The following strikes me as an amazing illustration of how reading based on form and abstract logic alone rather than grounded in life and people, leads to a technical textual scholar's inability to do history (and to be aware that he is writing nonsense even as he strikes out at other better scholars):
The only way for Sacha to interpret the evidence that the calendar divide was a chasm is to read sources without context. For example, he has to misread the calendar divide in the written camp’s Pesher Habakkuk story in which the “wicked” Jerusalem High Priest arrives to cause the “righteous” community to sin on their Day of Atonement as a story in which the High Priest by happenstance caused the people to sin in some unstated sin on their Day of Atonement. He has to treat the text as a contextless entity. It is strange to read a story that omits identify a sin[1] but mentions people being forced to sin on their Day of Atonement as not meaning that they were forced to sin on their day of Atonement. That would be laughable on a rhetorical, polemical, and literary level.[2]
Similarly: he must ignore context in order to argue that the story could not have been about the calendar because calendar polemics could not have existed in a Judaism in which there existed variations between some communities’ celebrations of the lunisolar calendar’s holidays. Although that argument sounds logical, it ignores context; it ignores the fact that variations in the celebrations of the lunisolar holidays are merely minor variations of one day between communities that in any case were geographically separated from each other, while the variations between the dates of a solar and of a lunisolar calendar are blatant.[3]
Last, but admittedly least, he overlooked -- or did not know yet -- the good evidence that when the “righteous” community of solar calendar adherent describe their calendar conflict with the “wicked” High Priest they mean a political conflict of allegiance between the Sadducean – and proto-Essene – deposed “righteous” Hyrcanus II and the Pharisee supported upstart, “wicked” Antigonus Mattathias.[4]
The only way for Sacha to interpret the evidence that the calendar divide was a chasm is to read sources without context. For example, he has to misread the calendar divide in the written camp’s Pesher Habakkuk story in which the “wicked” Jerusalem High Priest arrives to cause the “righteous” community to sin on their Day of Atonement as a story in which the High Priest by happenstance caused the people to sin in some unstated sin on their Day of Atonement. He has to treat the text as a contextless entity. It is strange to read a story that omits identify a sin[1] but mentions people being forced to sin on their Day of Atonement as not meaning that they were forced to sin on their day of Atonement. That would be laughable on a rhetorical, polemical, and literary level.[2]
Similarly: he must ignore context in order to argue that the story could not have been about the calendar because calendar polemics could not have existed in a Judaism in which there existed variations between some communities’ celebrations of the lunisolar calendar’s holidays. Although that argument sounds logical, it ignores context; it ignores the fact that variations in the celebrations of the lunisolar holidays are merely minor variations of one day between communities that in any case were geographically separated from each other, while the variations between the dates of a solar and of a lunisolar calendar are blatant.[3]
Last, but admittedly least, he overlooked -- or did not know yet -- the good evidence that when the “righteous” community of solar calendar adherent describe their calendar conflict with the “wicked” High Priest they mean a political conflict of allegiance between the Sadducean – and proto-Essene – deposed “righteous” Hyrcanus II and the Pharisee supported upstart, “wicked” Antigonus Mattathias.[4]
[3] ibid. In short, certain scholars err in thinking that historical conclusions and especially textual interpretations can be based on abstract logical analysis instead of analysis based on the integration of human nature and social context. All the more so, they err in using abstract logical but unrealistic options to refute historical evidence.
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