[Picture: INFOBEAT | ][Picture: Profile | ][Picture: Feedback | ][Picture: About | ][Picture: Terms | ][Picture: Custom] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Picture] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
11:05 AM ET 01/28/98

FEATURE-Evidence of Dead Sea sect found after 2000 years
	 
	    By Janine Zacharia

EIN GEDI, Israel (Reuters) - There is a mystery buried near
this oasis overlooking the lowest place on earth, a
2,000-year-old question mark over a long-vanished monastic sect
that may once have included John the Baptist.

Now archeologist Yizhar Hirschfeld thinks he has unearthed
part of the answer. Digging in a forbidding desert site all but
ignored by archeologists for decades, he believes he has
identified for the first time a home of the Essenes, a first
century Jewish sect viewed as precursors to early Christians.

Flying in the face of most scholars, Hirschfeld places the
Essenes here, 200 yards above the popular hiking spot of Ein
Gedi and roughly 12 miles from Qumran, the site many of his
colleagues believe was the sect's primary home. It was in
Qumran, a cave-pocked site at the northern tip of the Dead Sea,
that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s.

Known for their esoteric lifestyle and strict ritual
observance, the Essenes are believed by many scholars to have
written the scrolls, numbering some 800 parchment documents,
among them ancient biblical texts.

But Hirschfeld, of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, says no.He
and scholars such as Norman Golb of the University of Chicago
believe the scrolls were actually an important, massive archive
rushed from Jerusalem to the caves at the Dead Sea for hiding
and protection from the invading Romans.
	   
	    ``ONLY PALM TREES FOR COMPANY''

Hirschfeld's Ein Gedi site and its inhabitants were
described in detail by Roman historian Pliny the Elder in the
first century.

The Essenes were a ``solitary tribe ... remarkable beyond
all the other tribes in the whole world as it has no women and
has renounced all sexual desire, has no money and only palm
trees for company,'' Pliny wrote. ``Lying below the Essenes was
formerly the town of Ein Gedi, second only to Jerusalem in the
fertility of the land and in its grove of palm trees.''

Israeli archeologists first located the site in the early
1950s but gave it only a perfunctory, unspecific date of either
the Roman or Byzantine era, extending over seven centuries.

Hirschfeld's team found the first sign this week that the
site was likely to have been the Essene one described by Pliny:
pottery remains of the style used during the time the Essenes
would have lived there. The shards were found in one of roughly
20 plain rectangular cells, each large enough to house one man,
that Hirschfeld believes are characteristic of those that would
have housed individual members of the ascetic religious sect.

``The pottery is typical of the first century,'' he said. 
``It enables us to connect the historical background we have
about the Essenes living above Ein Gedi with the remains.''

The finds included the base of a thumb-sized glass perfume
bottle believed to have held balsam scents harvested by the
Essenes. But Hirschfeld's hunch that the Essenes may have lived
here is regarded with caution by other experts.

``I don't doubt that this may have been an Essenes site
because we know there were many Essene villages along the Dead
Sea,'' said Stephen Pfann, director of Jerusalem's inter-faith
Center for the Study of the Early Church.

``But most scholars wouldn't rely on Pliny's description to
say this is exactly where they lived,'' he said. And, he added,
while the first century pottery findings are ``interesting, they
can be found anywhere in the area.''
	   
	    'POTTERY ISN'T FINAL PROOF'

Hirschfeld admits ``the pottery isn't final proof'' that the
village was Essene, but calls it a ``further indication.''
Without an inscription of some sort it will be difficult to say
with certainty that the site is Essene, he says.

Nor can the new find discount completely the conventional
wisdom he rejects that the Essenes lived at Qumran.

While Hirschfeld says there is no historical or
archeological evidence to say that the Essenes in fact lived at
Qumran, scholars like Pfann strongly disagree. They point to
evidence including a large number of immersion pools and a
cemetery characteristic of Essene burial at the Qumran site.

Despite the lack of absolute corroborating evidence,
Hirschfeld has little doubt the site he has excavated at Ein
Gedi is one that would certainly have suited the Essene
lifestyle.

``It's a divine place,'' he said, looking out at the Dead
Sea and the majestic red rock hills beyond it. ``The view. The
location. It's magnificent and close to heaven.''

 ^REUTERS@