Women at Qumran: Introducing the Essays

Author(s): Rob Kugler and Esther Chazon

Source: Dead Sea Discoveries , 2004, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2004), pp. 167-173
Published by: Brill

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 WOMEN AT QUMRAN: INTRODUCING THE ESSAYS

ROB KUGLER ESTHER CHAZON

Lewis & Clark College Hebrew University

The questions relating to women at Qumran-whether they were in

attendance there and the attitudes of the community toward them
regardless of their presence or absence at the site-have drawn con-
siderable interest in the last few years and for good reasons.' Some of
the skeletal remains from excavations in the Qumran cemeteries re-
cently resurfaced and stimulated a flurry of new analyses.2 Also on the
archaeological front, de Vaux's notes are gradually coming to light,
permitting researchers to determine from the fuller archaeological
record the evidence for and against the presence of women there.3
And at nearly the same time, DJD editions of some of the halakhic
and sapiential scrolls containing substantial passages related to women

For the most significant general discussions of women at Qumran, see E. Schuller,
"Women in the Dead Sea Scrolls," in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A
Comprehensive Assessment (eds P. Flint and J. VanderKam; Leiden: Brill, 1999) 2.117-44;
Schuller, "Women in the Dead Sea Scrolls," in Methods of Investigation of the Dead
Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects (ed.
M. Wise et al.; New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1994) 115-32; and
S.W. Crawford, "Not According to Rule: Women, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran,"
Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of
Emanuel Tov (eds S. Paul, R.A. Kraft, L. Schiffman, and W. Fields; Leiden: Brill,
2003) 127-50; see also M. Gruber, "Women in the Religious System of Qumran,"
Judaism in Late Antiquity 5.1 The Judaism of Qumran: A Systemic Reading of the
Dead Sea Scrolls (eds A.J. Avery-Peck and J. Neusner; Handbook of Oriental Studies
1.56; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 173-96.
2 J. Magness, "Women and the Cemetery at Qumran," The Archaeology of Qumran
and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) 163-87; 0. Rohrer-Ertl,
F. Rohrhirsch, and D. Hahn, "Ober die Graberfelder von Khirbet Qumran, insbesondere
die Funde der Campagne 1956. I: Anthropologische Datenvorlage und Erstauswertung
aufgrund der Collectio Kurth," RevQ 19 (1999) 3-46; S. Sheridan, "Scholars, Soldiers,
Craftsmen, Elites? Analysis of the French Collection of Human Remains from
Qumran," DSD 9 (2002) 199-246; J. Taylor, "The Cemeteries of Khirbet Qumran and
Women's Presence at the Site," DSD 6 (1999) 285-323; J. Zias, "The Cemeteries of
Qumran and Celibacy: Confusion Laid to Rest?" DSD 7 (2000) 220-53.
3 J.-B. Humbert and A. Chambon, Fouilles de Khirbet Qumrtin et de Ain Feshka 1
(Fribourg: tditions universitaires, 1994).

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Dead Sea Discoveries 11, 2

Also available online - www.brill.nl

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 168 ROB KUGLER AND ESTHER CHAZON

were being published.4 In light of these developments, the steering

committee of the Qumran Section of the Society of Biblical Literature
organized a session of invited papers to address the topic of women
at Qumran. Three of the articles in this issue of Dead Sea Discoveries
were presented at the meeting and have since been updated in light of
further developments.' Lacking is a treatment of developments related
to the archaeological record, especially the evidence of the skeletal remains.
So to introduce the articles by Baumgarten, Bernstein, Wright, and
Grossman in this issue, we begin with a brief summary of current opin-
ion on the archaeological evidence regarding the existence of women at
Qumran. We conclude with a summary of what readers will find in
the four articles and of how we think readers might most profitably
understand them in relationship to one another.

The Archaeology of Women at Qumran

To begin with the evidence from the cemeteries-the skeletal re-

mains from only 43 of 1100-1200 tombs!6-the growing consensus is
summed up nicely by Jodi Magness when she says (regarding the
whole body of archaeological evidence) that there was at most "only
minimal female presence at Qumran."7 Thanks to the recent rediscov-

4 See especially J. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.XIII: The Damascus Document

(4Q266-273) (DJD 18; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) for the Cave 4 Damascus Document
evidence; t. Puech, Qumran Grotte 4XVIII (DJD 25; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
115-78, for 4Q525; J. Strugnell and D. Harrington, Qumran Cave 4.XXIV (DJD 34:
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) for 4Qlnstruction.
I Originally the session was intended to address the question of women and chil-
dren at Qumran, but the invited participants all gravitated almost exclusively to the
topic of women alone. The session included papers from A. Baumgarten, B. Wright,
M. Bernstein, and J. Magness, and responses from E. Schuller and R. Kraemer.
Magness published her remarks in updated form in another venue ("Women at
Qumran?" What Athens Has to Do with Jerusalem: Essays on Classical, Jewish, and
Early Christian Art and Archaeology in Honor of Gideon Foerster [ed. L.V. Rutgers;
Leuven: Peeters, 2002] 89-123), and they are mostly available now in The Archaeo-
logy of Qumran (see above). M. Grossman's paper was presented in a session related
to the one in which Baumgarten, Wright, and Bernstein presented their papers. It was
added to this small collection because of its pertinence and special contribution from
a methodological perspective. See below for further comments in this regard.
6 S. Steckoll, "Preliminary Excavation Report in the Qumran Cemetery," RevQ 6 (1968)
323-44, reports on nine more skeletons from ten tombs, but we must join Magness
("Women and the Cemetery at Qumran," 169) in rejecting reliance on his evidence
since it is no longer available for fresh analysis, and his own suggestions are so whim-
sical as to be patently unreliable.
I "Women and the Cemetery at Qumran," 185.

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 WOMEN AT QUMRAN 169

ery of remains located in Jerusalem, Paris, and Munich, 39 skeletons

have lately undergone reexamination. Olav R6hrer-Ertl, Ferdinand
Rohrhirsch, and Dietbart Hahn analyzed the remains of 22 skeletons
from de Vaux's excavations brought to Munich by Gottfried Kurth,
one of the physical anthropologists retained by de Vaux.8 Susan
Sheridan has examined nine skeletons housed in the Ecole Biblique in
Jerusalem, as well as the partial remains of eight more skeletons
brought to the Musee de l'Homme in Paris by Henri-Victor Vallois,
another of the physical anthropologists employed by de Vaux.9 The
German researchers identified among their 22 sets of remains nine
adult males, eight females, and five children. Only two of the females
were located in the "main" western sector of the cemetery complex,
while the remaining women (and children) were in the southern exten-
sion and southern cemetery. Joe Zias has since challenged the identifica-
tion of the remains in the western sector as female on the basis of
their stature, but he has won few adherents to his position on these two
sets of remains. However, he has demonstrated convincingly that the
women and children in the southern extension and southern cemetery
are all later Bedouin burials.'0 Meanwhile, Sheridan's analysis of the
remains located in Jerusalem shows that eight were males and a ninth,
likely from the northern cemetery or extension, was a female." As for
the remains ensconced in the Musee de l'Homme, Sheridan has now
determined that although a letter from Vallois to de Vaux proposed
that several were women, none of them are indisputably from a
female, even though some bone fragments appear to possess feminine
characteristics. More important is Sheridan's judgment on the condi-
tion of the Paris collection: the remains endured such abominable
preservation-damage at the site in labeling and preparation for trans-
port, decay in the museum because of insufficient storage, and mixture
somewhere along the way-as to be almost useless to researchers.'2
So in all, one can at most say that there is evidence for perhaps three

8 Rohrer-Ertl, Rohrhirsch, and Hahn "Uber die Graberfelder von Khirbet Qumran."
9 Sheridan, "Scholars, Soldiers, Craftsmen, Elites?"; we also include observation's
from a presentation by Sheridan we heard just before going to press: "Analysis of the
Skeletal Remains from Qumran: The French and German Collections from the De
Vaux Excavations," presented on November 23, 2003 in the Archaeological Excava-
tions and Discoveries: Illuminating the Biblical World Section at the Annual Meeting
of the Society of Biblical Literature in Atlanta, GA.
10 Zias, "The Cemeteries of Qumran and Celibacy."
Sheridan, "Scholars, Soldiers, Craftsmen, Elites?"
12 Sheridan, "Analysis of the Skeletal Remains from Qumran."

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 170 ROB KUGLER AND ESTHER CHAZON

females among the remains removed from the 43 tombs excavated by

de Vaux. But one must also remember that the number of tombs exca-
vated amounts to little more than 3.5% of the entire collection of
graves at Qumran, and this tiny percentage is reduced in turn by the
uselessness of the eight sets of remains in Paris. In other words,
Magness is right that the skeletal remains provide evidence only for a
"minimal female presence" at Qumran; but we must hasten to add
with her and others that the amount of evidence we may consult to
make this judgment is statistically insignificant relative to the amount
of evidence that remains untouched.
Do the "gendered objects" (items usually associated with one gen-
der or the other) from Qumran provide more substantial evidence of
women's active presence at the site? Magness has surveyed the avail-
able evidence to conclude that only "one spindle whorl and no more
than four beads"'"3 may be counted as female-gendered objects. Like
the skeletal remains, this too prompts her to conclude that there was
"only minimal female presence at Qumran."'4 But here also the pau-
city of available evidence forces Magness and others to qualify their
judgments: de Vaux's full archaeological record is still not completely
published, and further evidence "could reveal the presence of additional
gendered objects."''5
As things stand, then, the entire known archaeological record per-
mits one to say that there is only the slimmest of physical evidence
for women having been at Qumran.'6 At the same time, though, that
record itself is of the slimmest sort, reducing the value of such a judg-
ment regarding the presence or absence of women at Qumran.

Bernstein, Wright, Baumgarten, and Grossman on Women

at Qumran

One thing is certain, then, as a result of recent analyses of the

archaeological evidence for women at Qumran: we remain as depen-

1' "Women and the Cemetery at Qumran," 178. Magness is able to make this claim
on the basis of some recently-published excavation notes from de Vaux; but at the
same time she observes that the incomplete publication of those notes limits the
confidence with which she and other interpreters can make claims about day-to-day life
at Qumran.
14 Ibid., 185.
Is Ibid., 179.
16 Taylor, "The Cemeteries of Khirbet Qumran," 322-23, concludes much more pos-
itively than this, but much of the re-sexing and re-assignment of skeletal remains to
reduce earlier, higher estimates of the number of women present among the tombs
came after her article was completed.

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 WOMEN AT QUMRAN 171

dent as ever on the scrolls themselves to attend to the question of

women and Qumran. Thus the essays that follow take on added
significance and, as we shall see, may serve as pointers for further
research.
Bernstein and Wright, incorporating recent publications of official
editions, address the significance of the legal and wisdom texts where
there is an especially abundant amount of material on women. Bern-
stein sets out to categorize the kinds of texts in which laws regarding
women are found to discover that they appear in "all the kinds of
texts in which we expect to find them," so that "the [well-known]
'omission' of women by IQS might even be said to stand out as an
anomaly by comparison." He also describes what these texts say about
women and concludes that they are, "on the whole unexceptional and
remain within the boundaries of what we might expect of any Jewish
group at the time," although there may be a "small admixture of legal
material which is perhaps uniquely generated by the structure and ide-
ology of the 'Qumran' community." In any case, he does not think
that the texts are mere "theoretical exercises, describing some sort of
ideal community, as opposed to legislating for some real social
entity"; rather they legislate for a real community. Yet he admits that
he cannot be sure whether the legislation offered was that group's
reality or not.
Wright examines the wisdom texts at Qumran for their peculiar tes-
timony to women, since like the halakhic texts they provide an un-
usual amount of gender-specific material. Wright frankly admits that
wisdom texts do not "alone provide answers to the questions about
women's presence and participation in the Qumran community."
Indeed, he goes a step further to suggest that instead the wisdom texts
"put into relief the difficulty of finding those answers." Wright comes
to this conclusion by observing that none of the "wisdom" texts from
Qumran seems to be certainly sectarian. As a consequence he is parti-
cularly perplexed by the question of how much these texts express the
Qumran community's attitudes and perspectives.'7 On the question of
the social functions of the images of Woman Wisdom and Woman
Folly so prominent in all of these texts except for 4QInstruction,
Wright is circumspect: "Perhaps the most that one could make out of

17 Wright is also rightfully troubled by our lack of understanding regarding the

extent to which such texts were used in the life of the community. He asks, "Were all
these texts even read alongside each other throughout the long life of the Qumran com-
munity or did some works fall out of favor and sit on the shelf collecting dust while
other favored texts were avidly read and studied?"

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172 ROB KUGLER AND ESTHER CHAZON

those Qumran sapiential texts that personify Wisdom or Folly is that

they reinforce and reinscribe, by the continued use of the images, male
cultural constructs of women to be desired and women to be avoided."
He also observes, though, that the sapiential texts that do devote atten-
tion to practical instruction-the manuscripts of 4QInstruction-do not
utilize the feminine image of wisdom or folly when addressing relations
with women. Yet here too the evidence is equivocal: in Wright's view
the repeated phrase in 4QInstruction, mmi n, gives it an eschatological
horizon, suggesting that its stipulations might express the community's
hopes rather than its historical profile. If so, says Wright, the "detailed
advice the sage of 4QInstruction offers about women tells us little to
nothing on its own about the situation in the Qumran community."
For all of their careful description and analysis of what the halakhic
and wisdom scrolls say about women, Wright and Bernstein both
express substantial uncertainty regarding the correlation between that
literary evidence and the social realities that prevailed at Qumran. It
would seem that like the archaeological record, the literary evidence
does not carry us very far in assessing the presence of women at Qum-
ran and the attitudes of the community assembled there toward women.
Albert Baumgarten's article serves as a salutary warning that whatever
we do in trying to move beyond this apparent stalemate, we should
avoid letting longstanding hypotheses bias our judgment regarding the
evidence. But Maxine Grossman's article offers even more direct assis-
tance to those who share Wright's and Bemstein's anxiety about the
correlation between literary evidence and social realities.
In addressing gender in the Damascus Document, Grossman intro-
duces a novel method for bridging that gap. The approach owes much
to literary theorists who have long observed that texts' meanings are
not static or unitary, but rather depend on the changing and diverse
social locations of the individuals and subgroups of their receiving
communities. Taking this observation seriously, Grossman states that
her approach is "to determine a range of plausible historical settings
in which this text [the Damascus Document] may have been com-
posed and transmitted, recognizing that the history of the text may
have included more than one such moment." As a result Grossman
shows that the "constructions of gender" in the Damascus Document
provided realities that "were malleable, and covenanters with different
assumptions or different agendas may have leveraged the text of the
Damascus Document to support diverse views [regarding gender].
Those views also may have changed over time, in response to (or in
support of) changing social situations."

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 WOMEN AT QUMRAN 173

The value of Grossman's novel approach for easing the anxiety

researchers have regarding the correlation between texts and social
reality is plain. First, it admits that there is no one exclusive correla-
tion between a literary work and a single social reality. Second, it
acknowledges nonetheless that because texts are received in concrete
social contexts, they do respond and contribute to the construction of
actual social realities. So we gain access-albeit limited in nature-to
the social realities engendered by scrolls through reading them against
the "range of plausible historical settings" we may construct from the
available evidence we have for the community at Qumran. In short,
while Grossman's approach may cast doubt on the text's ability to
answer definitively our questions about the presence of women at Qumran,
it does provide a way to imagine the wide range of attitudes toward
women shared by members of the community over time as a result
of sharing and transmitting the kinds of texts Wright and Bernstein
describe.
These essays do not pretend to settle any of the disputed issues about
women at Qumran. Rather our hope is that they will help unsettle old
assumptions and show that the status of women in the scrolls and in the
sect that preserved them is very much open to ongoing debate.

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