Word: dubay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2001-2001
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clifftops above the Dead Sea, Ron Dubay sifted the dust through a small sieve and found two tiny fragments of bone. Then he heard his partner Dennis Walker shout, "Whoa! We got something here." Walker's trowel held three vertebrae. Fighting their excitement, the researchers from California State University at Long Beach carefully dusted away for two days, finding skull fragments and the brittle, broken remains of at least one human body. Last week their conclusions about the find started an archaeological battle...
Qumran, where Dubay and Walker found the bones, was home to an ascetic sect of Jews, the Essenes, roughly contemporary with Jesus. In the cliffside caves, in the first century A.D., the sect members buried their sacred texts in sealed jars to save them from the Roman army. Those documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, were discovered in 1947, and are the oldest existing scripture in Hebrew. But the lives of the Qumran people remain shrouded in mystery and controversy...
...Dubay and Walker believe their find is important because, alone among the 1,200 simple graves at Qumran, the tomb was inside a purpose-built structure. That may mean that the bones belonged to an important person, perhaps even the "Teacher of Righteousness" mentioned in the scrolls. Other researchers have speculated that the teacher may have been one of the Maccabean kings of Judea, the apostle James, John the Baptist, perhaps even Jesus...
...Bedouin women buried about 200 years ago. The Cal State team "got overexcited," says Hanan Eshel, a leader of the Qumran dig and an archaeologist at Tel Aviv's Bar-Ilan University. More important than the bones, says Eshel, is a zinc coffin also found nearby by Dubay and Walker. Zinc has never before been found in burial artifacts from the Essenes' time. That signals an important, probably wealthy person was transported from far away, sealed inside the zinc to keep the corpse from smelling during transport. Qumran, then, must have been significant to more than just the ascetics...
...night of the murders, Carolyn Oppy was looking forward to dinner with her husband to celebrate her 44th birthday. "She called that day and told us Ken had a big surprise for her. She sounded hopeful," says Dubay. Oppy loved her work as an optometrist, was popular with the patients, even getting the cranky ones to loosen up and laugh with her. The one person she couldn't get through to was her husband, whose affairs saddened and angered her at the same time. She had considered divorce, but in the end, she held on, hoping Stahl would change...