The Story of the Scrolls

by The Story of the Scrolls- The Miraculous Discovery

  Geographical, chronological and organizational arguments may be listed in favour of the identity of the Qumran Community and the Essenes. Whereas Philo and Josephus state that the Essenes lived in various places in Judaea, Pliny speaks of only one renowned Essene settlement at a short distance from the western shore of the Dead Sea where palm trees grow. The last town mentioned before the Essene notice was Jericho and the next two ‘below’ (infra) the Essenes were Engedi and the rock fortress of Masada. Qumran would nicely fit this territorial setting if ‘below’ is interpreted, not as ‘lower down’, but as ‘downstream’ or ‘further south’ on the way to the southernmost site of Masada. The nature of the Qumran ruins (communal buildings, a huge quantity of crockery and many facilities for ritual bathing) strongly support the Essene theory. To lessen the probability of the identification of Pliny’s location with Qumran, one would need a suitable site somewhere on the hills above Engedi. In the 1960s Israeli archaeologists, led by Benjamin Mazar, thoroughly investigated the area without finding any trace of the Essenes. By contrast, Yizhar Hirschfeld in the 1990s believed he had discovered above Engedi remains of wooden huts, but no pools or communal buildings. On the whole, the view that Qumran is Pliny’s Essene village seems by far the most probable.

  From the chronological point of view, Qumran was communally occupied from the late second century BCE, or on a more noticeable level at least from 100 BCE to 68 CE. If 100 BCE corresponds to the beginning of the first major architectural developments, the beginnings of the sectarian occupation are likely to date to the end of the second century BCE. This period, suggested by archaeology, matches the existence of the Essenes in Judaea as attested by Josephus. He first refers to them in the time of Jonathan Maccabaeus (mid-second century BCE) and their last mention in the Jewish War coincides with the great rebellion against Rome (66–70 CE) during which the Essenes had bravely resisted Roman tortures. With the destruction of Qumran, the Essenes disappear from the historical horizon.

  The most important proofs of identity are the organizational correspondences. Thus initiation was by stages in both groups: a first probationary period was followed by two further years of training. The extremely unusual common ownership of property characterized the life of the Essenes and of the strictly ascetic Qumran group. The Essenes’ renunciation of marriage, except in one of their branches according to Josephus, was equally uncommon. It matches the strict ascetics at Qumran, but not the ‘Damascus’ sect whose members, like Josephus’ special branch of Essenes, approved of marriage. The Essenes were critical of the Jerusalem Temple and so were the celibate Qumran sectaries. Both considered their community as the place of worship approved by God. The meals, blessed by priests, were reserved only for full members both by the Essenes and by the strictly observant Qumran Community. Both opposed oaths, with the exception of the vow made at their entry into the association.

  However, there are also some differences. The two major discrepancies – common or private ownership and celibate or married forms of life – resolve themselves once it is recognized that two separate branches of the same movement are attested by both the Scrolls and Josephus. Pliny’s perfunctory statement that the Essenes lived without money (sine pecunia) does not tally with the numerous coins found at Qumran, but it may be explained by exaggerated ‘poetic’ licence and an artistic liking for a nice turn of phrase. Further conflicting features are that the Qumran candidates swore their oath to return to the Law of Moses at the beginning of their training, whereas the Essenes took a vow of allegiance to the Torah at the end. It may have happened on both occasions. Moreover, the ‘Damascus’ sectaries were allowed to have slaves while the Essenes, according to Philo and possibly according to Josephus, opposed this. But the reliability of the statement has already been queried (see pp. 194–5 above). Furthermore, the weighty role of the Zadokite priests and the subject of messianic expectation, well attested in the Scrolls, are lacking in the classical sources. But this silence can easily be assigned to the unwillingness of Philo and Josephus to burden their Gentile readers with complicated Jewish theological concepts. Let us further add the total absence in the Scrolls of the term ‘Essene’ or anything approaching it. Here the most likely reason for the Scrolls’ silence is that the sectaries were described as Essenes only by outsiders; within the group they called themselves ‘men of the Community’, ‘men of holiness’ or ‘men of the Law’ in a somewhat similar way as members of the Catholic order of the Franciscans used to be commonly designated by outsiders as ‘Grey Friars’ and those of the nonconformist Society of Friends are usually called ‘Quakers’. Set against all the weighty common traits the discrepancies appear insignificant.

  Another kind of objection to the Essene identification, emphatically raised in 1995 by Professor Martin Goodman, is based on the incompleteness of our information concerning the religious profile of Judaism during the epoch in question. He reminds us that Josephus names only the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots as existing religious parties (‘A Note on the Qumran Sectarians, the Essenes and Josephus’, Journal of Jewish Studies 46 (1995), pp. 161–6). Surely, Goodman claims, there were more than four dissenting religious factions among Jews at the turn of the era? The Talmud speaks of twenty-four sects of heretics. Hence, according to Goodman, the mainstream view that the Qumranites were Essenes is oversimplified: it stands on insecure and shaky foundations.

  While this observation is not without value, neither does it deal a fatal blow to the Essene theory. It merely means that if the Qumran sectaries were not Essenes in the absolute sense, they belonged to a company hardly distinguishable from the Essene sect. This reminds me of the scholar who was unwilling to accept that the land of Canaan was occupied by the biblical Joshua and preferred to ascribe the conquest of Palestine to a different military leader who lived in the same period, who acted in a similar fashion and who, according to questionable traditions, was also called Joshua. Joking apart, while the identification of the Dead Sea sect and the Essenes is not an established fact, it is a strongly argued and well-founded hypothesis which will remain tenable until Professor Goodman or someone else comes up with a more convincing alternative.

  Rachel Elior’s recent thesis claiming that the members of the Qumran community were not Essenes, because the Essenes never existed and were invented by Josephus, strikes me as an entertaining flight of fancy. As at the moment of writing these lines the theory is known only from press interviews released in March 2009; the interested public will have to await the appearance of the English edition of Memory and Oblivion: The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls, before her claim can be subjected to stringent scrutiny. Rachel Elior’s much-vaunted discovery that the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a priestly group has in fact been common knowledge since the start of Qumran studies, but her assertion that this Community cannot be identified with the Essenes, because the Essenes of the classical sources do not appear in a priestly context, is mistaken. Josephus, although writing largely for a Graeco-Roman readership uninterested in Jewish peculiarities, still felt it necessary to underline the significant role of the priests in Essene life. He reported that the preparation of the sect’s pure food was entrusted to priests and that their common table was presided over by a priest who recited the prayer before and after each meal (Jewish Antiquities XVIII:22; Jewish War II:131). As an indirect pointer, Josephus designated as a ‘sacred robe’ the white garment which constituted the Essene uniform (Jewish War II:131. He refers here to the ceremonial ‘linen’ or ‘fine white linen’ vestment prescribed for the priests by the Bible (Exod. 28:39–43; Ezek. 44:17–19) as well as the Qumran War Scroll (1QM 7:10–11).

  Negatively, Elior deduces from the silence of the rabbis that the Essenes did not exist, but in doing so she does not bear in mind that by the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud (200–500 CE), the Essenes had already vanished and consequently there was no practical need for a debate about them. She further argues that the absence of the term ‘Essenes’ from the Scrolls proves
that they had nothing to do with the Qumran texts. But such a statement overlooks the fact that the Semitic name ‘Essenes’ (‘Saints’ or ‘Healers’, see p. 192) was used only by outsiders like Philo, Josephus and the Roman Pliny. The initiates of the sect called themselves ‘Men of the Community’, ‘Men of Holiness’, ‘Men of Supreme Holiness’ or ‘the Poor’ in their writings. Such a linguistic phenomenon is quite common in the religious terminology of most languages. Members of the Catholic orders of St Francis of Assisi are officially called Friars Minor (Fratres Minores in Latin), but outsiders, as I have noted, call them ‘Franciscans’ or ‘Grey-friars’. Likewise the members of the ‘Society of Friends’ are popularly known as ‘Quakers’.

  The main evidence used for the demonstration of the Essene identity of the Qumran sect consists in the unique features, unattested for any other Jewish group in antiquity, of common ownership of property and male celibacy, reinforced by Pliny’s location of the Essenes on the western shore of the Dead Sea.

  Against Professor Elior’s contention that the Essenes were made up by Josephus, attention must be drawn to their very detailed portrayal in Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, and to Josephus’ numerous references to Essene individuals involved in Palestinian Jewish history from the mid-second century BCE to the war against Rome in 66–70 CE. Finally, in his autobiography Josephus states that he himself gained personal experience of Essenism when as a sixteen-year-old young man he joined the Essene community for a time. These concrete factual accounts, easily controllable by Josephus’ contemporaries, do not strike one as the figment of someone’s fertile imagination.

  To return to weightier matters, we may need to adopt a fresh point of view in assessing the relationship between the married and the celibate communities. Josephus gives the impression that the non-marrying Essenes formed the main group and the marrying branch was an unimportant side shoot. The much more extensive Qumran evidence in favour of the married sect suggests the opposite view, namely that the ‘Damascus’ type sectaries represented the bulk of the movement, but that the fame of the celibate elite of Qumran reached the ends of the earth. ‘Unbelievable though this may sound, for thousands of centuries a race has existed which is eternal yet into which no one is born,’ Pliny tells us. Understandably, the Jewish apologists Philo and Josephus were only too glad to propagate this notion and present the Essenes as Jewish religious celebrities to their intellectually hungry Graeco-Roman readers.

  3. The History of the Qumran-Essene Community

  As is well known, the Qumran caves have not yielded one single strictly historical document. Hence any attempt at reconstructing the origin and development of the Dead Sea community must rely on an interpretation of theologically motivated data couched in cryptic language such as Teacher of Righteousness, Wicked Priest, Furious Young Lion, Kittim, etc. I will not be concerned here with the historical hypotheses which have already been shown to be unlikely or indeed unacceptable, like Zealotism or Jewish Christianity (see pp. 189–191). Leaving these out of consideration, what do the hints contained in the Scrolls add up to in regard to the history of the Qumran Community?

  The Exhortation of the Damascus Document displays three chronological details of significance. The ‘age of wrath’, the political-religious upheaval corresponding to the first stages of the community, began 390 years after the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The Teacher of Righteousness arrived 20 years later. Finally, about 40 years after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness, his opponents were punished by ‘the head of the kings of Greece’. From the reference to the ‘kings of Greece’ we may conclude that the events have taken place in the Hellenistic period of Jewish history. The straightforward application of the three chronological figures (390, 20 and 40 years) points also to the second century BCE as the historical context of the birth and early development of the sect. Employing simple arithmetic, the onset of the ‘age of wrath’ 390 years after Nebuchadnezzar’s victory in Judaea in 586 BCE brings us to 196 BCE, the beginning of the Syrian Greek (Seleucid) domination of Palestine which commenced with the Seleucid king Antiochus III, the Great’s conquest of the Jewish homeland in 200 BCE, when he defeated the Egyptian-Greek Ptolemies at the battle of Panias. The changeover resulted in increasing Hellenistic influence on the Jews, which in turn provoked the formation of a group of tradition-loving pious men (the Hasidim), the presumed forefathers of the Qumran Community. The appearance, twenty years later, of the Teacher of Righteousness brings us close to the accession to the throne of Antiochus IV, Epiphanes (175–163 BCE), whose hostility to the Jewish religion marked the climax of a major upheaval, the Hellenistic crisis. The length of the career of the Teacher of Righteousness, which started in year 20 of the ‘age of wrath’, is not given. The lower end of the chronological perspective of the author of the Damascus Exhortation is about 40 years after the disappearance of the Teacher.

  In mathematical terms: 390 + 20 + X (the Teacher’s ministry) + circa 40 add up to 450 + X. In the early stages of Qumran research, scholars like Manchester University’s Professor H. H. Rowley, took these figures at their face value. The ‘age of wrath’ started in 196 BCE (586–390) and with it the burgeoning community of the pious Hasidim of the pre-Maccabaean period came into being. The Teacher of Righteousness arose in c. 176 BCE and is identified with the martyr high priest Onias III, and the Wicked Priest with the Hellenizing pontiff Menelaus who in 171 BCE ordered the murder of Onias III (2 Macc. 4:34–5). The bottom line of the events is to be drawn somewhere in the second half of the second century BCE.

  This solution of early Qumran history, plain at first sight, nevertheless runs into a double snag. The first arises from general historical considerations, the second from the Habakkuk Commentary. To take the figure 390 literally in a calculation of biblical chronology is unsound. No ancient Jewish writer had a correct notion of the length of the post-exilic era. In the third century BCE, the Jewish Hellenist chronographer Demetrius counted 573 years – 73 too many – between the Assyrian conquest of Samaria (722/1 BCE) and the start of the rule of Ptolemy IV in Egypt in 221 BCE. The reasonably careful Josephus was also guilty of several miscalculations. Figures relating to the same event can vary even between his Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War. Thus he counted 481 (Antiquities) or 471 (War) years from the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE to the death of the Hasmonean ruler Aristobulus I (103 BCE). The correct figure is 435 years. Again, Josephus made the Jewish temple built in Leontopolis in Egypt by Onias IV last 343 years, whereas the period between 160 BCE (the date of the construction of the temple) and 73 CE (the date of its overthrow) amounts only to 233 years. As for the rabbinic pseudo-historical work known as Seder ‘Olam Rabbah or Great World Order, it allows 490 years to elapse between the first destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the second by Titus in 70 CE. The true figure is 656 years. To accept therefore the 390 years of the Damascus Document for genuine chronology is risky, to say the least.

  What stands definitely behind the Damascus Document’s reckoning is the Book of Daniel’s symbolical understanding of Jeremiah’s prophecy concerning the 70 years of rule granted to Babylon (Jeremiah 29:10). According to Daniel, the implied meaning is 70 times seven or 490 years (Daniel 9:24). Without any doubt, this mystical number lurks in the background of the Seder ‘Olam Rabbah and very likely of the Damascus Document. All we need is to assume that the ministry of the Teacher of Righteousness lasted the allegorical 40 years, like Moses’ leadership of the Israelites in the Sinai desert, and we end up with 390 + 20 + 40 + 40 = 490, as the moment of the coming of the Messiah of Aaron and the Messiah of Israel.

  Leaving aside this theological chronology, we may reasonably deduce from the cryptic allusions of the Damascus Exhortation that the origins of the Qumran community and the activity of its founder are to be placed in the second century BCE, say between 175 and 125 BCE, definitely during the Hellenistic era of Palestinian Jewish history. The Damascus Document itself is pre-Roman (pre-63 BC
E), dated to the end of the second century BCE. To move further ahead, the various pesharim and other forms of exegetical material from Qumran enable the student to draw a neater contour for the historical canvas and fill it in with more colourful detail by providing, among other things, identifiable historical names. The Nahum Commentary and the Habakkuk pesher envisage Jerusalem and the surrounding lands as governed by two classes of rulers: the Greek (Seleucid) kings, Antiochus (Epiphanes) and Demetrius (Eukairos) on the one hand and the rulers of the Kittim who, like the Roman proconsuls, regularly changed. The Kittim-Romans, mentioned also in the fragmentary historical calendar, are portrayed as the ultimate conquerors of the world who later on, in the eschatological age, were to be governed by kings (= emperors). This extended historical horizon, for which the War Scroll (1 and 4QM) and the Book of War (4Q285) furnish additional information, covers sectarian history and eschatological expectation from 175 BCE to the end of the first century BCE, and probably well into the first century CE.

  The badly preserved historical calendar provides further pieces for the completion of the puzzle. It mentions the priest John (probably John Hyrcanus I, 135–103 BCE); Shelamzion (Queen Salome Alexandra, 76–67 BCE); Hyrcanus (the high priest John Hyrcanus II, 63–40 BCE) and Aemilius (Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, governor of Syria, 65–62 BCE). To proceed further, the investigation must be focused on the Wicked Priest who, as high priestly ruler of the Jewish nation, is more likely to be identifiable thanks to the Books of the Maccabees and Josephus than the more shadowy leading characters of the sect. This Wicked Priest, being a contemporary and adversary of the Teacher of Righteousness, belongs to the opening phase of sectarian history in the second century BCE.