Qumran—The Pottery Factory

Qumran, that desolate, supposedly monastery-like site with its ritual baths and communal dining room overlooking the Dead Sea, had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls found in nearby caves, according to a just-released study.

Your vision of a couple hundred celibate Essenes padding around praying whenever they were not copying scrolls in a special room designated “the scrollery,” only to end up buried in a silent cemetery of more than a thousand single graves, is a work of the imagination, not history or archaeology, says Israeli archaeologist Yizhak Magen.^a

Qumran, he says, was just a pottery factory, manned by a few dozen workers at most. This conclusion, he says, is “inescapable.”