A QUMRAN ORIGIN FOR THE MASADA NON-BIBLICAL TEXTS?

Abstract

The texts found at Masada form a small corpus comparable in nature to the much larger corpus found at Qumran. The exact number of texts found at Qumran or, for that matter, at any site in the Judean Desert will never be known because it is often unclear whether any two fragments reflect the remains of one or two different scrolls. In the minds of scholars, the presumed total number of Qumran scrolls has increased considerably since the initial inventory lists were made. In the first decade, scholars estimated there to be 700 or less different copies, while one generation ago they spoke of 800 copies. In the meantime this number has increased to some 850 items, and the final list will be even longer. The Masada corpus comprises a mere fifteen literary texts in Hebrew (and one in either Hebrew or Aramaic), found in various loci at Masada. The following analysis excludes the ostraca in Hebrew and Aramaic and the ostraca and papyrus texts in Latin and Greek. The 720 ostraca and thirty papyri and ostraca in Latin and Greek are less relevant to the topic under investigation since they derived from the Roman soldiers, while the literary texts were probably brought to Masada by the Zealots and also the Essenes.