The Qumran Con

I recall, not long after Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? was published by Scribner—a distinguished mainstream publishing house—hearing through the grapevine the words of another professor: “Golb may be right, but the way he has chosen to show that he is right is unacceptable”—an assessment referring to several chapters of the book that focused on the repressive tactics of the monopolists, on their financial improprieties, and on their expressions of anger, fear, and frustration. These famously included the description by Magen Broshi (whose lecture I had attended at Harvard) of Norman Golb as a “revolting ... opinionated trouble-maker” who had “filled the world with his filth,” and of whom “we will be free ... when he dies.”

As Daniel O’Hara would put it in the New Humanist, Golb’s book “gives us much more than just a fresh and convincing interpretation of the origin and significance of the Qumran scrolls. It is also—among other things—a fascinating case-study of how an idée 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.” From now on, the “official” team openly reviled Golb, and anyone who dared to take his side had good reason to be afraid of professional repercussions. As Joel Kraemer would wryly observe in his biographical essay on Golb, “Those who believe in academic freedom may be disappointed to learn that Norman Golb was not invited to the sixty-years celebration of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Hebrew University.”

In 2002, Pulitzer laureate John Noble Wilford, writing in the New York Times, offered another look at ongoing efforts to silence Norman Golb. Discussing the scrolls conference held that year at Brown University, he pointed out that certain academics had agreed to attend only under the condition that certain others would not be invited. Jacob Neusner, himself a former professor at Brown, understood exactly what was being referred to and wrote to Golb, in an email of December 24, 2002,

Neusner, in effect, had had enough. He, along with many others, had witnessed the efforts of the Qumranologists and their students, colleagues, and associates to protect their own interests by isolating, denigrating, and blackballing Norman Golb, both as a person and as a scholar. In emphatically asserting that Golb had “defined the shape of scholarship for generations to come,” Neusner stated what was already known to scholars around the world. In opting for “persuasive” tactics over reasoned scientific debate, champions of the Essene notion of scroll origins had in fact signaled a weakness in their position: should the refusal to debate and the policy of control be broken, the historical evidence highlighted by Golb risked becoming an open embarrassment to Qumranology and its defenders. They had, after all, integrated one of his most basic insights into their fallback “multiple Judaisms” position—without acknowledging as much—and had never offered a cogent historical explanation for declining to follow the evidence all the way to its logical conclusion.