By Nir Hasson, HAARETZ
Among the tens of thousands of documents that were found in the 19th century in the Cairo Geniza, a collection of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, the largest and most important of their kind were two copies of a puzzling, handwritten manuscript that was labeled the Damascus Document.
This manuscript was believed to have been written in the 10th century C.E. and includes divine warnings, apocalyptic descriptions and religious rites. Some of the fog around this manuscript was dispersed 70 years later with the finding of . One of the scrolls that was found in the Qumran caves was the Damascus Document. In other words, this text originated with the sect that lived beside the Dead Sea.
After the conquest and destruction of Qumran by the Romans, a copy of the manuscript found its way to Cairo and there, apparently, it was repeatedly copied for 900 years. This document now serves as a possible solution to another mystery – the true nature of the Qumran site.
The site of Qumran at the northern end of the Dead Sea has been firing the imagination of researchers and archaeology buffs for 70 years. Cave No. 4, located in a cliff inside the national park, is a world-scale archaeological treasure. Most of the hidden scrolls were found there. Across the cliff is the site itself, consisting of the remains of large and impressive buildings that include a large pantry, two gigantic ritual pools (mikvehs), warehouses, and agricultural installations.
The location and scrolls are at the heart of a prolonged scientific argument relating to the connection of the site to the scrolls and the identity of the site’s occupants. Most researchers identify the residents of Qumran, who lived there between the first century B.C. and the first century C.E. with the Essene sect, described by historian Josephus Flavius (Yosef Ben Matityahu).
In this argument, an important question that occurs to every visitor to the site seems to have been forgotten: Where are the living quarters? If this was a permanent Essene settlement, how could they have a central pantry, large ritual pools, a cemetery and refectory, but no houses? Where did the people who composed the scrolls live? And what about the people who dipped in the pools and used the thousand pottery vessels that were found at the site?
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ytzrubin
Merely explain the matter to TED by email to his given address..
lost password== can not get new one because can not fillequest in form for ”current password” ytzrubin
What has this article shown as as “solved”…..It’s information, so far is that which any casual reader already has gleaned from stabdard reports. I believe that one of the original descriptions showed a large room which was regarded as being a sleeping quarters.. There was also evidence that some lived in the surrounding caves. In a community ike this, the libing quarters would have been their last consideration.
There was evidence of married Esenes also, and their middens were discovered and microscopically inspected, as was their area for defecation, discovered by following the laid down, written rules in a manuscript..
I have often remarked (as in “noticed”) the fact that Ha’Aretz, though a bankrupt leftist rag,has often published very interesting articles.
The connection between Schachter’s discoveries in the Cairo Genizah and the Quamran scrolls had already been recognised in “The Damascus Document.
The description of Schachter and his assistant crawling through the moutainous piles of ritually” buried” eorn out Jewish Holy literature is fascinating, as well as their having to afhere to a time limit, and to get out as much as they could.
What happened to what was left over…??? No one knows,No one asked.. !!
This looked to have been one of them, but goes no further than the Headlines, which may have been TED’S…