Essenes or Zealots?

Extract

We have all been aware, indeed for some years now, that Prof. G. R. Driver was preparing a work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we knew that it would be a major work, and that it would certainly tell us something new. It was a long wait, but now it is ended, and here is the book, of more than 600 pages, which is throwing to the ground certain positions which had come to be regarded as established. It is the work of a scholar, who is considered one of the finest Hebraists of our time, and of a courteous man, who has many friends, among whom I have the honour to include myself. I cannot forget his charm and humour as chairman at one of my Schweich Lectures on these very same manuscripts in 1959, nor his kind words in the preface which he graciously agreed to write to these lectures when they appeared in print, nor the long talks we had and the meals at Magdalen College and at his home at Oxford, nor the visit we made together to Qumran. All this makes it the more painful to me to be compelled to disagree with what he has written. After I have shared bread and salt with him (and a little more too), he might well say with the psalmist (he would say it in Hebrew): ‘He who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me’. But this book is without question one of the most important which has been written about the scrolls, and judgement about it must be made with complete honesty and frankness.