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107 not a historical figure of the first century CE, but a late fiction con- structed by the evangelists, mainly on the basis of Pauline statements about Jesus. The radical scepticism towards the gospels as historical sources (which includes dating them extremely late) left aside, the weakest point of Ellegdrd's theory is his construction of "Diaspora Essenism." The possibility of Essene connections to the Diaspora cannot be excluded (cf. Philo's descriptions of Essenes and Therapeutae), but Ellegdrd goes far beyond what the evidence allows. He is bound to postulate some quite far-reaching differences between the Essenes of Palestine and of
LADY WISDOM AND DAME FOLLY AT QUMRAN SIDNIE WHITE CRAWFORD University of Nebraska-Lincoln* The female figures of Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly, found in the post-exilic Wisdom literature, have always attracted much debate and speculation. The questions of who they are and what they stand for, particularly in the case of Lady Wisdom, have been hotly debated. Is she merely a literary creation, driven by the fact that the nouns for wisdom in Hebrew and Greek, i10Jn and (yo(piu., are feminine in gen- der ? Or is she an actual divine figure, a female hypostasis of Yahweh, the god of