Women in the Qumran cemeteries

Abstract

Legitimate ways of using the Qumran cemeteries as evidence for the status of women at Qumran include: modern lab diagnoses of skeletal remains by trained anthropologists, inclusion of statistical probability when giving statistics, privileging the evidence most securely associated with the site. Problems arise when labels are tendentious, sources are improperly privileged, statistically small samples are extrapolated, skeletal sexing is preliminary, and scroll texts are assumed to be uniform. The women found in the Qumran cemeteries appear to be in the minority, but not anomalous. The small sample size of the excavated tombs at Qumran does produce a relatively large margin of error. But even so, the probability that the male-female ratio and adult-child ratio of the Qumran cemeteries is representative of the larger population is very small. It is fair to say that the Qumran community had a disproportionate number of adult men, buried individually rather than in family graves. The data from the cemeteries as a whole indicates a context somewhere between the celibate male Essenes of the classical sources and the families assumed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls and the graves together indicate that women were not anomalies, but neither do they make a big deal of women’s presence. We have no texts discussing or assuming women might be members of the community apart from their husbands, nor prohibiting them from being such. The assumption that women could not be full members must now rest only on an argument from silence, the premise being that women do not have this kind of religious self-determination in the wider social context, so neither can they here. However, if we were to hold (with Tal Ilan) that women could support, have allegiance to, or join sectarian movements within Second Temple Judaism, the Scrolls and the graves would not refute us. Qumran offers us nothing direct in the way of evidence regarding the level of religious self-determination for women in Second Temple Judaism. The evidence points in the direction of women being part of a probably celibate Qumran community, which was in turn part of a larger sectarian movement, whether Essene or not.