Toilet tied to tale of Dead Sea Scrolls

Godliness vs. cleanliness
As time went on, pathogens would likely build up in the latrine, Zias said.

"What happened was that 20 to 40 people went out there every day over a period of 100 years," he explained in a University of North Carolina news release. "By burying their fecal matter, they actually preserved the microorganisms and parasites. In the sunlight, the bacteria and parasites get zapped within a fairly short amount of time, but buried, the parasites can live in the soil for up to a year. Then people pick up things by walking through fecally contaminated soil — it's like a toxic waste dump, and if you have any cuts on your feet..."

If the people who used the latrines were indeed Essenes, their religious practice would require them to undergo a ritual washing when they returned to the settlement. For modern-day Westerners, that sounds like good hygiene. But 1st-century Qumran was a different environment, and such practices would actually make matters worse, Zias said.

Water would typically stand in the ritual pools for months at a time, replenished only by three months' worth of winter rains. When the residents immersed themselves in the pools, they'd leave behind bacteria and parasite eggs. The warm water and sediment would serve as a fertile breeding ground for the pathogens, leading to cross-infection.

"Can you see yourself going into whirlpool water standing there for nine months, and 100 people have been going in there before you, day in and day out?" he asked.

Zias said the parasites detected at the presumed latrine would cause intestinal distress — which, in his mind, also helps explain the emergency toilet identified within the community. "If you're sitting there reading the Torah and you've got diarrhea, you think you're going to make it up the hill? You're not going to make it," he said.

This situation could explain yet another puzzle that Zias has been working on: the apparent mortality rate in Qumran. Zias said previous studies have found that only 6 percent of the adults buried in the community's graveyard were older than 40, compared with a figure of 49 percent for 1st-century Jericho, 9 miles (14 kilometers) to the north.

Zias said the people buried at Qumran were "the unhealthiest group that I have ever studied in over 30 years" — and the vulnerability to fecal pathogens may explain why.

"It is not hard to imagine how sick everyone must have been," Zias said.

Tabor said the public-health angle added an unexpected twist to his research: "By trying to be holy, in effect they're contaminating themselves," he told MSNBC.com.

There might have been yet one more irony: Tabor noted that the Essenes, like the early Christians, interpreted physical illness as a manifestation of spiritual uncleanness — and this might have led them to be even more rigorous about the unhygienic baths.

Case not yet closed
Tabor acknowledged that the evidence from the apparent latrine site could not, by itself, prove that Qumran housed an Essene monastery.

"Frankly, let's say it was a pottery factory. It might have been run by very observant Jews who maybe were even connected to the scroll community," he said. "But that would be highly unlikely, and given the cemetery evidence plus all the other evidence, one begins to feel that one is really pushing a theory rather than letting the facts speak."

Tabor said the analysis of the latrine site was "one more piece of evidence" to add to the debate over the Qumran mystery, alongside the textual and the archaeological record.

The University of Chicago's Golb said he was unconvinced. Even if Qumran's residents set up a latrine 1,600 feet away, that wouldn't necessarily identify the community's residents as Essenes, he said.

"What James Tabor has done here is to just disregard all the evidence we've turned up," Golb told MSNBC.com.

He ticked off the top arguments against assuming that the Essenes were the ones behind the Dead Sea Scrolls — including the fact that the scrolls included texts that represented other, non-Essene strains of Jewish religious thought; the claim that the Copper Scroll listed locations for hidden treasures from the Jerusalem Temple; and references to the Qumran caves in other ancient texts as a hiding place for Jerusalem refugees.

In Golb's view, the fuss over Qumran's latrine is merely a sideshow.

"It’s a continuation of an effort over the past 10 or 12 years to disregard or deny the investigations of well-seasoned archaeologists at Qumran. ... It's a pity that they are trying to pull the collective wool over the eyes of the public," Golb said.

Tabor, however, said the physical evidence — such as the fact that virtually all of the skeletons examined at Qumran's cemetery were from adult men — plays an integral part in reconstructing the story behind the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"Why would any additional material evidence, be it cemeteries or latrines, be seen as a ploy?" Tabor said in an e-mail. "Why not welcome all the facts and work them into something harmonious?"

In an earlier version of this story, the photo caption incorrectly placed Qumran in Israel rather than on the West Bank.

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