 Elior claims that the Essenes, the supposed authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls never existed.She contends (as have Lawrence Schiffman, Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, Chaim Menachem Rabin, and others) that the Essenes were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by Greek rulers in the 2nd century BC.She conjectures that the scrolls were taken with them when they were banished.