The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English

by Geza Vermes

  The Romans, now that the rebels had fled to the city, and the Sanctuary itself and all around it were in flames, carried their standards into the Temple court, and setting them up opposite the eastern gate, there sacrificed to them.

  (War VI, 3I6)

  It is also worth noting that the ‘Kittim’ of the War Scroll, the final opponents of the eschatological Israel, are subject to a king or emperor (melekh). Previously, in the Commentaries of Habakkuk and Nahum, they are said to have been governed by rulers (moshelim). In sum, therefore, the time-limits of the sect’s history appear to be at one extreme the beginning of the second century BCE, and at the other some moment during the Roman imperial epoch, i.e. after 27 BCE. And this latter date is determined by Qumran archaeology as coinciding with the first Jewish war, and even more precisely with the arrival of the armies of Vespasian and Titus in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea in June 68 CE.

  (c) Decipherment of Particular Allusions

  The ‘age of wrath’ having been identified as that of the Hellenistic crisis of the beginning of the second century BCE, the ‘root’ as the Hasidim of the pre-Maccabaean age, and the ‘Kittim’ as the Romans, the next major problem is to discover who was, or were, the principal Jewish enemy or enemies of the sect at the time of the ministry of the Teacher of Righteousness variously known as the ‘Scoffer’, the ‘Liar’ , the ‘Spouter of Lies’ and the ‘Wicked Priest’ (IQpHab, 4QPsa, CD).

  It is not unreasonable to conclude that all these insults are directed at the same individual. It would appear from the Damascus Document that the ‘Scoffer’ and the ‘Liar’ (cf. also 4QpPsa [XXXVII]) were one and the same (‘when the Scoffer arose who shed over Israel the waters of lies’, CD 1, 14). And we read of the ‘Wicked Priest’ that he was called ‘by the name of truth’ (1QpHab VIII, 8-9) at the outset of his career, the inference being that later he changed into a ‘Liar’.

  Another basic premise must be that the person intended by the fragments of information contained in the Scrolls became the head, the national leader, of the Jewish people. For although biblical names are often used symbolically, including that of ‘Israel’, the actions attributed to the ‘Wicked Priest’ make little sense if the person in question did not exercise both pontifical and secular power. He ‘ruled over Israel’. He ‘robbed... the riches of the men of violence who rebelled against God’, probably Jewish apostates, as well as ‘the wealth of the peoples’, i.e. the Gentiles. He built ‘his city of vanity with blood’, committed ‘abominable deeds in Jerusalem and defiled the Temple of God’ (1QpHab VIII). Taken separately, these observations might be understood allegorically, but considered together, they constitute a strong argument for recognizing the ‘Wicked Priest’ as a ruling High Priest in Jerusalem.

  The ‘Wicked Priest’, then, was a Pontiff who enjoyed good repute before he assumed office. He was victorious over his adversaries at home and abroad. He rebuilt Jerusalem (cf. 1QpHab VIII, 8-11; 4Q448). And he was eventually captured and put to death by a foreign rival.

  The chronological guidelines established in the preceding section locate the period in which this individual flourished between the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 BCE) and the probable date of the foundation at Qumran (150-140 BCE). During that time, five men held the office of High Priest. Three of them were pro-Greek: Jason, Menelaus and Alcimus. The remaining two were the Maccabee brothers, Jonathan and Simon. All the Hellenizers can be eliminated as candidates for the role of ‘Wicked Priest’ since none can be said to have enjoyed anything like good repute at the beginning of their ministry. Jason and Alcimus fail also because neither was killed by an enemy, as implied in 1QpHab VIII-IX. Jason died in exile (2 Mac. v, 7-9) and Alcimus in office (1 Mac. ix, 54-6). The Maccabee brothers, by contrast, meet all the conditions. The careers of both men fall easily into two stages, marked, in the case of Jonathan, by his acceptance of the High Priesthood from Alexander Balas, and in the case of Simon by his willingness to become a hereditary High Priest. Both were also ‘instruments of violence’ and both died by violence. Jonathan is nevertheless to be chosen rather than Simon because he alone suffered the vengeance of the ‘Chief of the Kings of Greece’ and died at the hands of the ‘violent of the nations’, whereas Simon was murdered by his son-in-law (i Mac. xvi, 14-16). A gallant defender of Jewish religion and independence, Jonathan succeeded the heroic Judas in 161 BCE when the latter fell in battle. But he qualified for the epithet ‘Wicked Priest’ when he accepted in 153-152 BCE from Alexander Balas, a heathen usurper of the Seleucid throne who had no right to grant them, the pontifical vestments which Jonathan was not entitled to wear. Captured later by a former general of Alexander Balas, Tryphon, he was killed by him at Bascama in Transjordan (1 Mac. xiii, 23).

  Concerning the identity of the ‘last Priests of Jerusalem’, the passion for conquest, wealth and plunder for which they are reproached points to the Hasmonaean priestly rulers, from Simon’s son, John Hyrcanus I (134-104 BCE), to Judas Aristobulus II (67-63 BCE). There can in particular be little doubt that the ‘furious young lion’, designated also as ‘the last Priest’ in a badly damaged Commentary on Hosea (4Q167 11 2-3), was one of them, namely Alexander Jannaeus. The application to him of the words of Nahum, ‘who chokes prey for its lionesses’, and the report that the ‘young lion’ executed the ‘seekers of smooth things’ by ‘hanging men alive’, accord perfectly with the known story that Jannaeus crucified 800 Pharisees whilst feasting with his concubines (cf. above, p. 53).

  From this it follows that ‘Ephraim’, equated in the Commentary on Nahum with the ‘seekers of smooth things’, symbolizes the Pharisees, and that if so, ‘Manasseh’ and his dignitaries must refer to the Sadducees. In other words, the political and doctrinal opponents of the Essene community, though itself with proto-Sadducaean links on account of its priestly leadership as insinuated by MMT, were the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

  This division of Jewish society into three opposing groups corresponds to the conformation described by Josephus as existing from the time of Jonathan Maccabaeus (Antiquities XIII, 171), but the new insight provided by the Scrolls suggests that the united resistance to Hellenism first fell apart when the Maccabees, and more precisely Jonathan, refused to acknowledge the spiritual leadership of the Teacher of Righteousness, the priestly head of the Hasidim. From then on, the sect saw its defectors as ‘Ephraim’ and ‘Manasseh’, these being the names of the sons of Joseph, associated in biblical history with the apostate Northern kingdom, and referred to itself as the ‘House of Judah’, the faithful South.

  Unfortunately, on the most vital topic of all, the question of the identity of the Teacher of Righteousness, we can be nothing like as clear. If the ‘Wicked Priest’ was Jonathan Maccabaeus, the Teacher would, of course, have been one of his contemporaries. Yet all we know of him is that he was a priest (1QpHab 11, 8; 4QpPs [XXXVII ii, 15=4Q171]), no doubt of Zadokite affiliation, though obviously opposed to Onias IV since he did not follow him to Egypt and to his unlawful Temple in Leontopolis.71 He founded or re-founded the Community. He transmitted to them his own distinctive interpretation of the Prophets and, if we can rely at least indirectly on the Hymns, of the laws relating to the celebration of festivals. The ‘Liar’ and his sympathizers in the congregation of the Hasidim disagreed with him, and after a violent confrontation between the two factions in which the ‘Liar’ gained the upper hand, the Teacher and his remaining followers fled to a place of refuge called ‘the land of Damascus’: it has been suggested that this is a cryptic designation of Babylonia, the original birthplace of the group, or else that ‘Damascus’ is a symbolical name for Qumran. The ‘House of Absalom’ gave the Teacher of Righteousness no help against the ‘Liar’, writes the Habakkuk commentator (1QpHab v, 9-12), the implication being that this was support on which he might have relied. If ‘Absalom’ is also a symbol, it doubtless recalls the rebellion of Absalom against his father David, and thus points to the perfidy of a close relation or intimate friend of the Teacher. O
n the other hand, since the ‘House of Absalom’ is accused not of an actual attack but simply of remaining silent during the Teacher’s ‘chastisement’, this allegorical solution may not be convincing. The allusion may then be a straightforward one. A certain Absalom was an ambassador of Judas Maccabaeus (2 Mac. xi, 17), and his son Mattathias was one of Jonathan’s gallant officers (1 Mac. xi, 70). Another of his sons, Jonathan, commanded Simon’s army which captured Joppa (1 Mac. xiii, 11).

  Meanwhile, even in his ‘place of exile’ the Teacher continued to be harassed and persecuted by the Wicked Priest. In this connection, the most important and painful episode appears to have been the Priest’s pursuit of the Teacher to his settlement with the purpose of pouring on him ‘his venomous fury’. Appearing before the sectaries on ‘their Sabbath of repose’, at the ‘time appointed for rest, for the Day of Atonement’, his intention was to cause them ‘to stumble on the Day of Fasting’. It is impossible to say, from the evidence so far available, precisely what happened on this portentous occasion, or whether it was then or later that the Wicked Priest ‘laid hands’ on the Teacher ‘that he might put him to death’. The wording is equivocal. For example, the verb in 1QpHab xi, 5, 7, translated ‘to confuse’, can also mean ‘to swallow up’, and some scholars have chosen to understand that the Teacher was killed by the Wicked Priest at the time of the visit. On the other hand, we find recounted in the imperfect tense (which can be rendered into English as either the future or the present tense): ‘The wicked of Ephraim and Manasseh ... seek/will seek to lay hands on the Priest and the men of his Council... But God redeems/will redeem them from out of their hand’ (4QpPsa [XXXVII, II, I7-I9=4QI7I]). In other words, we neither know who the founder of the Essenes was, nor how, nor where, nor when he died. Only writers upholding the most unlikely Christian identification of the Community claim to be better informed, but disagree among themselves. J. L. Teicher thought the Teacher was Jesus. For Barbara Thiering Jesus was the Wicked Priest, John the Baptist the Teacher; R. H. Eisenman rejects both and prefers James the Just, ‘the brother of the Lord’, as the Teacher of Righteousness. Only the sensation-seeking media have been taken in by their theories.

  It has been suggested that this inability to identify the Teacher of Righteousness in the context of the Maccabaean period undermines the credibility of the reconstruction as a whole. Is it conceivable, it is asked, that a figure of the stature of the Teacher should have left no trace in the literature relating to that time? The answer to this objection is that such writings are to all intents and purposes restricted to the Books of the Maccabees, sources politically biased in favour of their heroes and virtually oblivious of the very existence of opposition movements. Josephus himself relies largely on 1 Maccabees and cannot therefore be regarded as an independent witness. But even were this not so, and he had additional material at his disposition, his silence vis-à-vis the Teacher of Righteousness would still not call for particular comment since he also makes no mention of the founder of the Pharisees. And incidentally, not a few historians hold that he has nothing to say either of Jesus of Nazareth. The so-called Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquities XVIII, 63-4), they maintain, is a Christian interpolation into the genuine text of Antiquities (though others, myself included, think that part of the text is authentic). Be this as it may, not a word is breathed by him about Hillel, the greatest of the Pharisee masters, or about Yohanan ben Zakkai, who reorganized Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, although both of these men lived in Josephus’ own century and Yohanan was definitely his contemporary.

  Admittedly, the various fragments of information gleaned from the Dead Sea Scrolls result in an unavoidably patchy story, but it is fundamentally sound, and the continuing anonymity of the Teacher does nothing to impair it. For the present synthesis to be complete it remains now to turn to Josephus for his occasional historical references to individual Essenes and to Essenism.

  To begin with it should be pointed out that four members of the Community are actually mentioned by the Jewish historian, three of them associated with prophecy, one of the distinctive interests of the Teacher of Righteousness himself. The first, called Judas, is encountered in Jerusalem surrounded by a group of pupils taking instruction in ‘foretelling the future’, which probably means how to identify prophetic pointers to future events. Josephus writes of him that he had ‘never been known to speak falsely in his prophecies’, and that he predicted the death of Antigonus, the brother of Aristobulus I (104-103 BCE) (Antiquities XIII, 311-13). A second Essene prophet, Menahem, apparently foretold that Herod would rule over the Jews (xv, 373-8). Herod showed his gratitude to him by dispensing the Essenes, who were opposed to all oaths except their own oath of the Covenant, from taking the vow of loyalty imposed on all his Jewish subjects. A third Essene named Simon interpreted a dream of Archelaus, ethnarch of Judaea (4 BCE-6 CE), in 4 BCE to mean that his rule would last for ten years (XVII, 345-8). John the Essene, the last sectary to be referred to by Josephus, was not a prophet, but the commander or strategos of the district of Thamna in north-western Judaea, and of the cities of Lydda (Lod), Joppa (Jaffa) and Emmaus at the beginning of the first revolution (War 11, 567). A man of ‘first-rate prowess and ability’, he fell in battle at Ascalon (III, II, I9).72

  Finally, Josephus depicts in vivid language the bravery of the Essenes subjected to torture by the Romans.

  The war with the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of test. Racked and twisted, burned and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, they refused to yield to either demand, nor ever once did they cringe to their persecutors or shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies and mildly deriding their tormentors, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.

  (War 11, 152-3)

  Since it would appear from this passage that the Romans were persecuting not individuals, but a group, it is tempting, bearing in mind the archaeologists’ claim that the Qumran settlement was destroyed by the Romans, to associate it with the story of Essenes captured by the Dead Sea. If such a surmise is correct, the sect’s disappearance from history may well have been brought about in the lethal blow suffered by its central establishment during the fateful summer of 68 CE. The fact that no attempt was made to recover nearly 800 manuscripts from the caves confirms, it would seem, such a reconstruction of the end of Qumran and, with the annihilation of its central establishment, of the whole Essene movement.

  IV The Religious Ideas of the Community

  The first essays in the 1950s on the religious outlook of the Qumran sect all suffered from a serious defect in that scholars in those days tended to envisage the Scrolls as self-contained and entitled to independent treatment. Today, with the hindsight of five decades of research and with the entire corpus to hand, it is easier to conceive of the theology of the Community as part of the general doctrinal evolution of ancient Judaism.

  Nevertheless, it is no simple task to follow that development itself, the reason being that the systematic exposition of beliefs and customs is not a traditional Jewish discipline. In a sense, the Instruction on the Two Spirits, incorporated in the Community Rule, alluded to earlier (p. 28), is an exception, forming the one and only doctrinal treatise among ancient Hebrew writings. The theology of Judaism, biblical, inter-Testamental, medieval or modern, when written by contemporary Jewish authors, is often modelled consciously or unconsciously on Christian dogmatic structures: God, creation, human destiny, messianic redemption, judgement, resurrection, heaven and hell. Such structures may and sometimes do distort the religious concepts of Judaism. For example, the interest of the Church in the messianic role of Jesus is apt to assign a greater importance to Messianism in Jewish religion than the historical evidence justifies, and Paul’s hostility to the ‘legalism’ of Israel obscures the Jewish recognition of the humble realities of everyday life prescribed by the Law as no mere ‘
works’ but as a path to holiness walked in obedience to God’s commandments.

  1 THE COVENANT

  Since the key to any understanding of Judaism must be the notion of the Covenant, it may safely be taken as an introduction to Essene religious thought. The history of mankind and of the Jewish people has seen a series of such covenants. God undertook never to destroy mankind again by a flood; in exchange, Noah and his descendants were required to abstain from shedding human blood and, on the ritual level, from eating animal ‘flesh with the life, which is the blood, still in it’ (Gen. ix, 1-17). To Abraham, who was childless and landless, God offered posterity and a country, provided he led a perfect life and marked his body and that of all his male progeny with a visible reminder of the Covenant between himself and heaven, circumcision (Gen. xvii, 1-14). Again, in the days of Moses the Israelites were declared ‘a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation’ (Exod. xix, 5), God’s special possession, on condition that they obeyed the Torah, the divine Teaching of the religious, moral, social and ritual precepts recorded in the Pentateuch from Exodus xx and repeated in the farewell discourse addressed by Moses to his people in the Book of Deuteronomy. After the conquest of Canaan and the distribution of the land to the tribes, the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham, the Covenant was renewed by Joshua and the Israelites reasserted their commitment to their heavenly Helper (Jos. xxiv). From then on, the biblical story is one of continuous unfaithfulness to the Covenant. But God was not to be thwarted by human unworthiness and ingratitude, and for the sake of the handful of just men appearing in every generation he allowed the validity of the Covenant to endure. Though he punished the sinful and the rebellious, he spared the ‘remnant’ because of their fidelity to it. From time to time, saintly leaders of the Jewish people, King David and King Josiah before the Babylonian exile (2 Sam. vii; 2 Kings xxiii, 1-3) and Ezra the Priest after the return from Mesopotamia (Neh. viii-x), persuaded them to remember their Covenant with God with solemn vows of repentance and national rededication; but the promises were usually short-lived. This would no doubt account for the development of an idea in the sixth century BCE of a ‘new Covenant’ founded not so much on undertakings entered into by the community as on the inner transformation of every individual Jew for whom the will of God was to become, as it were, second nature.