Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls? (book)

Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran

First US edition cover
Author	Norman Golb
Cover artist	Erich Hobbing
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Dead Sea scrolls, Qumran
Genre	History, Paleography
Publisher	Scribner
Publication date	June 1, 1995
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	446
ISBN
OCLC	31009916

Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran is a book by Norman Golb which intensifies the debate over the origins of the Dead Sea scrolls, furthering the opinion that the scrolls were not the work of the Essenes, as other scholars claim, but written in Jerusalem and moved to Qumran in anticipation of the Roman siege in 70 AD.

Writing in Church History, Gregory T. Armstrong stated: "This book is 'must reading' for every historian regardless of her or his period of specialization. It demonstrates how a particular interpretation of an ancient site and particular readings of ancient documents became a straitjacket for subsequent discussion of what is arguably the most widely publicized set of discoveries in the history of biblical archaeology... Especially interesting is the account of events related to the exhibition of scroll fragments in the United States in 1993-1994. What is most distressing here is the reluctance of so many parties to the scrolls controversy—by then widely publicized—to engage in a full and free discussion of the many questions which had arisen."

Reviewing the British edition of the work, Daniel O'Hara stated that Golb "gives us much more than just a fresh and convincing interpretation of the origin and significance of the Qumran Scrolls. His book is also — among other things — a fascinating case-study of how an idee fixe, for which there is no real historical justification, has for over 40 years dominated an elite coterie of scholars controlling the Scrolls, who have not only sought to restrict access to those who are prepared to toe their party-line, but have abused and rubbished those 'heretics' who have attempted to place a different interpretation on them."

The Publisher Weekly, refers to this book as disputing the conventional wisdom that Dead Sea Scrolls related to the communal sect of the Essenes, and that their presumed monastery is actually a Jewish fortress. It also refers to Golb's belief that the "scrolls and related fragmentary manuscripts embody a wide spectrum of doctrines, genres and themes, from a Hebrew hymn by a Jewish nationalist poet to an apocalyptic brotherhood initiation to an inventory of documents stashed away in the Judaean wilderness"

A seminar on the Scrolls dated July 14, 2000, hosted by Australia's ABC Radio National's host Rachael Kohn with Dead Sea Scrolls scholars Geza Vermes, Lawrence Schiffman and Emanuel Tov, refers to this book as "An important dissenting opinion: Golb refuses to accept the 'consensus view' that Qumran was the site of the Essenes sect, and that they owned and wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, but instead argues that Qumran was a fortress like others in the area and that the library of scrolls was from the Jerusalem Temple." (The book, however, at pp. 159–60, specifically rejects the idea that the scrolls came from the Jerusalem Temple, attributing this theory to Karl Rengstorf and asserting that Rengstorf had failed to "conceive of other libraries in Jerusalem whose owners could equally well have hidden away their contents.")