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New book out: David Stacey and Gregory Doudna, Qumran Revisited: A Reassessment of the Archaeology of the Site and its Texts (BAR International Series 2520; Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013).

David Stacey is an archaeologist in England who worked ten years on the Netzer excavations at Jericho, the nearest major site to Qumran, where most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Stacey reassesses the interpretation of the archaeology of Qumran. Most scholars of the Qumran texts have long assumed Qumran was the site of a monastic-like group of Essenes. Stacey says Qumran was an extension of Hasmonean Jericho, and that Qumran was a site for smelly and dirty industries located away from the people at Jericho.

My contribution to this book–dealing with the texts found at the site–is entitled “The Sect of the Qumran Texts and its Leading Role in the Temple in Jerusalem During Much of the First Century BCE: Toward a New Framework for Understanding.”

Click here to see my Foreword/Introduction in this volume which explains more . . .

Here I am posting excerpts from my book, Gregory L. Doudna, Showdown at Big Sandy: Youthful Creativity Confronts Bureaucratic Inertia at an Unconventional Bible College in East Texas (Bellingham, Wash.: The Scrollery ®, 2006). Softbound paperback, 527 pages. Available for $30 from Amazon.com and $28.75 from Lulu.com. Available as an e-book on Nook from Barnes and Noble for $13.99.

“It’s priceless”–Gavin Rumney, Ambassador Watch (for full review click here).

“Highly readable style . . . difficult to put down . . .”– Mac Overton, The Journal (here).

Preface

“. . . I was a student at Ambassador College in Big Sandy, Texas from 1972-75. This was a branch campus of the headquarters Ambassador College at Pasadena, California. Today the Ambassador Colleges are gone. I was there when it flourished during a pivotal time in its history, a time of turmoil, scandal, and intrigue. . . . I invite you to walk with me some of the steps of the way, like going to a strange land and back again . . .”

Chapter 1. Big Sandy oasis: Ambassador College

Chapter 2. The Story of the Worldwide Church of God

Chapter 3. The 7000-Year Plan

Chapter 4. The Doctrine Against Interracial Marriage

Chapter 5. Big Sandy School Days: 1974

Chapter 6. How I Tried to Prove the United States is Ephraim, not Manasseh

Chapter 7. Afterward on Anglo-Israelism, Part I

Chapter 8. Afterward on Anglo-Israelism, Part II

Chapter 9. The Further Adventures of the Ephraim/U.S. Theory: Chaos Theory in Action 

Chapter 10. Is God Reproducing?

Chapter 11. Desert Romance

Chapter 12. Meat Offered to Idols

Chapter 13. Letter of the Law and Spirit of the Law

Chapter 14. Quest for Immortality

Chapter 15. Key Events in the 1973-74 Sacred Calendar (and Other Timely Topics)

Chapter 16. Headquarters in Prophecy

Chapter 17. The Most Important Holy Day

Chapter 18. Faith Healing and Doctors

Chapter 19. Creation and Origins

Chapter 20. Tithing

Chapter 21. Big Sandy School Days: 1975

Chapter 22. Ambassador College, Pasadena: 1976

Chapter 23. The Return Home

Chapter 24. Letters and Reflections

Chapter 25. Big Sandy Voices: the Song of the Quest

Addendum. The Demise and End of Ambassador College, Big Sandy

Entering freshman class of 1972-73 at Ambassador College, Big Sandy

Two interesting books:

(1) T. Lim and J. Collins (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Many good articles, especially Martin Goodman (“the notion that the Dead Sea sectarians cut themselves off from the Temple would seem to us bizarre if we only had the pagan evidence and archaeology as the background to our understanding of the scrolls” [p. 88]); Sacha Stern (“The absence of calendar polemics in Qumran sources raises our suspicion that the calendar was not a major issue that would have defined the Qumran community as essentially different, sectarian, or separatist” [p. 247]); Michael Wise (“the Teacher and his movement appear to belong to the first century BCE” [p. 119]); Joan Taylor (“Josephus does not imply that the Essenes . . . avoided the Temple, Jerusalem, or the public life of Judaism” [p. 182]), and more. Charlotte Hempel reviews the volume here.

(2) Zdislaw Kapera and Robert Feather, Doyen of the Dead Sea Scrolls. An in depth biography of Jozef Tadeusz Milik (1922-2006). Krakow: Enigma Press, 2011. Jozef Milik, widely regarded as the most brilliant text person of the first generation of editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, reclusive, mercurial . . . Robert Feather not only was able to befriend and have a number of visits with the legendary Milik in Paris in the last years of Milik’s life but in this volume gives details of some of those conversations. Fascinating material. (The book is difficult to obtain but is available for $90 from this seller in Poland: Archaeobooks.)

Greg Doudna, “Ostraca KhQ1 and KhQ2 from the cemetery of Qumran: a new edition”, in E. Ben-Zvi, ed., Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures II. Comprising the contents of Journal of Hebrew Scriptures vol. 5 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), pp. 59-116.

(Contents of this volume can be viewed on google books.)

Two ostraca–potsherds with writing–known as KhQ1 and KhQ2 were found outside the east wall at Qumran in 1996. The editors, Frank Cross and Esther Eshel, identified KhQ1 as a deed of gift of property from a new member to a religious community at Qumran in a manner enjoined by the Community Rule (1QS)–one of the most important Qumran texts. It was claimed that KhQ1 provided the first direct evidence that the Community Rule was practiced at Qumran. In the most detailed analysis of these texts undertaken in the scholarly literature, this article presents new readings of KhQ1 and KhQ2 and takes up the question of whether KhQ1 can confirm or exclude the community-gift interpretation on the basis of an accurate reading of the text.