does not come from the bones themselves, but from organic
packing material in which the bones were stored after excavation - a big
difference indeed.
b) To make it even more interesting, Röhrer-Ertl has identified two women
in the main cemetery (Q22, Q24-II), which of course was disputed by Zias in
Boston, but without convincing arguments. We have to bear in mind, however,
that more bones are being examined in Paris, so the number proposed by the
German team might (!) even go up.
To make it brief, I think Joe Zias in his paper (if that refers to the DSD
article, too, remains to be seen) has come to premature conclusions, some
of which cannot be substantiated by the data he has presented (the
character of the scrolls or the community as Essene, thanks to Sigrid
Peterson), others which are based on questionable conclusions drawn from
data of his German collegues. I admit that even with these female
individuals identified in the main cemetery and its "fringes", the number
of females is lower that at other sites, but not unique. More on this in my
article and a book I am currently writing.
Let me conclude with a few words on the term "paradigm shift". I am happy
about Russell Gmyrken remarks. Even if Thomas Kuhn would not like us to use
that phrase, I still would take it to name the situation as I see it. The
phrase has long been used in the literature and nobody has any copyright on
it. We should not quarrel about terms but about the facts behind them. Is
this the reason for Steven Goranson's veto? We might not be in the position
to present a new paradigm yet, but from an archaeological standpoint I see
less and less that substantiates the old one. So there is a shift going on,
we just have to realize it.
Let's all look forward to a lively discussion.
All the best
Jurgen Zangenberg
630 Whitney Avenue
New Haven CT 06511
>>>
Note from the moderator: this message originally bounced because it is
over the size limit but I forwarded it on because it is on-topic.
Unfortunately, the Israeli ISP inter.net.il seems to be having some
problems. Joe Zias uses that ISP and the recent messages have been
bouncing. As soon as it clears up, I'll offer to forward the cemetery
messages to him.
Avital
For private reply, e-mail to Jurgen Zangenberg <jurgen.zangenberg@pantheon.yale.edu>
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