Rewriting the history of the Qumran caves : reviews of Jean-Baptiste Humbert and Marcello Fidanzio, eds., Khirbet Qumrân et Aïn Feshka, Vol. 4a : Qumran cave 11Q

Abstract

THE following three reviews by George Brooke, Sidnie White Crawford, and Lawrence Schiffman emerge out of a book review panel that took place in November 2020 at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The panel was organized within the framework of a new program unit dedicated to the Archaeology of Roman Palestine, co-chaired by the authors of this introduction. The aim of this new unit is to sponsor sessions highlighting a wide variety of thematic issues on the socio-political, economic, cultural, and religious history of Roman Palestine as seen through the lens of its material remains and to explore intersections with key topics of interest to scholars of early Judaism and Christianity. This will allow us to situate the early Jewish and Christian experience within the broader milieu in which both communities emerged. We therefore hope that this unit can provide a venue for both archaeologists and textual scholars to present reports on their most recent discoveries and their reviews of key publications in the discipline, and to discuss other topics that could bring archaeological data into dialogue with text-focused research in a way that is mutually beneficial. In view of these objectives, it is fitting that our inaugural session was dedicated to celebrating a recently published volume by Jean- Baptiste Humbert and Marcello Fidanzio on Qumran Cave 11Q that embodies this same interdisciplinary perspective and showcases the importance of an integrative approach for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. By publishing these three reviews, we hope to cast a spotlight on and create a conversation around this key publication, which represents a major milestone in the history of research on the Qumran caves. Of all the caves investigated by Roland de Vaux between 1952 and 1956, Cave 11Q was the only one not to be published in DJD, owing to a complicating set of political and logistical factors. Before the publication of Humbert and Fidanzio’s volume, therefore, information on Cave 11Q had to be gleaned largely from a brief preliminary report published by de Vaux in Revue Biblique in 1956 and de Vaux’s field notes, which were published with slight modifications by Jean- Baptiste Humbert and Alain Chambon in 1994. Cave 11Q was reinvestigated by Joseph Patrich in the 1980s, but no proper publication of the findings ever appeared in print, except for a short note in an article published in 1994. As a result, there have been many outstanding questions concerning a wide range of issues such as the cave’s history of use, the nature of its various occupations, its stratigraphic profile, the context and date of specific artefacts, the depositional and post-depositional history of the scrolls, and more. This final report presents the necessary primary data—including the original excavation notes, photographs, drawings, and other archival material—that will allow scholars to address these issues more definitively.