The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

1 coin from 76-67 bc

5 coins from 67-40 bc

4 coins from 40-37 bc

10 coins from 37-4 bc

16 coins from 4 bc-6 ad

91 coins from 6-41 ad (time of the procurators)

78 coins from 37-44 ad (reign of Agrippa I)

2 Roman coins from 54-68 ad

83 coins from 67 ad (2nd year of the revolt)

5 coins from 68 ad (3rd year of the revolt)

6 additional coins more precisely from the revolt, too oxidised to identify

13 Roman coins from 67-8 ad

1 Roman coin from 69-79 ad

2 coins from 72-3 ad

4 coins from 72-81 ad

1 Roman coin from 87 ad

3 Roman coins from 98-117 ad

6 coins from 132-6 ad (revolt of Simeon bar Kochba)¹⁸

The distribution of coins would appear to indicate two periods when the community at Qumran was most active — that between 103 and 76 bc, and that between ad 6 and 67. There are a total of 143 coins from the former period, 254 from the latter. For adherents of the consensus, this did not mesh as neatly as they would have liked with their theories. According to their reading of the scrolls, the ‘Wicked Priest’ was most likely to be identified as the high priest Jonathan, who lived between 160 and 142 bc — half a century before the first concentration of coins. In order to support his thesis, Father de Vaux needed a very early date for the founding of the Qumran community. He was thus forced to argue that the solitary coin dating from between 135 and 104 bc served to prove the thesis correct — even though common sense suggests that the community dates from between 103 and 76 BC, the period from which there is a concentration of 143 coins. The earlier coin, on which de Vaux rests his argument is much more likely to have been merely one that remained in circulation for some years after it was minted.

De Vaux ascribed particular significance to the disappearance of Judaic coins after ad 68 and the nineteen Roman coins subsequent to that year. This, he maintained, ‘proves’ that Qumran was destroyed in ad 68; the Roman coins, he argued, indicated that the ruins were ‘occupied’ by a detachment of Roman troops. On this basis, he proceeded to assign a definitive date to the deposition of the scrolls themselves: ‘our conclusion: none of the manuscripts belonging to the community is later than the ruin of Khirbet Qumran in AD 68.’¹⁹

The spuriousness of this reasoning is self-evident. In the first place, Judaic coins have been found which date from Simeon bar Kochba’s revolt between ad 132 and 136. In the second place, the coins indicate only that people were wandering around Qumran and dropping them; they indicate nothing, one way or the other, about the deposition of manuscripts, which could have been buried at Qumran as late as bar Kochba’s time. And finally, it is hardly surprising that the coins subsequent to ad 68 should be Roman. In the years following the revolt, Roman coins were the only currency in Judaea. This being the case, they need hardly have been dropped solely by Romans.

Eisenman is emphatic about the conclusions to be drawn from de Vaux’s archaeology. If it proves anything, he states, it proves precisely the opposite of what de Vaux concludes — proves that the latest date for the scrolls having been deposited at Qumran is not ad 68 but ad 136. Any time up to that date would be perfectly consistent with the archaeological evidence.²⁰ Nor, Eisenman adds, is the consensus correct in assuming that the destruction of the main buildings at Qumran necessarily meant the destruction of the site.²¹ There are, in fact, indications that at least some cursory or rudimentary rebuilding occurred, including a ‘crude canal’ to feed water into a cistern. Rather unconvincingly, de Vaux claimed this to have been the work of the Roman garrison supposed, on the basis of the coins, to have occupied the site.²² But Professor Driver pointed out that the sheer crudeness of the reconstruction does not suggest Roman work.²³ De Vaux maintained that his theory, conforming as it did to the alleged destruction of Qumran in ad 68, was in accord with ‘les donnees d’histoire’ the ‘accepted givens of history’ — ‘having forgotten’, as Professor Driver observed drily, ‘that the historical records say nothing of the destruction of Qumran in ad 68 by the Romans’. In short, Driver concluded, ‘the “donnees d’histoire” are historical fiction’.²⁴

There is another crucial piece of archaeological evidence which runs diametrically counter to the interpretation of the consensus. De Vaux himself studiously, and justifiably, avoided referring to the ruins at Qumran as a ‘monastery’. As he explained, he ‘never used the word when writing about the excavations at Qumran, precisely because it represents an inference which archaeology, taken alone, could not warrant’.²⁵ It is clear, however, that he nevertheless thought of Qumran as a species of monastery. This is reflected by his uninhibited use of such monastic terms as ‘scriptorium’ and ‘refectory’ to describe certain of the structures. And if de Vaux himself had some reservations about dubbing Qumran a ‘monastery’, other adherents of the consensus did not. In his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, Cardinal Danielou babbled happily about the ‘monks of Qumran’, even going so far as to state that ‘the monasticism of Qumran can be considered as the source of Christian monasticism’.²⁶

What de Vaux, his colleagues and adherents of the consensus chose consistently to overlook was the distinctly and unmistakably military character of some of the ruins. When one visits Qumran today, one will inevitably be struck initially by the remains of a substantial defensive tower, with walls of some feet in thickness and an entrance only on the second storey. Less obvious, but just across a small passageway from the tower, there is another structure whose function may not be immediately apparent. In fact, it is what remains of a well-built forge — complete with its own water supply for tempering the tools and weapons crafted within it. Not surprisingly, the forge is something of an embarrassment to the scholars of the international team, clinging to their image of placid, pacifist ‘Essenes’. Thus de Vaux scuttled away from the issue as fast as tongue and pen could carry him:

there was a workshop comprising a furnace above which was a plastered area with a drainage conduit. The installation implies that the kind of work carried on there required a large fire as well as an abundant supply of water. I do not venture to define its purpose any more precisely than that.²⁷

Which is rather like not venturing to define the purpose of empty cartridge cases and spent projectiles of lead scattered around the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Professor Cross, following in de Vaux’s footsteps but incapable of the same disingenuousness, grudgingly alludes to ‘what appears to have been a forge’.²⁸

In fact, arrows were found inside the ruins of Qumran; and while one could argue that these were loosed by attacking Romans, they are, as Professor Driver asserted, ‘as likely to have belonged to the occupants’²⁹ — if not, indeed, more likely. On the whole, the military character of the ruins is so flagrant that another independent scholar, Professor Golb of the University of Chicago, has gone so far as to see in them an entirely martial installation.³⁰ According to Golb, the scrolls were never composed or copied at Qumran at all, but were brought there, from Jerusalem, specifically for protection. ‘No fragment of parchment or papyrus’, Golb has pointed out, ‘was ever found in the debris… nor any tools of scribes… ‘³¹

Apart from coins and the physical ruins, the most important body of external evidence used by the international team for dating the Dead Sea Scrolls derived from the tenuous science of palaeography. Palaeography is the comparative study of ancient calligraphy. Assuming a strictly chronological and linear progression in the evolution of handwriting, it endeavours to chart developments in the specific shape and form of letters, and thus to assign dates to an entire manuscript. One might find, for example, an old charter or some other document in one’s