(4Q375, fr. 1)
The overall conclusion of the survey is clear. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the literary legacy of Judaism of the so-called inter-Testamental or late Second Temple era (200 BCE –100 CE) has become much richer and more nuanced, and in certain respects, such as the status of the biblical text, quite different from what pre-1947 scholarship held it to be. In short, even without the consideration of the sectarian writings, which constitute the main novelty of the Scrolls, the claim that Qumran has revolutionized our understanding of the religious culture of Judaism in the age of Jesus must be accepted as proven.
VII
The Novelty of the Sectarian Scrolls
In the Qumran library, next to the Bible, the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha, we find another impressive pile of manuscripts in which members of a particular Jewish group record their special customs, laws, scriptural interpretation and beliefs. Since they considered themselves distinct from the rest of their Jewish contemporaries and refused to mix with them, they can be correctly designated as the initiates of a sect. From the moment of the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars hastened to put a name to this separatist community and identified them as the Essenes, a religious group known from classical Jewish and Roman sources written in Greek and Latin. This allowed the interpreters of the newly discovered scrolls to take into account the rich additional information regarding the Essene sect, handed down by Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–c. 50 CE), Flavius Josephus (37–c. 100 CE) and Pliny the Elder (23/24–79 CE). In dealing with the scrolls, I will resist the temptation to employ straightaway evidence extraneous to Qumran, and try instead to understand the Community of the Scrolls with the help of its own writings and leave to chapter VIII the presentation of the ongoing debate between the proponents and the opponents of the Essene theory.
The sectarian documents found in the Qumran caves fall into four main categories. To begin with, we have various rules of the Community and the exposition of Jewish religious law as practised by its members. These rules are followed by compositions describing the worship and prayers characteristic of the sectaries, performed in conformity with their distinctive calendar, and by collections of hymns and psalms which, together with the rules, reveal their religious ideas and demonstrate their piety. The third literary class contains the material that may be used for the reconstruction of the history of the Dead Sea community. These can be found in the Exhortation section of the Damascus Document and in works belonging to the peculiar kind of Bible interpretation known as pesher (plural, pesharim) produced by the sectaries. To these we may add the exposition of scriptural citations included in the rules. Sapiential literature is the fourth main category dispensing information with regard to the wisdom seekers’ attitude towards God and man. Various otherwise unrelated Qumran miscellanea will be listed in the Appendix to this chapter.
A. THE RULES
The rules themselves are neither transparent nor uniform and require some legal, social and historical elucidation. They have enough in common to show that the groups that used them were interlinked, yet the differences are such that one is obliged to inquire into the nature of the connection between them, namely, whether they represented legal development in distinct branches of the same single movement or in separate institutions which in some way were related to one another.
In addition to the discrete fragmentary texts found in Cave 4 relative to Sabbath observance, compensation for injuries, forbidden marriages and ritual uncleanness (4Q181, 251, 264A, 274–7, 284A), the Qumran library has yielded six major documents dealing fully or partly with the essentials pertaining to the organization of a community, and to the way of life and moral principles followed by its members. One of the six, the Temple Scroll from Cave 11, dating to the first half of the second century BCE, may have been produced before the birth of the Qumran sect. If so, its original version was later adopted by the sect and in part adapted to its particular requirements in the final decades of the second or at the beginning of the first century BCE. Some of the legal practices listed in the Temple Scroll, e.g. the ban on royal polygamy (57:16–18), on marriage between uncle and niece (66:15–17), and on married sectaries having sexual intercourse in ‘the city of the sanctuary’ in Jerusalem (45:11–12), are closely paralleled in another Qumran rule, the Damascus Document (4:20–25:11; 12:1–2).
1. The Statutes of the Damascus Document (CD (Cairo Damascus Document), 4Q265, 5Q12, 6Q15)
The Damascus Document, the rule first found in the Cairo Genizah at the end of the nineteenth century and later on at Qumran, is unquestionably a sectarian composition. It was originally revealed by the two medieval Cairo manuscripts dating to the tenth and the twelfth centuries (see chapter I, pp. 15–16), and from eleven fragmentary texts from Qumran Caves 4, 5 and 6, which also contain additional regulations about skin disease, sexual conduct within marriage and the community’s Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant. The Damascus Document consists of an Exhortation with sectarian historical, doctrinal and exegetical content, and a list of Statutes referring to the structure and discipline of a separatist religious society. The historical and social context of the Exhortation places the Damascus Document before the other rules, except possibly MMT Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Torah or Some Observances of the Law (see pp. 140–41). It definitely envisages a married community of Jews that presumably preceded and produced the unmarried sect depicted in the Community Rule. Also the historical framework of the Damascus Document belongs to the Hellenistic age where Seleucid rulers (kings of Yavan or Greece) are the foreign enemies of the Jews, whereas other rules, the War Scroll, the Book of War (4Q285) and the commentaries on Habakkuk and Nahum identify the final foe as the Kittim (Romans), whose conquest of Judaea in 63 BCE marked the end of the Hellenistic age in Palestine. Their dominion culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Consequently, the date of composition of the Damascus Document can safely be placed to the final decades of the Hellenistic age in Palestine, probably somewhere close to 100 BCE.
The Exhortation of the Damascus Document (CD A 1–8, B 1–2, supplemented by fragments from Caves 4, 5 and 6), comprises a sermon addressed by a teacher of the Community to his ‘sons’. It sketches the origins and early years of the movement, which will be discussed in the context of the history of the sect (see pp. 203–6), and also contains moral admonitions. The title ‘Damascus’ derives from the phrase ‘the new covenant (made) in the land of Damascus’ which appears seven times in the Cairo manuscript and once in a Cave 4 fragment. Like many similar phrases employed in the biblical commentaries from Qumran to designate persons, places and events associated with sectarian history, the land of Damascus is not to be taken literally. In the opinion of many scholars it probably alludes to Qumran.
The legal material relating to the ‘Damascus’ Community is included in the Statutes (CD 9–16 and numerous Cave 4 fragments). These Statutes legislate for the premessianic age, indicated by a passage which speaks of the future coming of two Messiahs, the Messiah of Aaron and the Messiah of Israel. They also hand out moral and ritual rules and define the governance of the ‘Damascus’ Community. The beginning and the end of the Statutes are missing from the Cairo manuscripts, but can partly be restored from the Cave 4 material. Pages 15 and 16 are misplaced in the Genizah text and in the light of the Qumran fragments should be brought forward before page 9.
The Community is envisaged in the Statutes as a miniature biblical Israel, divided into priests and laity, and more specifically into priests, Levites, Israelites and proselytes. The term ‘proselytes’ probably designates figuratively Jewish applicants for membership of the sect before their formal admission, and literally Gentile slaves after they had converted to Judaism. In further imitation of the biblical Jewish nation, the Community is symbolically subdivided into twelve tribes and into camps of thousands, hundreds and fifties, down to the minimum group of ten.
The ‘Damascus’ sect was led by priests, belonging to the tribe of Levi, and more specif
ically to the family of Aaron. They claimed association with the family of Zadok, the high priest under king Solomon, whose clan supplied the chief priests down to the early second century BCE. Even the smallest unit, a camp of ten men, was to be headed by a priestly Overseer or Guardian, a man aged between thirty and sixty years, who had to be an expert in the Book of Meditation (probably the Law of Moses) and learned in sectarian jurisprudence. ‘The Guardian of all the camps’ was the title of the superior general who must have been between thirty and fifty years of age, versed in ‘all the secrets’ and familiar with all the languages. The Guardian’s duties included the instruction, examination, rejection or acceptance, ranking and pastoral care of candidates and members. It is possible that in the selection of suitable candidates, he employed the arcane science of astronomical physiognomy, the study of the physical appearance of individuals. Three ‘horoscopes’, contained in 4Q186 and 561, which might have served such a purpose, have survived, each depicting a person made up of a mixture of nine parts of light and darkness. Shortness, fatness and irregular or ugly features were associated with wickedness, and tallness, a slim body and a pleasant appearance with virtue.
Admission of new candidates and dismissal, accompanied by a curse, of defaulting members took place in a yearly ceremony ‘in the third month’ (the month of Sivan) of the Jewish year, no doubt at the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost celebrated on the fifteenth day of the month. The priestly Guardian regulated the activities of the members of his unit, including business deals, and advised them in matters of marriage and divorce too. Another of his tasks was to disqualify priests with speech defects, those who could not express themselves clearly and distinctly, to determine the dues members had to pay to the priests, and to diagnose contagious skin diseases (‘leprosy’) which required the segregation of the sick and their eventual readmission after cure. As the latter right was a privilege explicitly reserved for priests in the Bible, a curious stratagem was devised for the case when only a simple-minded (i.e. mentally handicapped) priest was available. A learned Levite among the members of the camp had to guide him through the ritual and tell him what he had to do, but, as ordained by the Bible, only a priest was allowed to perform this ceremony.
Next to the Guardians, the sect had also ten Judges, elected for a specified time, four from among the priests and Levites, and six lay Israelites. In addition to administering justice, they also handled, together with ‘the Guardian’, no doubt ‘the Guardian of all the camps’, the communal funds destined for the support of the poor and the orphans as well as for the redemption of war prisoners.
The sectarian judicial system was run on the basis of biblical law adapted to the Community’s needs. The members were prohibited under pain of death from handing over a Jew to a Gentile court if he was charged with a capital case. The Statutes envisage death sentences pronounced by the Judges of the Community. Biblical law requires two or three witnesses in a case carrying a death penalty, but the Damascus Document foresees the possibility of judging a capital crime committed before a single witness. It obliges the witness to bring the culprit before the Guardian and to rebuke him in his presence. The matter was then recorded by the Guardian on a register. Should the crafty criminal commit the same offence twice more before a single witness, the repeated transgressions would be treated by the Guardian and the Community court as a single crime attested by three witnesses.
There were two kinds of new members awaiting initiation: the children of the sectaries who were born and brought up within the Community and adult Jewish outsiders. The former gained full membership at the age of twenty (assuming that the legislation laid down in the Messianic Rule applied also in historical times in the ‘Damascus’ Community). Grown-up Jews, who had notified the Guardian of their desire to join, were enrolled after one year of study, during which period all the secret teachings of the sect, including its particular solar calendar, modelled on the important pseudepigraphic Book of Jubilees, were revealed to them. No one mentally or bodily disabled could be admitted to full membership of the Community.
The ‘Damascus’ sect consisted of married Jewish couples and their offspring. Among the leaders, explicit reference is made to persons of both sexes, called ‘the Fathers’ and ‘the Mothers’, though democratic equality was not part of the system. According to a Cave 4 text (4Q270, fr. 7), murmuring against ‘the Fathers’ entailed irrevocable expulsion from the sect, but an offender against ‘the Mothers’ could get away with a punishment for a mere ten days! An interesting detail relating to marital sex is recorded in the same fragment. A husband sleeping with his wife ‘against the rules’ was declared a fornicator and dismissed from the community (see more on this in chapter VIII, p. 184). Three further restrictions relating to marriage legislation are mentioned in the Exhortation. Sectarian matrimony was to be monogamous, whereas biblical Judaism permitted polygamy. Marriage between an uncle and his niece was prohibited and sex between husband and wife was forbidden in Jerusalem (or at least in the area designated as ‘the city of the Sanctuary’ according to the wording of both the Damascus Document and the Temple Scroll), no doubt during the presence of sect members in the Holy City at the three pilgrim festivals of the year (Passover, Feast of Weeks and Feast of Tabernacles).
The Statutes’ version of biblical laws concerned with purification and Sabbath observance is generally more rigorous than the practice of the Jews of that age. For instance, on the Sabbath the sectaries were forbidden to assist a domestic animal in labour, nor were they allowed to pull it out from a cistern or a hole as ordinary Jewish farmers did according to the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament (Matt. 12:11; Luke 14:5). No rope or ladder could be used in the rescue of a man who had fallen into water. Commerce with non-Jews was restricted, but not altogether prohibited (see chapter VIII, pp. 183–4).
In sum, the ‘Damascus’ Community was a free association of Jewish families, governed by the priests, Sons of Zadok, and embracing a more stringent version of the Mosaic law which, together with their sectarian practices, set them apart from the main body of Palestinian Jewry. Nevertheless the extra dose of asceticism that lasting celibacy implies appears nowhere explicitly in the Statutes, although it has been tentatively suggested that the group practising ‘perfect holiness’, distinct from those who ‘marry and beget children’, refers to a separate unmarried branch of the sect (see CD 7:4–8).
2. The Rule of the Congregation or Messianic Rule (1QSa)
Fifty-two fragments found in Cave 1 have been meticulously assembled by Dominique Barthélemy and Joseph Milik to form two almost complete columns of text. They once belonged to the manuscript of the Community Rule (Serekh ha-Yahad or 1QS) and came from the pen of the same scribe. The date of the document, known as the Rule of the Congregation or Messianic Rule (Serekh ha-‘Edah or 1QSa), falls most probably to the middle of the first century BCE. The text briefly sets out the purpose and the regulations of a community that is either the same as the one described in the Damascus Document or is very similar to it. The principal difference between them is that whereas the ‘Damascus’ Statutes relate to the pre-messianic age, in the Rule of the Congregation the two Messiahs – the Priest and the Messiah of Israel – are already present and the eschatological war is looming on the horizon. The Rule of the Congregation is linked to the Damascus Document on the one hand through its reference to the ‘Book of Meditation’ (probably the Pentateuch) and to the Sons of Zadok, the priests. On the other hand, it is related to the Community Rule in its description of the sectarian meal and to the War Scroll in its sketch of the military organization of the sect in the final eschatological age.
The epoch envisaged is described as ‘the last days’, when a large crowd of the congregation of Israel was expected to join the Community of the Sons of Zadok. They are all to participate in a ceremony of entry into the Covenant and hear the exposition of the sect’s laws and statutes. Like the Community of the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Congregation is also for a married gr
oup, as wives and children – as well as their education – are expressly mentioned in it.
The text offers an unparalleled insight into the life of the members. We learn that from early childhood they were instructed in the Book of Meditation and from the age of ten years in the communal statutes. On having reached the age of majority at twenty, they were enrolled in the Community, and the young men were allowed to marry and also to act as witnesses in court proceedings. At the age of twenty-five, they qualified for lower offices, and at thirty for higher offices in the Community and could become chiefs of units, judges and tribal officers under the supervision of the Zadokite priests and their intermediaries, the Levites, who acted as administrative officers. It was the Levites’ duty to summon the congregation, no doubt with their trumpets, as we learn from the War Scroll, for court sessions, communal council and when war was to break out.
The council of the Community, presided over by Zadokite priests, consisted of the sages, the judges, the chiefs of the tribes, and the chiefs of lower divisions (thousands, hundreds, etc.). Only unblemished and ritually clean persons could attend and play a role in the council because ‘the angels of holiness were with their assembly’, the Community being the terrestrial division of the heavenly army.
The Story of the Scrolls Page 11