The latest assault on the Essene origin of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls comes from Professor Rachel Elior, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her views, not yet published but given in interviews, have been loudly trumpeted in the media and may be summed up as claiming (according to the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz of 13 March) that the scrolls were written by Jerusalem Sadducee priests and not by Essenes; and that the Essenes never existed, but were invented by Flavius Josephus.

While a proper assessment of Professor Elior's ideas will have to wait until she backs them with scholarly argument in a forthcoming book, the following points need to be made. Josephus was not the first, let alone the only, author to describe (in great detail) the Essenes. He gives two separate accounts of the sect in his Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities and refers to various Essene individuals involved in Palestinian Jewish history from the mid-second century BC to the war against Rome in AD 66-70. Moreover, in his autobiography he states to have himself joined for a time the Essene community. These texts do not look like the figment of someone's imagination. Furthermore, Josephus was preceded by two other first century AD writers, the Jew Philo of Alexandria and the Roman Pliny the Elder, both providing a picture of the Essenes essentially the same as that of Josephus, and listing the uncommon features of religious communism and renunciation of marriage. (The Qumran Community Rule also refers to common ownership of property and lays down a way of life unsuitable for married people. Both are contrary to what we know about Sadducee priests.) Finally, Pliny the Elder asserts that the Essenes lived on the western shore of the Dead Sea somewhere between Jericho in the north and Ein Gedi and Masada in the south (corresponding to the area where Qumran lies). The two unique characteristics (common ownership and male celibacy) and the geographical location remain the solid grounds on which the theory of the Essene identity of the Dead Sea sect continues to stand.

After the release of the original scrolls between 1950 and 1953, the publication of the fragments from Cave 1 in 1955 promptly inaugurated the collection Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD), the final volume of which has just appeared.

The snail's pace progress of this series over more than three decades up to 1991 constitutes what I once called the academic scandal of the century.