historical perspectives: from the hasmoneans to bar kokhba in light ...

PREFACE
After the first three Orion conferences were dedicated to more ethereal
topics of Qumran scholarship (biblical interpretation, the pseudepigrapha,
and the Damascus Document), the topic of the fourth annual
symposium, "Jewish History from the Maccabees to Bar Kochba,"
was meant as a gesture to the real world, an attempt to move to
more tangible things. This plan was seconded by the decision to
include in the conference, and hence in this volume of proceedings,
some studies of the most tangible elements that have come out of
Qumran: animal skins, the threads used to sew them into scrolls,
and pottery.
In practice, however, it turned out that the attempt to distinguish
between flesh and spirit was not successful, and that no one was disappointed
by that failure. Things of the spirit do have their real history,
and Qumran texts do not talk history without the spirit. Thus,
one way or another, people kept leading us back to texts and ideas,
and texts and ideas kept leading us back to people. So, on the one
hand, David Goodblatt's study of Qumran evidence for ancient Jewish
nationalism turns out to be bound up, part and parcel, with the
importance of the Bible at Qumran, no less than Adiel Schremer's
contribution, which began with the status of books there. Similarly,
Hanan Eshel's study of the Kittim (were they Greeks? Romans?) and
Tal Ilan's search for Qumran allusions to Salome Alexandra result
in studies of how the Qumran community read the Bible. Even
Lawrence Schiffman's paper on the description of the Temple and
Daniel Schwartz's on Antiochus Epiphanes move back and forth
incessantly between "historical sources" and the Bible via Qumran eyes.
On the other hand, Bilhah Nitzan's study of the covenant at
Qumran and Noah Hacham's examination of communal fasts are
far from studies of timeless doctrines. They are bound up with the
fabric and realities of a flesh and blood religious community. The
same may be said of Justin Taylor's paper, which, on the face of it,
attempts to resolve textual and exegetical inconsistencies in the Book
of Acts, but in fact ends up by positing some real differences among
various communal groups.
The three remaining studies, whose citation style follows the format