texts (in the case of carefully produced documents) during the late Second Temple period
in Jewish Palestine.
The Sites
There is no longer and single theory concerning the deposit of the Qumran Scrolls that
can claim an outright consensus among scholars. However, it may not be too far from the
truth to say that the most commonly held theory is that the Qumran Scrolls were depos-
ited in the caves at around the middle of the first century C.E. This is based primarily on
the terminus ante quem of the destruction of Qumran at the hands of the Roman army just
before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Other evidence, such as C14 dating
and palaeographical analysis, has been employed to support this view. As such, the ma-
jority position over the last six decades of research has continued to date the deposit of
the scrolls in the caves near Qumran to around the year 68 C.E. This is roughly contem-
poraneous with the terminus ante quem for the deposit of the scrolls in the fortress at Ma-
sada, which was destroyed by the Roman 10th Legion in the year 73 C.E.^735 Because of
the temporal proximity of the destruction of both sites, the predominant scholarly view
treats the corpora from Qumran and Masada as representing relatively contemporaneous
deposits. The two corpora form a composite picture of the kind of biblical texts that were
circulating in Jewish Palestine in the late Second Temple period.
735
The date for the destruction of Masada at the hands of the 10th Legion is given as Spring 73-74 CE in Y.
Yadin, Masada II. The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963 - 1965. Final Reports (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration
Society, 1989) 4-5. R. de Vaux thought it likely that the 10th Legion was also responsible for the destruction
of Qumran – see R. de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Oxford University Press,
1973) 38-41.