Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran [Paperback]

The scrolls found in the caves in the surrounding area had nothing to do with the Qumran ruins but were placed there by Jews fleeing the Roman sack of Jerusalem. Thus the scrolls are not a collection of "sectarian" essene beliefs, but a cross section of wider Jewish religious thought of the period. With this in mind, the texts show how both Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity and more esoteric ideas evolved out of this wider religious thought rather than from one individual sectarian group.

Golb provides a wealth of archeological and textual examples to prove his point. So, if one accepts Golb's conclusions then we should stop calling the Qumran site the home of an Essene sect and stop refering to the scrolls as the product of this sect. If authors such as Lomas and Knight, Baigent and Leigh accept his conclusions then they will have to re-jig their theories about the origins of Freemasonry and Christianity. A debate on this issue would be interesting and necessary, I feel.

It has to be said that the bulk of the book contains Golb's disputes with "traditional" Qumranologists who stick to the conventional view of the scrolls as a product of a desert sect. This may all be necessary as a way of recording for posterity an alternative view from a member of the "awkward squad" but for a lay reader can be a bit tedious. (still gave a 5 though :-))

Oddly, that is not what the book is really about. The true focus is the wagon-circling of those academicians who had built careers on the--as Prof. Golb demonstrates with inescapable logic--totally unfounded assumption that the ruins at Khirbet Qumran are the remains of a monastery where scribes churned out sectarian literature to be stored in the local caves. Beginning with the group surrounding the Dominican Roland de Vaux, which originally formulated the "Qumran-Essenes" theory largely out of air and good wishes, at least two generations of graduate students obtained their doctorates by excluding, working around, or simply suppressing evidence at variance with the received truth. Prof. Golb's dissection of their arguments would stand up well in any court.

Golb perhaps did not intend to pillory so brutally the lack of real intellectual rigor required of today's PhDs, but a reader is compelled to wonder exactly how severely these people are required to defend any conclusions they arrive at.

The one sour note in an otherwise fascinating work is the impenetrable recital of the academic-political intrigues surrounding the controversy. Golb was apparently defamed rather savagely in the process and a wish for vindication is understandable. However, he seems to overlook his own presentation as his best weapon. Having exposed his opponents as obvious hacks, he truly need do nothing more than sit back and watch his opponents squirm. Verbum sat sapienti for the second edition, which I eagerly await.

Golb is an erudite, he scholarly covers the whole thing, from the discovery up to the vilest journalistic myth-making. He provides also a lot of background information on the site and the result of the founds. And yet his book reads like a thrilling novel.

A masterpiece. By far the best book ever written on the greatest archaelogical found on the 20 the century.