Cemetery Politics
Among the many bones its various enemies pick with the Jewish state, one has been much in the news lately: bones, very dry bones, residing in cemeteries both real and imagined all across the country.
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Digging King Herod
King Herod was a Jew of doubtful origin who ruled Israel in the years 40-4 B.C.E. During this same period, the Roman republic was being replaced by the Roman Empire with its vast expansionist aims. Relying on Roman support for his power, Herod was, in effect, Israel's little Roman emperor. And he played the part, bringing administrative order and economic prosperity to the country and creating hugely ambitious architectural projects. In the Roman way, he was also cruel, paranoid, and thorough, killing his wife, three sons, and an assortment of other relatives and confidants.
The New Israel Museum
An expanded and revamped Israel Museum re-opened to the public in late July after three years of renovations. While the modest architecture remains as it was, the modernist cubes rolling with the Jerusalem landscape, the jumble of buildings has been streamlined: 25,000 square feet of exhibition space have been added, but the number of items on display has been reduced by a third. Overall, the design is significantly more user-friendly, with a spacious new entrance hall leading to the museum's remarkable collections, including its three most significant wings: archeology, Jewish art and life, and fine art.
A Dead Issue?
Since the electrifying discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in the late 1940's, the scholarly consensus has been that they were produced by the Essenes, a small Second Temple-era Jewish sect known to us from Josephus. Last year, a book by Rachel Elior, Memory and Oblivion: The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Hebrew), upended this seemingly settled issue by contending that, in fact, the Essenes never existed.
Elior's revolutionary thesis, argued with force and stridency, has been discussed in major mainstream publications from Israeli newspapers to Time magazine. But the controversy, and clashing assessments of her achievement as a historian, have obscured a more complicated and interesting history. As it happens, a minority of scholars has long held that the Dead Sea sect was actually a small community of Sadducees (or "Zadokites")—the priestly group associated with Temple ritual and given to biblical literalism—who had exiled themselves from Jerusalem in the wake of the Hasmonean takeover in the second century B.C.E.
This modern scholarly story begins in 1910, when Solomon Schechter published fragments that he had found in the Cairo Genizah and had identified as Sadduceean on the basis of their frequent references to the high priest Zadok and the "sons of Zadok." With the discoveries at the Dead Sea, Schechter's texts were seen also to make up part of the scroll known as the Damascus Rule; yet the majority of scholars, instead of being led to question the prevailing hypothesis about the monastic community at Qumran, concluded that the Damascus Rule, too, must have been the work of Essenes.
Against that majority view, a handful of researchers, focusing less on the Scrolls' apocalyptic eschatology than on their teachings with regard to specific religious practices, continued to point to a Sadduceean connection. A pioneer proponent of this scholarly approach was Joseph Baumgarten of Baltimore (who himself was very far from repudiating the Essene association); since the 1970's, the figure most prominently associated with it has been New York University's Lawrence Schiffman. By the 1990's, their methodology had begun to win a number of well-informed adherents.
Anyone visiting the isolated site of Qumran today will sense the difficulty involved in reconstructing a society that has been dead and buried for nearly 2,000 years, and the even greater difficulty of relating this relatively tiny community to the diverse, stratified, and fevered Jewish society of the time. What conclusions, one wonders, will future investigators draw about today's Jewish society based on archaeological findings at, say, the Carlebach Moshav, a crunchy-Orthodox cooperative farm outside Jerusalem?
Text updated and slightly revised on February 23, 2010.
Insight & Analysis
Q & A
But for the Grace of Babylon: A Conversation with Irving Finkel
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.
Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.
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