Dead Sea Scrolls Seminar With The Eshels

For the last couple of days I have been priveleged to sit and hear about the Dead Sea Scrolls from Hanan and Esther Eshel. While many brilliant observations were made by both Drs, the highlight for me was this humorous gem from Hanan at the free public lecture on Thursday evening talking about the Copper Scroll

There is a lot of interest in the Scrolls, so some of the people involved are going to be… weird. And it seems to me that all of the weird people are attracted to this scroll.

If you said to me, “Hanan of all the Scrolls if one of them was never to be found, which one would you choose?” I would give up the Copper Scroll.

Love it. Someone tell Cargill he has a new quote for his next savaging of Barfield. without any capital letters of course.

For his Wednesday lecture Dr. Hanan Eshel lectured on How Can We Learn Political History from the Dead Sea Scrolls? which covered material from his book The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Hasmonean State, of which I got a signed copy. Yay me. Eshels’s primary conclusion is that opposed to a group of scholars in Israel who are committed to the idea that the Hasmoneans were really good kings the DSS really back up historians such as Josephus that the Hasmoneans were not so good Jewish kings.

On Thursday Dr. Esther Eshel lectured on The Kuntillet Ajrud Inscriptions and her work on translating and interpreting these inscriptions. The important question from Kuntillet is the references to YHWH and his asherah. Asherah was a Semitic goddess and the consort of El so the argument from inscriptions such as this is that YHWH had a girlfriend that was worshiped as well. However, Dr. Eshel proposes that the inscriptions at Kuntillet do not allow this understanding as the verbs surrounding YHWH and asherah are all singular and asherah should be understood as a lowercase “a”. An understanding that would mean YHWH and his holy place, or dedicated thing. So maybe the pole but not the girl.

On Thursday evening Dr. Hanan Eshel lectured on The Archaeology of the Dead Sea Scrolls to a packed house at the TWU auditorium. While Dr. Eshel covered many basic events surrounding the discovery of the Scrolls his lecture was interspersed with so many personal stories, such as being a student of Yadin, that it was probably the most fascinating lecture I have heard on the discovery and archaeology of the Scrolls.

I have been invited to spend some time with the Eshels tomorrow during Shabbat and talk all things Dead Sea. This is exciting for me as Hanan Eshel is on the organizing committee for the Enoch seminar and is a wealth of information.

Shabbat Shalom indeed!

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