Shanks: I’d like to hear your analysis of locus 30 [on de Vaux’s plan], the so-called scriptorium, where scrolls were supposedly written. It is a hall. Did it have two stories?
Eshel: There were stairs leading to a second floor.
Magness: Clearly there were the remains of two floors.
Shanks: What was the function of that hall? Hanan?
Eshel: Well, everybody knows inkwells were found there.g
Hirschfeld: As far as I remember, de Vaux found two ceramic inkwells in the hall and one more made of bronze outside.
Eshel: [Solomon] Steckoll found a fourth in his small excavation in 1966 to 1967.9 Three or four inkwells at one site is unique, especially at a site the size of Qumran.
Magness: I have worked for many years on pottery reading at various archaeological sites, and I have never yet found an inkwell in any of the zillions of baskets of pottery that I have sorted.
Hirschfeld: A 1980 article on ancient inkwells reports on 15 of them from different places.10 It’s true that in the parallels I have cited, no inkwells were found, but these sites were only partially excavated. Inkwells were found in Jerusalem and also in the Galilee—in Meiron and en-Nabratein.11
Eshel: But we don’t have a room with more than one inkwell anywhere else right now. Even in the upper city of Jerusalem, in the rich buildings that [Nahman] Avigad excavated, he didn’t find such a room.h I don’t want to give the impression that I’m sure that room 30, or the second floor, was used as a scriptorium because I’m not sure.
The tables from that room are also unique. Once it was thought that those tables were used to write the scrolls. Then they decided that that was not convincing. Perhaps the tables were used to make the dry lines on the scrolls. They cannot be used as something that people lay on [as argued by the Donceels]; they’re too narrow.
Shanks: What about the possibility that the upper story was a fancy dining room, a triclinium, as the Donceels have argued?
Magness: You’d have to be a midget in order to be able to recline and dine on those benches because otherwise you’d fall off. They’re only 40 centimeters [about a foot] wide.
I’m not wedded to the scriptorium idea either. If somebody comes up with a better interpretation and says, “Look we have a nice parallel here that nobody ever looked at, and it’s not a scriptorium, it’s a ‘fill in the blank,’” that’s fine.
Shanks: But the so-called desk theory doesn’t hold up either.
Magness: You’re right! We just don’t know what they are.
Patrich: To reconstruct it exactly is difficult. There are things you cannot do. One of them is, you can’t recline. Perhaps you can lean against it or stretch a scroll along it.
Hirschfeld: To me it seems that the so-called tables are benches that were built along the wall, probably for sitting rather than reclining.
Eshel: Jodi [Magness] and I have just excavated a room in Yattir with a lot of benches. Benches are made of stone and then plastered. The tables from Qumran don’t have stone in the middle; they are built with plaster over reeds tied together. You can’t sit on this. Someone of my weight would break it.
Shanks: There’s only one fancy room at Qumran, or set of rooms. Room 4 [on de Vaux’s plan] has benches around it, and it has a pass-through to another room (room 2), and there’s a large stone installation like a stand on the other side of the pass-through. What is your interpretation of that? These rooms, it has been suggested, made up the Qumran library where the scrolls were studied.
Hirschfeld: I see locus 4 not as a place for sitting, but for storing. The benches are not for sitting—they are too narrow—but for storing jars, as in traditional Arab houses. The upper story, incidentally, was where the inhabitants lived. We often see this division of the lower and upper story in Roman and Byzantine country houses.
Shanks: Jodi, you shrugged your shoulders, as if to say “I don’t know what it’s for.”
Magness: Yes. Unless you have a room that has a really distinctive layout or very distinctive installations, the only way to determine what its use was, at least in its last phase of occupation, is on the basis of the artifacts found inside it. Until the material from Qumran is finally fully published, we won’t be able to answer a lot of the questions you’re asking. They’re up in the air. We can’t really know until we have the full publication of the material.
Eshel: We know Hartmut Stegemann’s suggestion that it [room 4] was a study room and that you had to show some kind of ID in order to enter this room and that the librarian was on the other side of the wall, and the scroll was ordered from him.12 I don’t want to play this game. Maybe he is correct; maybe he is not correct. I’m not sure that even if all the material found in Qumran is someday published, we’ll have an answer to this question.
Patrich: I agree with Yizhar [Hirschfeld] that we need to take into account the existence of a second story where people stayed and lived. The lower floor was for storage and light manufacturing.
(Just kidding.)
