When you discover an ancient, overgrown road in the jungle, it's hard to prioritize where to clear next. You know you need to clear the whole road but you also want to figure out where the road goes, so the tension is between
clearing an exploratory path with intent to circle back and clear the rest later
and
clearing the road thoroughly as you go.
If your curiosity exceeds a certain tipping point, you're going to do what I did, which is keep moving forward knowing the need to circle back and clean things up would be necessary.
With that in mind, I've been recently invited to do a guest appearance and the subject of discussion will primarily be the Kolbrin Bible. In preparation for that guest appearance, I've circled back to my Kolbrin-Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) analysis to tidy it up.
Months ago when I initially made the discovery, I started a spreadsheet to collect the textual links between the two source materials. When I opened up that spreadsheet this past weekend, it had 19 line items.
But, as I was going through my DSS book, I noticed a lot of margin notes from other textual matches I had found but had not yet logged into the spreadsheet, so I took care of that.
That spreadsheet now has 89 line items.
I've sorted the findings by Kolbrin and by DSS to isolate hot spots and clustering of links between the two source materials.
3 chapters from one book of the Kolbrin Bible
seem to be an ancestral source for
4 hotspots from the DSS plus 7 smaller outlier clusters.
A lot of the 89 line items are repeats, meaning, for example, the same Kolbrin quote might link to 2 or more different DSS quotes. That said, there are 40-44 unique Kolbrin quotes that have ties to the DSS.
One big takeaway from this analysis is that the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to contain something that coders might understand as a "version history" of the same documents. That would explain why the same rules keep popping up in clusters with minor variations in the corresponding language from one cluster to the next. Typically people don't save version histories of unimportant documents.
One of the 4 hotspots was the Damascus Document which is the DSS item to which one ought to look if one were seeking information about the DSS owners (which the overwhelming academic consensus, at this point, points at as being the Essenes). So, it seems logical to me that, if the Damascus Document is one of the hotspots and echoes of its content ring three more times within the DSS, the documents from which these rules came were considered important and that's why the Essenes had a version history of them.
Why only 3 chapters from one book of the Kolbrin though? I'm not sure, but I have an imagination and I can come up with any number of possible scenarios in which natural disasters, animals, clumsy or malicious humans, etc. could have damaged or disappeared the full text but someone had a few chapters somewhere that was geographically distributed. I don't know, nor do I need to know. All I need to know is that it's not unrealistic to suggest that the Dead Sea Scrolls largely stem from those 3 chapters of that one book of the Kolbrin.
As for the quotes themselves, as one might imagine, some are extremely similar whereas at least a few require speculative leaps and are merely included because the speculative leaps seem worth mentioning even if they wind up ultimately being dismissed.
Plenty more work remains to be done on the Kolbrin and, to a lesser extent, on the DSS, but this is a really solid few dozen links to have established.
🪶
clearing an exploratory path with intent to circle back and clear the rest later
and
clearing the road thoroughly as you go.
If your curiosity exceeds a certain tipping point, you're going to do what I did, which is keep moving forward knowing the need to circle back and clean things up would be necessary.
With that in mind, I've been recently invited to do a guest appearance and the subject of discussion will primarily be the Kolbrin Bible. In preparation for that guest appearance, I've circled back to my Kolbrin-Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) analysis to tidy it up.
Months ago when I initially made the discovery, I started a spreadsheet to collect the textual links between the two source materials. When I opened up that spreadsheet this past weekend, it had 19 line items.
But, as I was going through my DSS book, I noticed a lot of margin notes from other textual matches I had found but had not yet logged into the spreadsheet, so I took care of that.
That spreadsheet now has 89 line items.
I've sorted the findings by Kolbrin and by DSS to isolate hot spots and clustering of links between the two source materials.
3 chapters from one book of the Kolbrin Bible
seem to be an ancestral source for
4 hotspots from the DSS plus 7 smaller outlier clusters.
A lot of the 89 line items are repeats, meaning, for example, the same Kolbrin quote might link to 2 or more different DSS quotes. That said, there are 40-44 unique Kolbrin quotes that have ties to the DSS.
One big takeaway from this analysis is that the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to contain something that coders might understand as a "version history" of the same documents. That would explain why the same rules keep popping up in clusters with minor variations in the corresponding language from one cluster to the next. Typically people don't save version histories of unimportant documents.
One of the 4 hotspots was the Damascus Document which is the DSS item to which one ought to look if one were seeking information about the DSS owners (which the overwhelming academic consensus, at this point, points at as being the Essenes). So, it seems logical to me that, if the Damascus Document is one of the hotspots and echoes of its content ring three more times within the DSS, the documents from which these rules came were considered important and that's why the Essenes had a version history of them.
Why only 3 chapters from one book of the Kolbrin though? I'm not sure, but I have an imagination and I can come up with any number of possible scenarios in which natural disasters, animals, clumsy or malicious humans, etc. could have damaged or disappeared the full text but someone had a few chapters somewhere that was geographically distributed. I don't know, nor do I need to know. All I need to know is that it's not unrealistic to suggest that the Dead Sea Scrolls largely stem from those 3 chapters of that one book of the Kolbrin.
As for the quotes themselves, as one might imagine, some are extremely similar whereas at least a few require speculative leaps and are merely included because the speculative leaps seem worth mentioning even if they wind up ultimately being dismissed.
Plenty more work remains to be done on the Kolbrin and, to a lesser extent, on the DSS, but this is a really solid few dozen links to have established.
🪶
3❤️2🔥1
