Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Collins on the DSS

JOHN J. COLLINS: Dead Sea Scrolls: What Have We Learned? at the Huffington Post.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near the site of Qumran, south of Jericho in the years 1947-1956 were dubbed "the academic scandal of the 20th century" because of the long delay in publication. Over the last 20 years or so, however, they have been fully published, except for occasional scraps that continue to come to light. Ever since their discovery, they have aroused passions on a scale that is extraordinary for an academic subject. Now that those passions have cooled, the time is ripe to ask what we have really learned from this remarkable discovery.

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UPDATE: Over at Remnant of Giants, Deane Galbraith flags a comment to the above. This is a good illustration of why I don't enable comments at PaleoJudaica.