From what I have read, noboy is really sure who the Qumran people were.
The Essenes were one of a bewildering number of different Jewish sects existing at the time and connecting them with Qumran is a tenuous effort.
What is more interesting than who the Qumranites actually were, were the contents of the scrolls. The scrolls themselves contain various types of documents. Some are not found in the Bible, such as the "War Scroll" or the "Temple Scroll".
Others are different versions of various books of the Old Testament which versions, although different in some aspects, all basically tell the same Biblical story, confirming the antiquity of the Old Testament itself. There are also books which are not not included in the Christian Bible or official Jewsih religious texts for various reasons but still used by some Judaeo-Christian religious groups today. Check out "Banned Books of the Bible" on the history channel.
The non-biblical texts allude to tales of a great struggle between the sons of darkness and the sons of light - whether this was a figurative or real struggle is uncertain, as well as who these characters represent represent.
The people who wrote the scrolls were obsessed with ritual cleanliness, with respect to issues like where a person could have a bowel movement, how to perform ritual baths and rites to remove uncleanliness, etc.
The Qumran site itself contains ruins which could be interpreted to be ritual baths.
Its extremely interesting and most unfortunate that more is not known of this intreguing settlement and the scrolls themselves. With time, more material may appear.
The Qumran site itself contains ruins which could be interpreted to be ritual baths.Odd that the jewelry etc is attributed to the later Romans, while the baths -- which point in a very Roman direction -- are not. :')
The Jews in the Roman World
by Michael Grant
another editionJesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels
by Michael Grant
