The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English

by Geza Vermes

  The early assumption of Scroll scholars that every non-biblical Dead Sea text was an Essene writing52 might have justified to some extent Norman Golb’s scepticism. But nowadays specialists distinguish between Qumran manuscripts written by members of the Essene sect, and others either predating the Community, or simply brought there from outside. Emanuel Tov, for instance, has drawn a dividing line on scribal grounds between scrolls produced at Qumran and the rest.53 However, in my view the soft underbelly of the Jerusalem hypothesis is revealed - apart from the patent weakness of the archaeological interpretation, for Qumran is not a fortress - by the composition of the manuscript collection itself, definitely pointing towards a sectarian library. If Cave 4 is taken as representative, whereas several biblical books (Kings, Lamentations, Ezra and Chronicles) are attested only in single copies; and others, as important as Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Proverbs, Ruth and Ecclesiastes, in two copies, we find ten copies of the Community Rule and nine of the Damascus Document. Over a dozen manuscripts contain sectarian calendars, yet not one mainstream calendar figures among the 575 (or 555) compositions found in that cave! So, if the texts discovered at Qumran came from the capital, can their source have been an Essene library in Jerusalem?54

  QUMRAN AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

  Since Qumran and early Christianity partly overlap, it is not surprising that from the very beginning of Dead Sea Scrolls research some scholars endeavoured to identify the two. The first attempt came from England in the early 1950s, with Jacob Teicher of Cambridge modestly advancing the thesis that Jesus was the Teacher of Righteousness and Saint Paul the Wicked Priest.55 This trend was continued with loud media support by J. M. Allegro’s speculation about the role of ammanita muscaria, a hallucinogenic fungus, in the genesis of the Christian Church.56 It reached its climax with Barbara Thiering’s discovery that John the Baptist was the Teacher of Righteousness and the married, divorced and remarried Jesus, father of four children, the Wicked Priest.57 As for Robert Eisenman, he ignores Jesus, and casts instead his brother, James, in the role of the Teacher of Righteousness, with Paul playing the Wicked Priest.58 In my opinion all these theories fail the basic credibility test: they do not spring from, but are foisted on, the texts.59

  These - to say the least - improbable speculations as well as the no less fantastic claim that Qumran Cave 7 yielded remains of the Gospel of Mark and other New Testament writings in Greek60 need not detain us any longer.

  Turning to the real relationship between the Scrolls and the New Testament, this can be presented under a threefold heading. (1) We note (a) fundamental similarities of language (both in the Scrolls and in the New Testament the faithful are called ‘sons of light’); (b) ideology (both communities considered themselves as the true Israel, governed by twelve leaders, and expected the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God); (c) attitude to the Bible (both considered their own history as a fulfilment of the words of the Prophets). However, all correspondences such as these may be due to the Palestinian religious atmosphere of the epoch, without entailing any direct influence.

  (2) More specific features, such as monarchic administration (i.e. single leaders, overseers at Qumran, bishops in Christian communities) and the practice of religious communism in the strict discipline of the sect and at least in the early days in the Jerusalem church (cf. Acts ii, 44-5), would suggest a direct causal connection. If so, it is likely that the young and inexperienced church modelled itself on the by then well-tried Essene society.

  (3) In the study of the historical Jesus, the charismatic-eschatological aspects of the Scrolls have provided the richest gleanings for comparison. For example, the Prayer of Nabonidus, known since the mid-1950s,61 and concerned with the story of Nabonidus’ cure by a Jewish exorcist who forgave his sins, provides the most telling parallel to the Gospel account of the healing of a paralytic in Capernaum whose sins Jesus declared forgiven.62

  The second example is the so-called Resurrection fragment (4Q521, cf. below, pp. 412-3).63 In this poem, the age of the eschatological kingdom is characterized, with the help of Psalm cxlvi, 7-8 and Isaiah lxi, 1, by the liberation of captives, the curing of the blind, the straightening of the bent, the healing of the wounded, the raising of the dead and the proclamation of the good news to the poor. Likewise, in the Gospels, victory over disease and the devil is viewed as the sure sign of the initial manifestation of God’s reign. Jesus is reported to have announced:

  If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, the Kingdom of God has come upon you.

  (Lk. xi, 20)

  Similarly, to John the Baptist’s inquiry whether Jesus was the final messenger the following reply is sent:

  Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.

  (Matth. xi, 4-5)

  Note furthermore that Community Rule 4:6 lists healing as the chief eschatological reward and that according to the Palestinian Aramaic paraphrases of Genesis iii, 15 the days of the Messiah will bring an ultimate cure to the children of Eve wounded by the serpent in the garden of Eden.64

  QUMRAN’S GREATEST NOVELTY

  If one had to single out the most revolutionary novelty furnished by Qumran, its contribution to our understanding of the genesis of Jewish literary compositions could justifiably be our primary choice. Comparative study of biblical manuscripts, where no two copies display the same text, and of sectarian works, attested in a number of sometimes startlingly different redactions, has revealed in one leading scholar’s words ‘insufficiently controlled copying’.65 In my view, however, the phenomenon would better be described as scribal creative freedom. Qumran manuscripts of Scripture, and even more of the Community Rule and the War Scroll, indicate that diversity, not uniformity, reigned there and then, and that redactor-copyists felt free to improve the composition which they were reproducing. Or, to quote myself,

  The Dead Sea Scrolls have afforded for the first time direct insight into the creative literary-religious process at work within that variegated Judaism which flourished during the last two centuries of quasi-national independence, before the catastrophe of 70 CE forced the rabbinic successors of the Pharisees to attempt to create an ‘orthodoxy’ by reducing dangerous multiplicity to a simple, tidy and easily controllable unity.66

  Looking at the Qumran discoveries from an overall perspective, it is - I believe - the student of the history of Palestinian Judaism in the inter-Testamental era (150 BCE-70 CE) who is their principal beneficiary. For such an expert, the formerly quite unknown sectarian writings of the Dead Sea literature have opened new avenues of exploration in the shadowy era of the life of Jesus, the rise of Christianity and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism. From the Jewish side, it was previously poorly documented. The rabbis of the first and second centuries CE had not permitted religious writings of that epoch to go down to posterity unless they conformed fully to their ideas, and although some of these texts were preserved by Christians (viz. the Apocrypha and many of the Pseudepigrapha), the fact that they had served as a vehicle for Church apologetics caused their textual reliability to be suspect. But the Scrolls are unaffected by either Christian or rabbinic censorship, and now that their evidence is complete, historians will be thoroughly acquainted, not with just another aspect of Jewish beliefs or customs, but with the whole organization, teaching and aspirations of a religious community flourishing during the last centuries of the Second Temple.

  The Scrolls have understandably awakened intense interest in the academic world, but why have they appealed so strongly to the imagination of the non-specialist? I would say, the outstanding characteristic of our age appears to be a desire to reach back to the greatest attainable purity, to the basic truth free of jargon. Affecting the whole of our outlook, it has necessarily included the domain of religious thought and behaviour, and with it, in the Western world, the whole subject of Judaeo-Christian culture and spirituali
ty. A search is being made for the original meaning of issues with which we have become almost too familiar and which with the passing of the centuries have tended to become choked with inessentials, and it has led not only to a renewed preoccupation with the primitive but fully developed expression of these issues in the Scriptures, but also to a desire for knowledge and understanding of their prehistory.

  The laws and rules, hymns and other liturgical works as well as the Bible commentaries of the Qumran Community respond to this need in that they add substance and depth to the historical period in which Jewish Christianity and rabbinic Judaism originated. They reveal one facet of the spiritual ferment at work among the various Palestinian religious parties at that time, a ferment which culminated in a thorough re-examination and reinterpretation of the fundamentals of the Jewish faith. By dwelling in such detail on the intimate organization of their society, on the role attributed to their Teacher and on their ultimate hopes and expectations, the sect of the Scrolls has exposed its own resulting synthesis. This in its turn has thrown into relief and added a new dimension to its dissenting contemporaries. Thus, compared with the ultra-conservative rigidity of the Essene Rule, rabbinic Judaism reveals itself as progressive and flexible, while the religion preached and practised by Jesus of Nazareth stands out invested with religious individuality and actuality. Also, by comparison to all three, the ideology of the Gentile Church sounds a definitely alien note.67 Yet at the same time, the common ground from which they all sprang, and their affinities and borrowings, show themselves more clearly than ever before. It is no exaggeration to state that none of these religious movements can properly be understood independently of the others.

  Essenism is dead. The brittle structure of its stiff and exclusive brotherhood was unable to withstand the national catastrophe which struck Palestinian Judaism in 70 CE. Animated by the loftiest of ideals and devoted to the observance of ‘perfect holiness’, it yet lacked the pliant strength and the elasticity of thought and depth of spiritual vision which enabled rabbinic Judaism to survive and flourish. And although the Teacher of Righteousness clearly sensed the deeper obligations implicit in the Mosaic Law, he was without the genius of Jesus the Jew who succeeded in uncovering the essence of religion as an existential relationship between man and man and man and God.

  II. The Community

  Since the early 1950s, the information garnered from the Scrolls and from Qumran’s archaeological remains has been combined by experts to form a persuasive portrait of the people to which they allude. Yet for all the advances made in knowledge and understanding, the enigma of the sect is by no means definitely solved. After all this time, we are still not certain that we have collated the whole evidence correctly or interpreted it properly. Questions continue to arise in the mind and there is still no way to be sure of the answers.

  Our perplexity is mainly due to an absence in the documents, singly or together, of any systematic exposition of the sect’s constitution and laws. The Community Rule legislates for a group of ascetics living in a kind of ‘monastic’ society, the statutes of the Damascus Document for an ordinary lay existence; MMT (Miqsat Ma‘ase ha-Torah, or Some Observances of the Law) probably echoes the prehistory or early history of the sect; and the War Rule and Messianic Rule in their turn, while associated with the Community Rule and the Damascus Document, and no doubt reflecting to some extent a contemporary state of affairs, first and foremost plan for a future age.

  Taken together, however, it is clear from this literature that the sectaries regarded themselves as the true Israel, the repository of the authentic traditions of the religious body from which they had seceded. Accordingly, they organized their movement so that it corresponded faithfully to that of the Jewish people, dividing it into priests and laity (or Aaron and Israel), and the laity grouped after the biblical model into twelve tribes. This structure is described in the War Scroll’s account of reconstituted Temple worship as it was expected to be at the end of time:

  ... the twelve chief Priests shall minister at the daily sacrifice before God ... Below them ... shall be the chiefs of the Levites to the number of twelve, one for each tribe ... Below them shall be the chiefs of the tribes ...

  (IQM 11, 1-3)

  Still following the biblical pattern, sectarian society (apart from the tribe of Levi) was further distinguished into units of Thousands, Hundreds, Fifties and Tens (IQS 11, 21; CD XIII, 1-2). To what extent these figures are symbolical, we do not know, but it is improbable that ‘Thousands’ amounted to anything more than a figure of speech. It is not irrelevant, in this connection, to note that the archaeologists have deduced from the fact that the cemetery contained 1,100 graves, dug over the course of roughly 200 years, that the population of Qumran, an establishment of undoubted importance, can never have numbered more than 150 to 200 souls at a time. Also, it should be borne in mind that the total membership of the Essene sect in the first century CE only slightly exceeded ‘four thousand’ (Josephus, Antiquities XVIII, 21).

  To consider now the two types separately, the ‘monastic’ brotherhood at Qumran alludes to itself in the Community Rule as ‘the men of holiness’ and ‘the men of perfect holiness’, and to the sect as ‘the Community’ and ‘Council of the Community’ or ‘the men of the Law’ (4QSd=4Q258). The establishment was devoted exclusively to religion. Work must have formed a necessary part of their existence; it is obvious from the remains discovered at Qumran that they farmed, made pots, cured hides and reproduced manuscripts. But no indication of this appears in the documents. It is said only that they were to ‘eat in common and bless in common and deliberate in common’ (IQS VI, 2-3), living in such a way as to ‘seek God with a whole heart and soul’ (IQS 1, 1-2). Perfectly obedient to each and every one of the laws of Moses and to all that was commanded by the Prophets, they were to love one another and to share with one another their ‘knowledge, powers and possessions’ (IQS I, II). They were to be scrupulous in their observance of the times appointed for prayer, and for every other aspect of a liturgical existence conducted apart from the Temple of Jerusalem and its official cult. ‘Separate from the habitation of unjust men’ (IQS VIII, 13), they were to study the Torah in the wilderness and thereby ‘atone for the Land’ (IQS VIII, 6, 10) and its wicked men, for whom they were to nourish an ‘everlasting hatred’ (IQS ix, 21), though this went together with a firm conviction that their fate was in God’s hands alone. And the poet proclaims in the Hymn with which the Community Rule ends:

  I will pay to no man the reward of evil;

  I will pursue him with goodness.

  For judgement of all the living is with God

  And it is He who will render to man his reward.

  (IQS x, 17-18)

  They were to be truthful, humble, just, upright, charitable and modest. They were to

  watch in community for a third of every night of the year, to read the Book and to study the Law and to bless together.

  (IQS VI, 7-8)

  These are, as may be seen, mostly the sort of recommendations to be expected of men devoting themselves to contemplation. A point to bear in mind, however, is that the contemplative life is not a regular feature of Judaism. An additional distinctive trait of these sectaries is that another qualification was required of them besides holiness: they were expected to become proficient in the knowledge of the ‘two spirits’ in which all men ‘walk’, the spirits of truth and falsehood, and to learn how to discriminate between them. They were taught in the so-called ‘instruction concerning the Two Spirits’, the earliest Jewish theological tractate incorporated into the Community Rule, how to recognize a ‘son of Light’ or potential ‘son of Light’, and how to distinguish a ‘son of Darkness’ belonging to the lot of Belial (IQS III, 13-IV, 25; cf. below pp. 73-4).

  The hierarchy at Qumran was strict and formal, from the highest level to the lowest. Every sectary was inscribed in ‘the order of his rank’ (IQS VI, 22) - the term ‘order’ recurs constantly - and was obliged to keep to it in al
l the Community meetings and at table, an order that was subject to an annual review on the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant. But after democratic beginnings, with the ‘Congregation’ (literally, ‘the Many’) as such forming the supreme authority, testified to by what seems to be the earliest formulation of the communal constitution (cf. 4QSb,d=4Q256, 258, see below, pp. 118-19), the ‘sons of Zadok, the priests’, members of the ‘Zadokite’ high-priestly family, took over the leadership of the sect. Although nothing to this effect is mentioned specifically in the Community Rule, the superior, the so-called mebaqqer or Guardian, was undoubtedly one of their number, as was the Bursar of the Congregation entrusted with handling the material affairs of the Community. In their hands lay the ultimate responsibility for decisions on matters of doctrine, discipline, purity and impurity, and in particular everything pertaining to ‘justice and property’ (IQS IX, 7). It was also a basic rule of the order that a priest was required to be present at any gathering of ten or more members who were meeting for debate, Bible study or prayer. A priest was to recite the grace before the common meals and to pronounce blessings (IQS VI, 3-8). He was no doubt the man whose duty it was to study the Law continually (IQS VI, 7; VIII, 11-12). One interesting feature of the priesthood at Qumran is that their precedence was absolute. In Judaism as represented by the Mishnah, the priest is superior to the Levite, the Levite to the Israelite, and the Israelite to the ‘bastard’ (Horayot III, 8). But the priestly precedence is conditional. If the ‘bastard’ is a man of learning, we are told, and the High Priest an uneducated ‘boor’, ‘the bastard ... precedes the High Priest’.