Qumran - Qumran-Essene Hypothesis

Qumran-Essene Hypothesis

There were few serious challenges to de Vaux's interpretation of the site of Qumran from the time it was introduced. While the archaeologist E.-M. Laperrousaz, had some quite divergent views, members of de Vaux's team followed approximately the same narrative, with minor deviations, members including J. T. Milik, and F. M. Cross. De Vaux's initial dig co-director, G. Lankester Harding, in 1955 wrote an article where he presented Qumran as "a building in which John the Baptist, and probably Christ, studied: Khirbet Qumran". Others outside de Vaux's team proposed other interpretations, people such as Henri del Medico, Solomon Zeitlin, and G. R. Driver, but their analyses received little lasting attention.

In 1960 Karl Heinrich Rengstorf proposed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not the product of the residents of Qumran, but came from the library of the Jerusalem Temple, despite their being discovered near Qumran. (Rengstorf's basic Jerusalem proposal has become increasingly more popular since the materials from de Vaux's excavations of Qumran were brought into the public arena in 1992.)

J.H. Charlesworth in 1980 proposed that Qumran was damaged in the Parthian war c. 40 BCE.

Jean-Baptiste Humbert published de Vaux's field notes. Humbert proposes a hybrid solution to the debate surrounding Qumran. Humbert accepts that the site might have been originally established as a villa rustica, but that the site was abandoned, and was reoccupied by Essenes in the late 1st century BCE. Humbert argues that the site may have also been used a place where sectarians pilgrims barred from entering Jerusalem may have celebrated the pilgrimage.

Minna Lönnqvist and Kenneth Lönnqvist brought an approach to the Qumran studies based on contextual archaeology with its spatial studies and interpretation of symbolic language of the archaeological data, positing that text scholars, who had only focused their studies on the scrolls, had removed the Dead Sea Scrolls from their archaeological context. The Lönnqvists proposed that the orientations of the settlement and the graves show that they both belonged to an intentional scheme based on adherence to a solar calendar. They argued from this that the settlement and its cemetery are connected to the Dead Sea Scrolls and associated with an Essene-type group which finds the closest parallels in the contemporary Jewish Therapeutic group known to have lived in Egypt.

Robert Cargill argues that the theory suggesting Qumran was established as a Hasmonean fortress is not incompatible with the theory proposing that a group of Jewish sectarians reoccupied the site. Cargill suggests that Qumran was established as a Hasmonean fort (see below, "Qumran as fortress"), abandoned, and later reoccupied by Jewish settlers, who expanded the site in a communal, non-military fashion, and who were responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Some who challenged de Vaux's findings took issue with the practice of using the Dead Sea Scrolls to interpret the archaeological remains at Qumran. They argued that these remains should be interpreted independently, without any influence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Various reinterpretations have led to various conclusions about the site. These include: