The Ancients - The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of Qumran

Episode Date: September 24, 2023

Part 1/2. Potentially one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever, the Dead Sea Scrolls - also known as the Qumran Scrolls - are a set of Jewish Manuscripts from nearly 2000 years ago. Found in a cave at the edge of the Dead Sea, the scrolls offer value insight into what life was like nearly two millennia ago - but what exactly are these scrolls - and do they tell us anything about a man called Jesus?In this episode, Tristan welcomes back Dr Jodi Magness from the University of North Carolina, to help us decipher these ancient texts. Looking at what life was like in the archaeological settlement of Qumran, what the remaining architecture and inscriptions tell us about the people who lived there, and explaining what ancient society would've been like - do we know who used the Dead Sea Scrolls, but even more importantly, who created them?The Ancients has been nominated in the History category at the Signal Awards! Help us win Gold by casting your vote here!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, we're talking about one of the most famous archaeological discoveries ever made in the Holy Land. It's a name that you've probably heard of, but might not know too much about. They're called the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Qumran Scrolls,

discovered in caves near the site of Qumran in the Judean desert. But what exactly are these scrolls? Do they have a link to Jesus? And what do we know about the people who used them, who created them? Well, you're going to find out in this special two-part episode with the one and only Dr Jodie Magnus from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now Jodie, she is a fan favourite who's been on the pod several times over the years talking all things from King Herod to the origins of Jerusalem and her knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the archaeology, well it's insane. We talked for well over an hour hence why we're

dividing this episode into two. Now in this first part we're going to be exploring the archaeology of nearby Qumran because it is so important for understanding the story behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and the people who use them. As Jodie herself highlights, there are many different theories about Qumran and its link to the scrolls, but here we have what Jodie believes is most likely. That Qumran was a Jewish sectarian settlement in the desert. I really do hope you enjoy. Jodie is a force of nature. Get ready. Lots of information coming your way in the next 35 minutes. So without further ado, here's Jodie. Jodie, welcome back to the podcast. It's always a pleasure getting you on The Ancients.

Thank you for having me back. You are more than welcome. And with you, we've done some really fun big topics of Holy Land archaeology over the years, whether it's Herod's tomb or origins of Jerusalem or Masada. And I think it's fair to say we're keeping on a big topic today with the Dead Sea Scrolls. If I remember from our chat about Herod's tomb more than a year ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls is up there as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent times in the Holy Land. Yeah, that's correct. It's been called the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Yeah. So if it has that title, first of all, what exactly are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Yeah, I like to say, actually, that pretty much most people have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but a lot of them don't know what they are. They've just heard of them. And I think a lot of people think that the Dead Sea Scrolls have something to do with Jesus. And they don't. Spoiler alert. They don't.

But there's a reason why people think that. So basically, the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient scrolls that date to the first centuries BC, and maybe a little bit into the first century AD, that were discovered in the area of the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in the vicinity of an archaeological site called Qumran. And these scrolls were deposited in those caves by members of a Jewish sect that lived at Qumran and brought the scrolls there and deposited them in the caves. The members of that sect did not write all of the scrolls, but they brought them there, used them, perhaps wrote some of them. And the scrolls themselves are a diverse collection of ancient Jewish religious literature, including the earliest copies of the Hebrew Bible, what some people call

the Old Testament, that have ever been discovered, and other Jewish religious works that are not biblical books. So that's basically what they are. The religious literature that's non-biblical also includes what we call sectarian literature, which means writings of the members of this sect which describe their distinctive beliefs and practices. Well, we're going to delve into all of that. But I think first of all, the archaeological site of Qumran, right next to where they were discovered, it seems so important to understand the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You need to understand the archaeology of this site. So Jodie, take it away. What is Qumran? What is the archaeology revealing about it? So yes, you're absolutely right that you cannot separate the scrolls from the site of Qumran,

even though I would point out that none of the scrolls technically were found at the site of Qumran. They were found in caves surrounding the site. And so the assumption is the scrolls were deposited in the caves by people who lived at Qumran. But technically, the scrolls don't come from Qumran. They come from the caves around Qumran. So basically, what happens is after the first scrolls were discovered, and the first scrolls were discovered by accident by local nomads, Bedouins, in the winter spring of 1946, 1947. But after the discovery of the first scrolls, and after they surfaced on the antiquities market and scholars became aware of them and identified them as scrolls dating to, let's

say, roughly the time of Jesus, at that point, scholars began to zero in on the site of Qumran, which is where the scrolls reportedly had come from that area. Now, the archaeological site itself was a small ruin that had been known previously. So, it was visible previously, people had visited it previously, but nobody had paid any attention to it until the scrolls were found in the vicinity of the site. And so that led to excavations at the site by a French biblical archaeologist named Roland Deveaux who conducted excavations at Qumran from 1951 to 1956 in connection with further exploration of caves in the area to see if there were more scrolls. So his expedition actually had two

components, number one, to look for scrolls, and number two, to excavate the site of Qumran. And he did find additional scrolls in the caves, but also excavated the site. So it turns out that the site is, again, it's a very small, it's an unimpressive looking site, simple construction, you know, field stones, not hewn stones, unadorned buildings, so no interior decoration or anything like that, dirt floors, or maybe rough lagstone pavement in the rooms. So it's a very small, unimpressive looking site that dates to the first century AD up until the year 68 AD. What happens in 68 AD is that the site was destroyed by the Romans at the time of the first Jewish revolt. Everything about Qumran and the

Dead Sea Scrolls is controversial, everything. And so nothing that I am saying is without controversy, although I like to think that I represent a kind of majority view. So the question is, you know, who lived at the site of Qumran? And can we in fact establish that they are the people who used the scrolls and deposited them in the caves, right? So first of all, I think that we can pretty conclusively demonstrate the connection between the scrolls and the site of Qumran. And we can demonstrate that based on archaeology, because we have the same types of pottery found at the site of Qumran and in the caves with the scrolls. Scientific analyses have indicated that that

pottery is made from the same clay, and there's actually a potter's workshop at Qumran. So presumably most of the pottery, if not all of it, was actually manufactured at the site. And that pottery was then used at the site, but also used for jars and other things that were deposited in the caves with the scrolls. And also we have topography, which is a geographical connection because some of the scroll caves, that is some of the caves that yielded scrolls, there were 11 caves in all that yielded scrolls. Some of those caves are accessible

only by walking through the site itself. So you had to actually walk through the site to get into caves with scrolls. So again, there's a physical connection. So I think that the evidence connecting the site with the scrolls. So again, there's a physical connection. So I think that the evidence connecting the site with the scrolls is overwhelming. And the upshot of that is that this is important because when you look at what is in the scrolls, the kind of literature in the scrolls, it's true that a lot of it is just generic Jewish religious literature of the time,

but there is also literature among the scrolls that is sectarian, that reflects a very distinctive outlook that is different from what most Jews had shared at that time. And that suggests that this group was a Jewish sect. And because we have ancient sources from this period, mostly Josephus, but also Philo and Pliny, who talk about a Jewish sect called the Essenes, who have, in many cases, beliefs and practices that are very similar to what we read about in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Therefore, many scholars, including myself, identify the Jewish sect that lived at Qumran, used the scrolls and deposited them in the caves with the ancient Essenes. And then you look at the archaeology. Now, you can look at the archaeology on its own without, and some people have said, well, we should just let the

archaeology speak for itself without taking into account the scrolls. Fair enough. That's not an illegitimate point of view, although it does ignore the fact that the scrolls are part of the archaeology of the site. So, anyway, to me, it seems perverse that if you have a body of literature that actually is part of the archaeology of the site, why would you want to exclude that from consideration? But even if OK, let's say even if we do that and we look at the site without first thinking about the scrolls, about the scenes or anything like that, it's a very strange looking site. And it's strange looking because it doesn't have any private houses in it. So it's not a village. It's not a town. It's certainly not a city. And then you wonder, well, then if there are no private houses in it, then what's going on here? What is it, right? Where did the people live? Meaning where did they sleep? There are a few

rooms at the site that have a second story level, and maybe some of those were used as bedrooms, but there's very little room for that at the second story level. So I think that people who were based at the site, for the most part, did not live or sleep inside the site, but outside it, maybe in tents and huts and caves around the outside of the site. So first of all, it's not really a normal site in that sense. The rooms that we do have in the settlement seem to have been used for communal purposes, like dining rooms. We have a couple of communal dining rooms as workshops, for example. So that then leads to the question of, well, then what is this site? And the excavator of the site, the original excavator, who was a French archaeologist named Roland Deveaux, I think that he really accurately described the site as a community center, the center of this community that is members of this sect,

and not like a normal village or a town. And then you have to ask yourself, well, you know, what kinds of activities were going on there? Again, I mean, what are they doing in this kind of community center? So clearly, they're having communal meals, for example. Clearly, they're doing manufacturing of something, some things, because some rooms were workshops. There's the potter's workshop, for example. But really, what was kind of the purpose of this sort of community center? It's a strange sort of a thing. Here, I'm going to say I probably am not part of the majority consensus, but there are a number of distinctive features at Qumran, aside from the fact that there's like no private houses. So one of the distinctive features is that

there's a large number of Jewish ritual baths, and they're not just a large number of them, they're large in size. So clearly they were to accommodate a large number of people, meaning the members of this community. And that indicates that the people who were based at Qumran had a concern with the maintenance of a very high level of Jewish ritual purity. Jewish ritual purity, by the way, is not connected with cleanliness or hygiene in the modern sense of the word. It's a state of being that is required for being in the presence of the God of Israel. So the God of Israel demands that when Israelites or Jews are in his presence,

and by the way, it's only Israelites or Jews, it's not Gentiles, because Gentiles were not allowed into the presence of the God of Israel, according to ancient Judaism, they had to be in a state of ritual purity, meaning they first had to sort of immerse themselves in a body of water, and then they could go into his presence. It's a little more complicated than that. But now before I go on, I will say, so people are probably wondering, but wait a minute, then wouldn't you need to be in a state of ritual purity all the time? Because God is omnipresent. He's everywhere around us all the time.

But ancient Jews, like other ancient peoples, did not believe that God was everywhere all at once. They believed that their God, in this case, it's the God of Israel, dwelled in a certain place. In the case of ancient Jews, they believed that the God of Israel dwelled in the Jerusalem temple. The Jerusalem temple was the house of the God of Israel. And that's where his presence was. And so all ancient Jews, before they entered the ancient temple in Jerusalem, first had to ritually purify themselves, right? So we have a large number of these sort of ritual baths. And that suggests a concern with the high level of maintenance of ritual purity, which is not all that normal for most Jews in antiquity, because most Jews in antiquity didn't have to worry about that unless they were going to the temple.

So what's going on here? So first of all, there was one category of ancient Jews who did have to worry about being ritually pure most of the time, and that was the priests, because they served God in his house. So they had to worry about being ritually pure on a higher level on a more regular basis. And one of the things that we know about this group, the Essenes, the sect that lived at Qumran, both from sectarian literature and from our outside sources like Josephus, is that full members basically adopted a priestly lifestyle when they joined the sect. Even if they didn't come from priestly families, they adopted a priestly lifestyle. And this is because this sect believed that the Jerusalem temple was impure and polluted, that the priests who were serving in the temple were unfit to serve. They therefore rejected as

legitimate the Jerusalem temple, and they constituted themselves, their sect, as a sort of a substitute temple. So conceptually, you have a group of people who, even if they're not coming from priestly families, have adopted a priestly lifestyle, and who believe that their community is a sort of a substitute temple, or really, more accurately, a sort of desert tabernacle when they would take over the temple in Jerusalem. But anyway, and then believe that God dwelled in their midst. And if you as an ancient Jew believe that, then that means that you are going to need to, you know, be ritually pure all the time. Now, this leads to a second problem,

which is the problem of sacrifices. Our concept, most people's concept, at least in the West, of interacting with God, if they believe in God, is very different from the way ancient people interacted with their gods, including ancient Jews. So, again, ancient peoples did not believe that gods were omnipresent. Ancient peoples believed in Jews are just like everybody else, by the way. One of the problems that I have with the way a lot of people today look at ancient Judaism and ancient Jews is that they think that ancient Jews and Judaism were different and peculiar from everyone else, when in fact, ancient Jews were far more like everybody else than they were not. They were pretty much the same, with a couple of differences, but pretty much the same. So, ancient peoples believed that gods were not omnipresent, didn't dwell among them all the time, but instead lived elsewhere. And it depended on the kind of

god it was. So you had, for example, celestial deities. Celestial deities are deities that live up in the heavens. You have, for example, the Olympian deities in Greece who dwell on top of Mount Olympus, right? You sometimes have chthonic deities, which means deities who live underground. So if you, as a Jew or anybody else in the ancient world, wanted to interact with your God and get your God to come to you so that they could do something good for you, make it rain to stop a drought or heal you from sickness or protect you during war or whatever, you had to entice them to come to you. How would you entice them? Well, you would offer them something good. And now let's think about, we'll think for a minute, we'll focus on celestial deities, which is heavenly deities,

because the God of Israel was and is a heavenly deity, dwells up in heaven. So how do you entice a God who's up in heaven to come down and do good things for you? Well, you offer the most precious food item that you can, which is a piece of choice meat. So you slaughter an animal and you take nice chunks of meat and you build an altar and you burn the chunks of meat on the altar and the smoke rises up to heaven. And God up in heaven smells that meat and says, barbecue, I'm going to come down and check it out and comes down to have a nice meal. And now at this point, you've now enticed the God to come to you with that nice offering of meat. But now what you want to do is make sure that the God doesn't eat and run, right? You want the God to hang around and continue to do good things for you. So what do

you do? You build the God a nice house, a house next to the altar where you feed the God. And that house is a temple building. And the temple is going to be a house for the God. But of course, it's a God's house. So it's got to be a really nice house. So it's going to be a big building, right? And because it's the God's house, ordinary people don't go into that house. Ordinary people aren't allowed directly into the presence of the God of Israel or any other God, for that matter, in antiquity. Ordinary people stay outside the building. They congregate around the altar where priests who are intermediaries with the God offer sacrifices on their behalf. And it is then the priests who are allowed into

the temple building and service the needs of the God. So bathe the God, feed the God, whatever, right? And Jewish interaction with their God, the God of Israel, was exactly like that in pretty much every way except that, well, there are a couple of differences, but one difference is that the Israelites and the Jews came to believe that their God could not be represented in physical form. So there was no cult statue of the God of Israel in the Jerusalem temple, but the concept is the same, that the presence of the God dwells inside the temple. And by the way, it was the same thing, like, let's go back to the Acropolis in Athens and think of the Parthenon where you had the statue of Athena Parthenos, right, in her temple and people outside, right? So ordinary people stayed outside the temple building. They couldn't go in. hierarchy where on earth, it's the king, right? Who's the representative of the God and ordinary people usually don't go directly into the presence of the king. And if they do, they have to like

prostrate themselves on the floor and everything, right? So there's really no way around human in the ancient mind. And this is true of the, we're now in the world of Jesus, right? This is the way Jesus would, this isn't just the way Jesus thought, this is the world he's in. So he didn't, everybody took this for granted. It wasn't like they were thinking, oh, we can do something else. No, this was it. So the way that you interact with the God is through offering sacrifices, right? There isn't, it's not like you can say, I'm going to offer a prayer instead. That was not the way it worked. Now let's go back to Qumran. So if you're a Jewish sect that rejects the Jerusalem temples, the sacrifices being offered there and the priests there as polluted

and illegitimate, that's the worst thing, by the way, that can happen if you're a Jew, because that means that if you're doing it wrong, then you're going, if you're doing things the way the God of Israel says you're not supposed to do them, then what's going to be the consequence? God is going to abandon you. He's going to be unhappy. He's going to leave you and you won't have his protection. That's the worst thing that can happen. And by the way, that is for Jews, the very worst thing, because unlike other ancient peoples, they didn't worship other gods. The God of Israel was it. So if you offend him, you're really out of luck. So if you think that that's what's happened, that the God of Israel is offended, that the temple is polluted, and you think you're doing things the right way, then what are you going

to have to do? You are going to have to offer sacrifices. It's not like there's an alternate option. So here's where I, again, become a little bit of a minority from many of my colleagues, which is that there's a phenomenon at Qumran of animal bone deposits. This was discovered by Deveaux in his excavations back in the 1950s. And what he discovered is that in the open air spaces outside the buildings, and there are some areas where they're especially concentrated, he found deposits of animal bones

that sometimes were covered with pieces of pottery or even placed inside pots. And they had been laid on top of the ground. They weren't buried, which is a very common error that some of my colleagues say. They weren't buried. They were on the ground. And they were also mixed with ash. This is a really weird thing. Now, what DeVoe did is he went looking for, and this is what we do as archaeologists, he went looking for parallels. Where else do we have something like this? And he couldn't find any other settlements where we have something like this. So we don't have anything like this in towns or villages or whatever. So it's really weird. Well, what DeVos said, the way that he interpreted this phenomenon is that what we have here are the remains of

special ritual meals that were eaten by members of the sect that lived at Qumran, right? So we know they had communal meals because they had communal dining rooms. So they had these special meals and they would take the remains of the meals and they would deposit them on the ground outside the buildings and cover them with, okay. But that explanation, and I actually believed that for a long time. And in the first edition of my Qumran book, that's what I say. The problem with that explanation is it doesn't have explanatory power. So it doesn't tell us why they did this, right? Why would you do that? It doesn't really make any sense. And so a few years ago, I did some research on this and I discovered that actually that's not the, I think that's not the correct interpretation. And the reason is we were looking

for parallels in all the wrong places. We were looking for parallels in settlements, which made sense. So villages like En Gedi or whatever, but those were the wrong places because we do actually have a lot of parallels to this, but they're in temples and sanctuaries. Temples and sanctuaries all over the ancient world, around the Mediterranean, in the Near East, even in Israelite sanctuaries like Tel Dan, the Samaritan temple on top of Mount Gerizim. So everybody was doing this. So inside the grounds of a temple or sanctuary, when they offered sacrifices, what would happen? Well, some of the meat was burned on the altar. The animal bones were then sort of brushed off and they were burned with the ash and they were sort of scattered

around the altar. And a lot of the meat was cooked, what was left of the animal was cooked and was divided up among the priests and the people and they ate it. And actually, for a lot of ancient people, the only time they ever even got to eat meat was when they participated in a sacrifice. Now, Deveaux had a small number of the animal bones that he discovered analyzed. The analysis indicated that at least the bones that were analyzed all belong to what are called kosher species, biblically permitted species. So you have sheep, cow, goat, no pig. So I like to tell my students no barbecue at Qumran because in North Carolina barbecue is pork. But anyway, and interestingly, no poultry, even though poultry is permitted, according to

biblical law, but typically was not offered for sacrifice, by the way. The analysis of the bones indicated that the animals had been slaughtered, butchered, the meat had been cut into chunks, the chunks of meat had been boiled or roasted, and then the meat had been scraped off of the bones and the bones were deposited on the ground and covered with pieces of Birken pottery or put inside pots. And again, it was all mixed with ash. And some of the bones were calcined, indicating that they had been burned in a fire. So the profile of the animal bones that Deveaux found and had analyzed exactly fits. His description of these deposits is exactly the same as deposits on the grounds of ancient temples and sanctuaries. I came to the conclusion that it's inevitable that these are actually the grounds of ancient temples and sanctuaries. I came to the conclusion that

it's inevitable that these are actually the remains of animal sacrifices. One problem is we don't have the remains of an altar. I don't think that that's an obstacle, actually. I do think that there's a space where we can identify that there was an altar that was later removed, but I don't think that that's, you know, an obstacle to identifying these as the remains of sacrifices. And if that's the case, then we have to conclude that this community at Qumran, the members of this sect, were offering their own sacrifices. Now, why is this such a big deal? Because many of my colleagues, and especially not so much archaeologists, but scholars who study early Judaism, right, or,

you know, Hebrew Bible or whatever, are under the impression that it's inconceivable that Jews, any Jews, would have offered sacrifices anywhere but the Jerusalem Temple in this period, especially when you're only, whatever, today it's like a half an hour drive from Jerusalem to Qumran, so a very short distance from Jerusalem to Qumran. This is inconceivable when, you know, what basically becomes the accepted norm in Judaism is that there can only be one temple to the God of Israel, and it has to be on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But we actually know that that was not the case in antiquity. We know that there were other temples where Israelites and or Jews offered sacrifices to the God of Israel. And one of the most famous examples actually is from exactly the same period, a site called Leontopolis in Egypt,

where members of a family, the Oniads, who are related, by the way, to the Qumran sect, ultimately established a sacrificial cult at a temple dedicated to the God of Israel. And that temple operated until it was closed by Vespasian in the year 73 AD. There really, to my mind, at least, there's no convincing reason. And in fact, to the contrary, personally, I think in this case, the archaeological evidence is incontrovertible. And what we have here, and all you have to do is, again, open up DeVos' reports and the photos and look at it was any other kind of ancient site in this period and this was found, there'd be no question that what we have here are sacrifices, the remains of sacrifices. But because it's a Jewish site, it's controversial. So I actually think that Qumran was functioning as sort of a desert tabernacle conceptually. So

again, not a temple. I don't think that they thought what they had here was a temple. I think that the members of the sect conceptually thought of themselves as being in the exile in the desert, so to speak, right? Analogous to the ancient Israelites. And they were awaiting, and we know this from their literature, they were awaiting the day when they would regain control of Jerusalem and the temple, they were awaiting the day when they would regain control of Jerusalem and the Temple, and then they would reinstitute the sacrifices as they saw fit, right? So altogether, this is the picture that I think the archaeology gives us, which is a very long answer to your initial question, which I forgot already what it was. It was all about the archaeology of Qumran,

so don't worry. You've highlighted and explained your theory surrounding it, and actually, I'm really glad you kind of wrapped that up there because you literally just highlighted what the literature is telling us about this group so is this kind of one of the real important things about the dead sea scrolls and we'll focus on the various different texts that are included in these scrolls but that some of these texts they refer to these people and what they were doing and what they believed in yeah that, that's right. So again, the Dead Sea Scrolls, okay, let me just backtrack a minute and say something about that very term, the Dead Sea Scrolls. So that's what they've become called, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it's not necessarily a terrible term, but it's not precise.

And the reason it's not precise is because we have other ancient scrolls from different periods and associated with different types of people, not the Qumran sect, that have been found in the area of the Dead Sea over the course of time. And so, for example, I think a few years ago, I think it was even during COVID, the Israel Antiquities Authority released this, you know, media announcement that new Dead Sea scrolls had been discovered. Well, it turned out that those were ancient scrolls from further south along the shore of the Dead Sea that date to a little bit later than the time of Qumran and have nothing to do with the Qumran sect. And I

personally am convinced that the IAA, the Israel Antiquities Authority, used that word Dead Sea Scrolls deliberately because they knew, you know,, used that word Dead Sea Scrolls deliberately because they knew, you know, anytime you say anything Dead Sea Scrolls, people automatically think of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And people, most people don't make that distinction. So they knew it was going to get a lot of publicity, which it did, but it had nothing to do with Qumran. And for this reason, a lot of scholars prefer not to use the term Dead Sea Scrolls to refer to the scrolls from the 11 caves around Qumran, but instead prefer to use other terms like the Qumran Scrolls or the Qumran Library or, you know, whatever like that, right? So just to clarify, I use Dead Sea Scrolls

because I'm writing for a general public, and if I used a technical term like that, nobody would know what I was talking about. But you have to understand that this term Dead Sea Scrolls, we're using it now to refer specifically to the literature associated with the site of Qumran, but it can be used more broadly as well. And the other thing that I will say is, again, to point out that one of the controversies about Qumran is the connection between the scrolls and the site. And the reason is because if you argue that the people who lived at Qumran were not the same people who used the scrolls and deposited them in the nearby caves, then it opens up the possibility of identifying Qumran as something different, something else that's not a sectarian settlement,

that it's something else. And these alternative theories have gotten a lot of publicity in recent years, so that Qumran was a villa, a manor house, a fortress, a pottery manufacturing center, a commercial entrepot. The only way that you can argue for those alternative interpretations of Qumran is if you say that the scrolls have nothing to do with the people who lived at the site. And the reason is because as soon as you look at the composition of the scrolls, that very sectarian nature of some of the scrolls automatically means you have to identify the people associated with the scrolls with a Jewish sect.

So I think that all those alternative interpretations are easily demonstrably false, right? Because again, I said, as I said before, we can identify, we can establish the connection. Unfortunately, again, because Qumran is so sensational, so controversial, anytime somebody comes out with one of these alternative theories, it automatically gets a huge amount of publicity, right? And I inevitably get contacted by the media, well, what do you think about, you know, this theory or that theory or whatever? So there's that. And there is a little bit of a more legitimate controversy about then identifying, even if even scholars who accept the Qumran as a sectarian site do not necessarily agree that

the members of that sect were Essenes. And that's because the word Essene does not occur in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's outside sources like Josephus and Philo and Pliny who refer to Essenes in this period. And so some scholars argue that it was a Jewish sect, but they weren't the Essenes who are described in our ancient sources. That's something else we can talk about more if you want afterwards. But anyway, I think that there's a good reason to identify them as Essenes. Well, there you go. Stay tuned for part two next week, where Jodie will explain who the Essenes were and what the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves talk about. We've still got so much to explore with the Dead Sea Scrolls. But as mentioned at the start, it's important to begin with the archaeology of Qumran

to try and understand the context for the Dead Sea Scrolls. More coming next week. Now, last things from me, I must mention something else now, which is very, very exciting because we, the ancients, we've been nominated for an award. The first time ever for the ancients. It is really exciting. For the best single history podcast episode at the Signal Awards, there is a link in the description where you can go and vote for our episode. vote for our episode. It is our episode from earlier in the summer with my old professor Alistair Blanchard from the University of Queensland, where we talk all things Achilles. That was a great episode. We were up against Dan in the awards too. We've got to beat Dan. We have to, and I need your help. It's such a pleasure doing this podcast. I just ask

to click the link in the description below and to vote for the Ancients at the Signal Awards. Hopefully we can bring it home to Ancients HQ. But that's enough from me. And I will see you in the next episode.