Roland de Vaux

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The excavation team, from left to right: Roland de Vaux, Józef Tadeusz Milik, Gerald Lankester Harding (1952).

Roland Guérin de Vaux (born December 17, 1903 in Paris , † September 10, 1971 in Jerusalem ) was a French Dominican , biblical scholar and archaeologist. He was director of the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem in the Arab part of the city. His main role was to oversee and coordinate research on the Dead Sea Scrolls . His group dug in Khirbet Qumran from 1951 to 1956 and explored the caves on the north-west bank of the Dead Sea .

Life

Roland de Vaux was born in Paris in 1903, studied at the Saint-Sulpice seminary from 1925 to 1928 and was ordained a priest in 1929. In the same year he joined the Dominican Order. From 1934 until his death he lived in Jerusalem, working on history and exegesis at the École biblique. His interest in archaeological issues was aroused by William Foxwell Albright , Kathleen Kenyon, and Benjamin Mazar . From 1938 to 1953 he was editor of the Revue Biblique , from 1945 to 1965 he was the director of the École biblique.

He had already participated in several excavations when he was approached in 1949 by Gerald Lankester Harding (1901-1979), director of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan , to investigate a cave at Khirbet Qumran on the Dead Sea in which scrolls were found were.

The first excavation campaign at Qumran began in December 1951. At the same time, he worked with Harding in Wadi Murabba'at in 1952 and in Ain-Feshkha a few kilometers south of Qumran in 1958 . His group worked in Qumran from 1951 to 1956 and examined the caves by the Dead Sea, both under the nominal direction of Ibrahim El-Assouli as a representative of the Jordanian Antiquities Authority. Roland de Vaux took on the role of editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls and in this role was responsible for the publication of the first three volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert , the official edition of the Scrolls.

Roland de Vaux was President of the 2nd IOSOT Congress in 1956 , which took place in Strasbourg.

Lectures on Qumran

In 1959 de Vaux held the Schweich Lectures at the British Academy , where he presented his analysis of the excavations in Qumran. His central statements in the lecture were:

  • Qumran was - after a first settlement in the Iron Age - around 135 BC. Inhabited until some time after 73 AD. He distinguished three periods: (I) up to the earthquake of 31 BC. BC, (II) from the accession of the ethnarch Herodes Archelaus in the year 4 BC. Until it was destroyed by the Romans in the Jewish War in 68 AD and (III) the subsequent Roman occupation.
  • The nearby caves where the scrolls were found are related to Qumran as comparable artifacts have been found in both locations.
  • Qumran was the center of the Jewish sect of the Essenes .
  • The scrolls often reproduce what was known of the Essenes from the works of the historian Flavius ​​Josephus .

criticism

Roland de Vaux did not publish a final report on his archaeological work in Qumran, leaving only extensive notes that were only published in 2003.

In the book "The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception" (Eng. "Classified Jesus", both 1991) he was violently attacked by the authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh ; they described him as rude, narrow-minded, bigoted and vengeful ("ruthless, narrow-minded, bigoted and fiercely vindictive"), anti-Semitic and as a sympathizer of fascism . The book by Baigent / Leigh, on the other hand, is rejected by research and referred to in the literature as the "hoax par excellence".

Publications (selection)

  • Ancient Israel
    • Volume 1: Social Institutions (1958)
    • Volume 2: Religious Institutions (1960)
  • L'archéologie et les manuscrits de la Mer Morte . The Schweich lectures of the British Academy 1959. London, Oxford University Press 1961
    • English translation: Archeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls , London, Oxford University Press 1973
  • Bible et Orient (1967)
  • Fouilles de Khirbet Qumrân et de Aïn Feshkha (1994) (= The excavations of Qumran and En Feschcha . 1996, German translation and information processing by Ferdinand Rohrhirsch)
  • Synthesis of Roland de Vaux's field notes , ed. by Jean-Baptiste Humbert et al., Friborg (Switzerland), University Press 2003. ISBN 3-7278-1444-6 . ISBN 3-525-53984-3 .

literature

  • Joseph Milik: Ten Years of Discovery in the Judaean Desert. , 1959.
  • Jacques Briend: De Vaux, Roland , in: Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls , ed. by Lawrence H. Schiffman and James VanderKam, Oxford, 2000, Vol. 1, ISBN 0-19-513796-5 , pp. 202-204.
  • Anselm Hagedorn: Institutions and Social Life in Ancient Israel: Sociological Aspects . In: Magne Sæbø (ed.): Hebrew Bible, Old Testament. The history of its interpretation . Volume 3: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries , Part 2: The twentieth century - from modernism to post-modernism . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-54022-0 , pp. 58–95, here section 2.5: Roland de Vaux (1903–1971) , pp. 81–83.
  • Jean Louis Ska: Questions of the "History of Israel" in Recent Research . In: Magne Sæbø (ed.): Hebrew Bible, Old Testament. The history of its interpretation . Volume 3: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries , Part 2: The twentieth century - from modernism to post-modernism . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-54022-0 , pp. 391–421, here paragraph 5.4: Roland Guerin de Vaux (1903–1971) and the so-called French School , p. 420 -421.

Web links

Commons : Roland de Vaux  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Baigent, Leigh (1991), pp. 27-28, in the German edition pp. 50-51
  2. ↑ “Such misinformation about this Aramaic text is only a token of the larger pattern of errors and misinformated statements that make the Baigent and Leigh book itself the deception par excellence [italics by the author] about the Dead Sea Scrolls.” In: Joseph A. Fitzmyer: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins. 2000, p. 43; Corresponding statement from Hartmut Stegemann in: Die Essener, Qumran, Johannes der Täufer and Jesus (1999).
personal data
SURNAME Vaux, Roland de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vaux, Roland Guérin de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French religious, biblical scholar and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 1971
Place of death Jerusalem