An Interesting Fin of nthe Dead Sea Scrolls

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   Lady Guinevereposted 16 years ago

   This article was posted on my group and I wanted to see if anyone else has read it or if anyone can get an update on the progress they have made, if any.  Here is the article:
   http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1089.htm
   
   Some of what it states is:
   
   """"Since the extraordinary discovery, made between 1947 and 1956, of the 900-odd Dead Sea Scrolls in 11 caves at Qumran in the West Bank, paleographers,1 religion historians, and other specialists have tried to determine their origins. The identity and motivations of the depositors remain a mystery, but we now know that the scrolls come from two distinct sources. This adds another piece to a puzzle that contains tens of thousands of text fragments originating between 300 BC and 70 AD. During their initial discovery, the texts were rapidly identified by researchers: fragments of the Bible, known apocryphal texts,2 and texts from the numerous sects which coexisted with Judaism during a period when there was no unified form of the religion. “Different types of texts were found in each cave,” explains Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra, the religion historian at Centre Paul-Albert Fevrier3 who recently uncovered the scrolls’ different origins. “The distribution is about the same in each cave, and as a result, researchers have for a long time assumed that all the texts were part of the same collection.”
   There remained the question of why the texts had been placed in caves in the desert. Had they been taken out of Jerusalem for protection before the Romans attacked the city between 68 and 70 BC? This is one theory, but in that case, the absence of Pharisian4 texts (a well represented sect in Jerusalem at the time) is peculiar. “The study of the pottery, tombs, and other archeological clues at the site has convinced most researchers that this is the work of an isolated group that lived at the site, but whose identity is still under debate. It could have been before an attack, the group was probably in a hurry when they hid the texts in the caves, some of which are very difficult to access,” says Stoekl Ben Ezra.""""

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      SparklingJewelposted 16 years agoin reply to this

      I'll have to go back over some of my sources, but I believe it has been suggested they were the Essences (spelling?) or some gnostic group...I am not sure of the chronological timing

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