The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

by Robert Feather

  Now, near the turn of the Millennium, their successors had witnessed the restoration of their sacred Temple by Herod – only to see others not of the Zaddokic line of high priests usurping the role, and a golden Roman eagle perched on the roof.

  Therefore to the Essenes the Second Temple was a place of intense contradiction. The holy place, central to their inheritance, was occupied by alien forces and governed by the whims of Herod, a lackey of Rome. Its size and shape were not to their liking and, worse still, from around 31 BCE onwards two lambs were sacrificed every day by the Temple priests for the ‘well-being’ of the Roman Emperor and the Roman Empire – anathema to many Jewish groups and especially to the Qumran-Essenes. No wonder they took the earthquake of 31 BCE that caused widespread destruction in the area of the Judaean Desert (and their own settlement), as a portent that they were right, and that their belief in an imminent apocalypse was justified.

  It soon becomes apparent from reading the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Essenes of Qumran considered themselves an elite messianic group, who had retreated from the fray of the Temple and the priesthood, and who sought refuge in the wilderness to protect their piety. Isaiah aptly describes their role:

  The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

  Isaiah 40:3

  The need ‘to retreat’ for some of the Essenes was part of their searching for a reaffirmation of the divine Covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai – a searching for the purity and essence of Torah and Hebrew teachings. They looked on themselves as the ancestral custodians of the ‘light of truth’.

  The Qumran Dead Sea Scroll known as the ‘Manual of Discipline’ (The Community Rule), sets out the requirement for a ten-year period of study, after which, at the age of twenty, students have to undergo a test of public examination to verify their understanding of the law and their own integrity.9 A year of ‘probation’ followed, after which the student was again examined. If he passed this test he served a further year of probation before a proposal for full membership of the Brotherhood was put to the vote. If accepted, the student was made to swear an oath of loyalty. The minimum age to hold office in the Brotherhood was twenty-five, and the ‘fourth degree of holiness’ (referred to by Josephus) could not be reached before the age of thirty. (It is interesting to note the similarity in the use of the terms ‘Brotherhood’, ‘degree’, and ‘master’ to those used in the Masonic movement, where members refer to each other as brothers and utilize biblical titles.10) The Essenes’ spiritual leader was known as the ‘right teacher’ – a title identified with Moses in his final blessing to the children of Israel (Deuteronomy 33). Successive ‘right teachers’ had the role of holding the community to the true interpretation of the Torah whilst they awaited the coming of a prophet like Moses and ‘two Messiahs’.

  This waiting was accompanied by an immersion in the holy scriptures and by the following of an ascetic way of life. Each year a cumulative total of 120 nights were to be spent in prayer and study. Personal possessions and income were to be given to the Community; in turn the Community looked after the individual’s needs. Living and eating were communal, and garments were plain and purely functional. (There are many similarities in this ‘unselfish’ way of life to the modern ‘Ashrams’ of America, the ‘Kibbutz’ of modern Israel and in Christian monasteries over the ages.)

  There was a strong hierarchical structure within the community. At the top was the ‘right teacher’. Priests, aided by Levites, dictated the doctrine of the group. All members could vote in an assembly on other, non-doctrinal matters, whilst general day-to-day administration was in the hands of a triumvirate of priests and twelve helpers. Everyone had a ‘pecking order’ in relation to their level of learning and holiness, as determined by their peers.

  Throughout the scrolls describing the feelings and activities of the Essenes, there is a connective embodiment of repeated themes and motifs, which endow these works with a sense of collective purpose: ‘Sons of Light’ fighting ‘Sons of Darkness’, messianic portents, battles with evil, the fruits of righteousness.

  The scrolls’ fundamental themes are of persons who are:

  Righteous – Zaddikim

  Pious – Hassidim

  Holy – Kedushim

  Meek – Anavim

  Endowed with God’s Spirit – Roucha Hakedushim

  Faithful – Emunim

  The first three of these themes are recognizably strongly Jewish, the latter three carry Christian overtones.

  It is the transitional/post-First Temple prophets that the Essenes looked to for their inspiration. They closely associated themselves with the ‘Sons of Zadok’ – the select priests of the Temple – using the term ‘Zaddikim’ as having an alternative meaning of ‘the righteous ones’ to describe themselves. They are the holy caucus who carry the true torch of light handed on to them through Moses.

  There are continual references throughout the Scrolls to the part played by the Temple priests, and it is clear that the Essenes considered themselves the keepers of the Covenant – part of the direct line of priests that attended the Holy Shrines. This can be seen in the Scrolls dealing with the Testament of the priestly Levi, of Aaron and of Kohath. These are the ‘Righteous seed’ – Zaddikim – which the Essenes continually claim as their birthright.

  …and God of gods for all eternity. And he will shine as a Light upon you and He will make known to you His great name and you will know Him, that He is the Eternal God and Lord of all creation, and sovereign over all things, governing them according to his will…Thus you will grant to me a good name among you, together with joy for Levi and happiness for Jacob, rejoicing for Isaac and blessing for Abraham, inasmuch as you guarded and walked in the inheritance. My sons, your fathers bequeathed to you Truth, Righteousness, Uprightness, Integrity, Purity, Holiness and the Priesthood.

  ‘Testament of Kohath’, Fragment 1, Column 111

  Even after some 1,500 years there is still recognizably an Egyptian style of phrasing, and the continual allusion to light reiterates the significance of the sun and light in Akhenaten’s theology.

  MYSTICISM AND KABBALAH

  In some of the Dead Sea Scrolls there is a visionary mysticism that borders on ‘Kabbalah’ (see Glossary), whilst mysticism and allusions to magic are not excluded.

  Practices of divination, magic, astrology, spells and the wearing of magic amulets were still not uncommon amongst the Jewish people at the time of Christ, but they were frowned upon by the Rabbinic teachers.*47 On the surface, this makes it all the more surprising to find from scrolls 4Q318, 4Q560 and 4Q561 that the Essenes – a fervently devout, God-fearing group – may have followed, or at least documented these kinds of cultist beliefs.12

  The fragmentary documents are difficult to understand in detail, but the document catalogued as 4Q560 is an amulet warning against evil spirits. It seems to be an incantation for a spirit to protect a body from male and female demons who might poison or invade it. The echoes of Egypt are not difficult to discern. The use of amulets in ancient Egypt was, as discussed earlier, very common for the living and for the dead. For example, in Chapter 156 of the ‘Book of the Dead’, or in Chapter 151 of the Papyrus of Ani, we find amulet incantations by ‘two Heart-souls’ called to bring spirits to protect the body and drive away devils that may wish to destroy it.

  Belief in evil spirits and mysticism was a necessary part of the Qumran-Essenes’ dualistic concept of the universe. There were for them two spirits created by God: good and evil. These forces vied to influence man in his behaviour. All that was good came from the dominion of light. All that was evil came from the dominion of darkness. (This idea has been echoed in the Persian ‘Zoroastrian’ idea of the supreme deity – Ahura Mazda – but in this philosophy it is he, rather than man, who must choose between good and evil.)

  The Book of Hagu

  Rabbinic teaching and the Torah both denounce study of mystic ‘hidden s
ecrets’ as dangerous. The Qumran-Essenes’ philosophy rejected magic, but positively required study of these mystic ‘hidden secrets’. Many of these Kabbalistic-like mysticisms can be traced back to early Egyptian traditions and the idea that Pharaoh and the select priests were entrusted with such hidden secrets.

  This hidden knowledge must have been handed down by word of mouth or by secret texts, but were there any secret texts kept even from the ordinary Qumran-Essene members?

  The question brings us to the mystery of the Book of Hagu (or Hagi). The book is mentioned in the Damascus Scroll and in the Manual of Discipline (1QS) as being fundamental; it was mandatory to understand it for anyone who wished to act as a judge of the congregation. So far, no-one has identified what the Book is or where it came from. Some scholars, such as Yigael Yadin,13 consider it might be the Temple Scroll or another, as yet undiscovered, scroll. Either way it appears to be a Book of Divine Law dating back to the time of Moses and Joshua – known to the Qumran-Essenes, but not known to the general Jewish community of Canaan or Israel.

  Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were, as previously mentioned, written in Aramaic square script, paleo-Hebrew (much older lettering), or Greek. There are however some examples in Nabatean Note A,*48 and ten manuscripts written in ‘Cryptic A’, ‘Cryptic B’ and ‘Cryptic C’. These have been partially deciphered, but reference is made in the Damascus document and other Dead Sea Scrolls to a mysterious ‘Midrash Sefer Moshe’ (MSM) text. This text is know to have been written in ‘Cryptic A’ and was personal to the ‘Maskil’, or leader, of the community – ‘for his eyes only’. This document (catalogued as 4Q249) that, unfortunately, has not yet been found, could well be the key to the secret ‘knowledge’ of the community and appears to be the basic source of rules and authority for the community.14

  I do not have a firm view as to what form the Book of Hagu really took. It was undoubtedly of tremendous importance in the eyes of the Qumran-Essenes. The references to it demonstrate that this lineage of devout, priest-like people possessed exclusive religious works, which must have come from outside traditional Jewish knowledge and been in their keeping for many centuries. The vows that new entrants to the Order were required to take (attested to by Josephus), were lengthy and mainly about piety towards God, observing the community’s rules and maintaining righteous thoughts and behaviour. However, the Qumran-Essenes undoubtedly had secrets to hide because one of these vows was: ‘to safeguard the secret books’.

  THE QUMRAN-ESSENE CALENDAR

  As I looked for other Egyptian antecedents amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most startling I found relates to the calendar used by the Qumran-Essenes. As mentioned in Chapter 1, it is solar based, relying on the sun’s movement, and gave them a year that contained 364 days. The twelve months each had thirty days and one of four extra days were added at the end of each three-month period. The basis for the Qumran-Essene solar calendar is spelled out in detail in their Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch and in the calendrical texts (4Q320–30). The solar calendar was physically confirmed by Father Roland de Vaux in 1954, by the finding of a stone ‘sundial’ in the Qumran ruins.

  The ‘sundial’ was almost certainly used by the Essenes to enable ‘physical’ measurement of days and intervals in a solar calendar.15 Not only were explicit details of the solar calendar given in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was a mandatory requirement that it be followed. Those who did not follow the original (solar) calendar are harshly castigated in the Damascus documents.

  The intriguing thing is, the Essene calendar was quite different from the Rabbinic Jewish calendar, which was, and still is, based on lunar movements, giving a year of 354 days.*49

  For the ancient Egyptians their year was, like the Qumran-Essenes, solar based – made up of twelve months of thirty days with five intercalary days added. These additional days were related to festivals for the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.16

  The question I asked myself was, why did the Qumran-Essenes only add four extra days rather than the conventional Egyptian calendar’s five? I believe a likely answer is that when Akhenaten became Pharaoh, these five traditional gods were persona non grata and he needed other festivals to equate with the intercalary days. There were many other traditional Egyptian festivals to choose from, the most important being the New Year Festival, the Festival of Sokar, the Festival of the Raising of the Sky and the Festival of the Potter’s Wheel. The choice, however, was severely limited as most of the major and minor festivals were built around pagan gods. The most likely outcome, therefore, was that Akhenaten opted for the three traditional ‘crop’-related festivals of the Nile’s inundation, spring and harvest, supplemented by the Festival of the New Year.

  This would explain why the Qumran-Essenes only added four intercalary days to their solar calendar – a procedure that was in tune with their stated affiliations to order and conformity with ‘the natural laws’, and in nonconformity ‘with the festivals of nations’. The four festivals the Qumran-Essenes celebrated were Passover (Pesach), the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot, Pentecost), the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) and the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) – all equivalent to those celebrated by the normative Jewish community, but all celebrated on different dates.17

  The fifth Jewish festival, ‘Purim’, traditionally dating back to the fifth century BCE Persian period of Jewish history, was celebrated in the general community but would have been superfluous to the calendrical needs of the Qumran-Essenes. This could explain why the Dead Sea Scrolls – which contain two almost complete versions of Isaiah and passages from every single book of the Old Testament, as well as apocryphal, pseudepigraphic and sectarian works – have nothing from the Book of Esther for which Purim is the related Festival.18

  The life-cycle of any community is critically controlled by the calendar it follows. The ability of the Qumran community to maintain their own version of the Israelite calendar is indicative of their extreme independence from mainstream Judaism – theirs was the same solar-based calendar that Akhenaten and the early Egyptians used.

  FESTIVALS AND JUBILEES

  Another calendrical difference from mainstream Judaism, maintained by the Qumranites, related to Festivals or ‘Jubilees’. These significant years for priestly celebration are documented in a Dead Sea Scroll known as ‘Heavenly Concordances’ (4Q319A).

  Taking their guidance from the creation story of Genesis 1:4, the Community looked for signs in the sky:

  And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night: and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.’

  Because their calendar was solar, rather than lunar based, years in which the sun and moon were aligned at the beginning of a year were signs of momentous portent worthy of celebration. For the Qumran-Essenes that happened in years one and four of six-year rotations. There is no mention in the scrolls of a first Jubilee, but a second Jubilee is listed as commemorable after a period of forty-eight years. The first Jubilee period must therefore have been a lesser number of years, but nevertheless a significantly long period to justify celebration, and to be divisible by six. It could have been after thirty, thirty-six or, perhaps, forty-two years. Lesser Jubilees would then fall in the fourth year of a six-year period, and at the end of the cycle or at the beginning of the seventh year.

  This system of Jubilees was quite unique to the Qumran-Essenes and not part of normal Jewish practice. The ‘Book of Jubilees’, which describes these requirements, is considered pseudepigraphic, i.e., non-canonical anonymous writings, thought to be from the period 200 BCE to 200 CE. But the system was not unknown in Egypt a thousand years earlier.

  By now this phrase is becoming quite repetitive, but the evidence is, again, very convincing.

  The ‘Sed’ or ‘Jubilee’ festivals celebrated in ancient Egypt were an ongoing tradition that can be traced back well before the period of Akhenaten, and were considered of fundamental importance for the Eightee
nth Dynasty pharaohs.

  The main Jubilee was celebrated in year thirty of a pharaoh’s reign; a lesser, secondary Jubilee was celebrated in the thirty-fourth year and a tertiary Jubilee in the thirty-seventh year. These ceremonials are well documented, for example, those in the reign of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father.19 They involved long-range planning and preparations, erection of statues, large building projects and the design of new clothing and apparel. The event itself took the form of regal processions, a reenactment of the pharaoh’s enthronement, feasting and national events.

  For Akhenaten, ‘celebrator of Jubilees’20 who only reigned long enough to celebrate lesser Jubilees, they were opportune occasions for his multi-talented abilities in literature, design and architecture to be exploited. Under his instructions, Akhenaten’s chief sculptor created new forms of ‘expressionism’ previously unseen in Egyptian artform. Portraits and statues appeared with elongated, Modigliani-like features. Figures were no longer represented in a rounded form, striving for realism, but as aquilinized creations with sharp features and enlarged heads. One can imagine that the inspiration for Akhenaten’s new perspectives may have been related to his worship of Aten and came to him when he gazed at the long shadows cast by solid objects illuminated by an oblique sun.

  However one looks at the celebration of Jubilees as they are described by the Qumran-Essenes at the time of Christ, they have a striking resemblance to practices only too familiar to the Egypt of 1,500 years earlier.

  There are other similarities between the Essenes’ culture and philosophy and that of ancient Egypt, for example, seen in the way the Qumran-Essenes viewed the forces of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’.

  THE SCROLL OF MOSES’ BIBLICAL FATHER