by Michelle Coppedge

The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. By Jodi Magness. Eerdmans, 238 pages, $26 cloth, $18 paper.

A small stone ruin hunkers down on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Once a settlement, the ruin contains workshops and other communal rooms but no private dwellings. Most of the graves in the adjacent cemetery hold the skeletons of adult men.

Who lived here? Khirbet Qumran, or Qumran, is near the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to the time of Jesus, were discovered in the 1940s and 50s. Roland de Vaux, who first excavated the site in the 50s, believed the scrolls belonged to a radical Jewish sect who practiced at Qumran. Members of the sect probably slept in tents, huts, or caves outside the settlement.

Though he wrote preliminary papers about Qumran, de Vaux died without publishing a final excavation report. Since his death in 1971, there's been controversy. The site has been called a fortress, villa, manor house, or commercial center, all based on the same archaeological evidence.

Qumran looking east to the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab (in modern Jordan). Who lived here? Photo by Jodi Magness; click to enlarge.

But any depiction of Qumran that does not account for the Dead Sea Scrolls is missing large pieces of the puzzle, says Jodi Magness, professor in the Department of Religious Studies. In The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Magness analyzes both archaeological and literary information from the site. Her book doesn't provide new evidence. "It actually reinforces that the conclusions of the original excavator were, for the most part, correct," Magness says. The book does refine de Vaux's dating of the site and interpretations of some of its features.

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of 900 scrolls and fragments that include the oldest preserved copies of the Hebrew Bible and related works, as well as other writings describing the sect's beliefs and practices. One of the scrolls, known as the War Scroll, details an imminent apocalyptic war. The Temple Scroll includes a blueprint for the future Jewish Temple and holy city of Jerusalem.

Magness agrees with de Vaux that members of the Jewish sect — called the Essenes by contemporary ancient sources — lived and worked at Qumran and deposited the scrolls in the nearby caves. The same types of pottery, some unique to Qumran, were found in both caves and settlement. There may have once been more scrolls at Qumran itself, but the destruction of the settlement by fire removed any trace of them.

Archaeologists collect fragments of the lives of people long dead to put together an incomplete picture. It's a subjective process, Magness says. "The problem is that people who suggest that Qumran was not a sectarian settlement are primarily archaeologists who do not specialize in scrolls," Magness says. They tend to ignore or deny the evidence the scrolls provide of Qumran's function, she adds.

Magness says that recognizing Qumran as a sectarian settlement incorporates all available evidence. "Once all de Vaux's material is published we will be able to refine our interpretation of the site," she says — but she doesn't think the overall reading of it will change. "It's analogous to the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves. They have only recently all been published, but we had a pretty good idea of what they were before."

The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls was published in 2002. In fall 2003 it received the Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for Best Popular Book on Archaeology and the Bible published in 2001 and 2002.