Elledge & Yeo, ASOR Blog
Who really wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Twenty years ago, the available options for understanding the identity of the Dead Sea Scrolls Community were relatively concise. Consensus associated the origins of the community with the ascetic Essenes. A few dissenting opinions highlighted its commonalities with the priestly Sadducees or associated the Scrolls with Jerusalem refugees who fled into the wilderness during the Great Jewish Revolt (66-70 CE). A frequent assumption is that the manuscripts somehow represented the collected religious literature of a single community. Qumran excavator ...