Netty C. Gross

IN EARLY MARCH, RACHEL ELIORdropped a bombshell: The highly respect-ed professor of Jewish mysticism suggested that the Essenes, an asceticcommunity commonly believed to have

written the Dead Sea Scrolls, never existed. The comment came in answer to a question

on the roots of Jewish mysticism after a lectureElior gave at the Hebrew University inJerusalem. Anything to do with the Scrolls isnews everywhere, and especially in Israel, andher theory soon found its way into the newspa-pers. The publicity preceded the publicationsoon afterward of her Hebrew-language book“Memory and Oblivion: The Mystery of theDead Sea Scrolls” in which she expounds thetheory.

Elior, a tall dignified woman of 59, with jetblack hair and blue eyes and a distinguishedresumé, found herself in the midst of the latestseries of controversies over a question whichhas plagued scholars since the cache of ancientreligious documents was discovered in the1950’s: Who wrote them?

The scrolls were found by Beduin shep-herds between 1947 and 1956, in caves in andaround Wadi Qumran near the ruins of theancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, about akilometer from the shores of the Dead Sea. The930 scrolls and fragments of parchment andpapyrus include some of the only known sur-viving copies of Biblical documents writtenbefore 300 CE, and shed light on informationabout faith and ritual during the Second Templeperiod and serve as a link between Judaism andChristianity. Written in Hebrew and Aramaicby some 500 different hands, they are consid-ered the most important archaeological find ofthe past century.

Publication of the scrolls was delayed fordecades, due mainly to the inertia of the origi-nal editors, beginning with Father Roland deVaux. The French Dominican priest, who waseditor-in-chief of the publication of the Scrollsuntil he died in 1971, never published a defini-tive archaeological report of his work atQumran. He and the editors succeeding himwere accused of moving too slowly in openingthe content of the scrolls to wider study. DeVaux and the Israeli scholar-soldier-politicianYigal Yadin, laid the foundations of the main-stream theories regarding the scrolls’ originsand the identity of the community in Qumran.

By the time the scrolls were published intheir entirety in 2001 under the direction ofHebrew University Professor Emanuel Tov,scholars had formed a consensus that they were

THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 27, 2009 11

ISRAEL

Old Scrolls, New ControversyAn Israeli scholar ruffles feathers by claiming that theEssenes never existed and could not have authored the Dead Sea Scrolls

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A MINORITY VIEW: Prof. Rachel Eliorcontends that the scrolls werewritten by the deeply conservativeSadduccees, descendants of theHigh Priest Zadok