The Commentaries on Hosea, Nahum and the Psalms mention two further political-religious parties distinct from and in conflict with the Qumran Community and metaphorically designate them as ‘Ephraim’ and ‘Manasseh’, the two symbolical ancestors of the northern tribes of the biblical Israel who separated from the southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The Nahum and Hosea Commentaries further refer to a bloodthirsty priest, nicknamed the ‘furious young lion’, who struck Ephraim (Commentary on Hosea) and ‘hanged alive’ (crucified) some of them (Commentary on Nahum), applying the penalty prescribed in the Temple Scroll for traitors of the Jewish nation (11QTemple 64:7–8). If the story is inspired by the crucifixion of 800 Pharisees by the Hasmonean priest-king Alexander Jannaeus (Josephus, Jewish War I:97), one would have reason to deduce that Ephraim stands for the Pharisees, Alexander’s enemies, and consequently Manasseh would refer to the Sadducees, his supporters.
One of the Commentaries on Isaiah (4Q161) takes us to the final age by which time the Kittim, not yet inimical to the community in the Habakkuk Commentary, become – as in the War Scroll and the Book of War – the ultimate foe of the sons of light and are destined for annihilation by their royal Messiah, referred to as the Branch of David. The deliberately obscure historical allusions of the Damascus Document and the Qumran pesharim will be subjected to a detailed interpretation in the light of the data furnished by archaeology and the writings of Flavius Josephus in the final section of chapter IX.
Beside pesharim, the Qumran Bible exegetes also produced thematic interpretative works based on selected scriptural extracts such as the so-called Florilegium (4Q174) which mentions the coming of two messianic figures, the ‘Interpreter of the Law’ (priestly Messiah) and the ‘Branch of David’ (the messianic king) and the Testimonia or Messianic Anthology (4Q175) which ends with an historical interpretation of Joshua 6:26 (see also 4Q379), announcing the coming of two brothers who would be ‘instruments of violence’. Other thematic exegetical compositions reinterpret biblical law (4Q159, 513–14), weave together citations relating to the Heavenly Prince, Melchizedek, identified with the archangel Michael, and mentioning his counterpart, Melkiresha or Belial/Satan (11Q13). To these should be added excerpts concerning divine consolation (Tanhumim, 4Q176) from which, unfortunately, most of the original sectarian interpretation has disappeared, and a collection (Catena/Chain) of biblical quotes referring to the last days (4Q177, 182).
D. WISDOM LITERATURE
Only a restricted amount of sapiential composition have been found at Qumran. Of these, eight manuscripts of a Wisdom work entitled Instructions form the bulk, but apart from fairly rare verbal similarities, like a reference to the ‘mystery to come’, they contain hardly anything that can be qualified as strictly sectarian. Their message concerns common piety and correct behaviour towards one’s wife, children and neighbours. If they have any sectarian connection, it would be with the married community members of the ‘Damascus’ Covenant. It is best to assume that the Sapiential Works or Instructions (4Q415–18), Bless, my soul (4Q434–8) as well as The Seductress (4Q184), The Songs of the Sage (4Q510–11) and The Beatitudes (4Q525) existed before the foundation of the Dead Sea Community and were inherited by its members. Much of the counsel the sage hands out in the Instructions is sensible everyday practical wisdom.
Do not strike him who is without your strength
lest you stumble and your shame increase greatly.
[Do not s]ell yourself for wealth
it is better for you to be a slave in spirit.
And serve your master freely
And do not sell your glory for a price.
Do not give money in pledge for your inheritance
lest it impoverish your body.
Do not satiate yourself with bread while there is no clothing.
Do not drink wine while there is no food.
Do not seek luxury when you lack bread.
Do not glorify yourself in your need if you are poor
lest you degrade your life.
Also do not treat with contempt the vessel of your bosom (wife)…
(4Q416 2:16–21)
Gospel parallels have secured some notoriety for the Beatitudes, as New Testament scholars sought to discover in it pointers to account for the differences between the Beatitudes of Luke 6:20–26 and Matthew 5:3–12. Yet whereas partial similarities between Matthew and 4Q525 are undeniable, the discrepancies in form and inspiration are considerable. The eschatological intensity of Matthew is greater and the units are structured differently: in Matthew each virtue is accompanied by its reward (‘Blessed is the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God’), while the Qumran Beatitudes append an antithetic parallelism to the blessing (blessed is he who does this and abstains from doing that). In a way the negative aspect of the Qumran Beatitudes recalls the Woes which follow Jesus’ blessings as described by Luke: ‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom’ – ‘Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation’ (Luke 6:20; 6:24).
[Blessed is]… with a pure heart
and does not slander with his tongue.
Blessed are those who hold to her (Wisdom’s) precepts
and do not hold to the ways of iniquity.
Blessed are those who rejoice in her,
and do not burst forth in ways of folly.
Blessed are those who seek her with pure hands,
and do not pursue her with a treacherous heart.
Blessed is the man who has attained Wisdom,
and walks in the Law of the Most High.
(4Q525 fr. 2, 2:1–4)
APPENDIX: MISCELLANEOUS TEXTS
A document found by Roland de Vaux’s team in Qumran Cave 3 and two inscribed potsherds accidentally discovered forty years later by an American archaeologist in the perimeter wall dividing the Qumran ruins from the cemetery do not fit into any of the previous pigeonholes. The first of these is the Copper Scroll (3Q15), preserved in two parts. It was first published independently by J. M. Allegro in 1960 as The Treasure of the Copper Scroll, and officially by J. T. Milik in 1962 in DJD, III. (Seemingly still hankering after the long defunct ‘closed shop’ era, Émile Puech refers – more than forty years after its publication – to Allegro’s book as a ‘pirated edition’.)
In 2006, the Copper Scroll was given a lavish new facelift, subsidized by the Foundation of Électricité de France. Scientifically reexamined by Daniel Brizemeure and Noël Lacoudre and retranslated by Émile Puech, it was reissued under the title, Le Rouleau de cuivre de la grotte 3 de Qumrân (3Q15): Expertise – Restauration – Épigraphie I–II (Leiden, Brill, 2006).
The Copper Scroll has always been an enigma. It consists of twelve columns of Hebrew text embossed on copper and listing sixty-four hiding places in Jerusalem, its neighbourhood and other locations in the Holy Land where a colossal quantity of silver, gold and Temple offerings were concealed. Cryptic instructions are given for the discovery of the treasures, but in hiding place no. 64 the lucky treasure hunter is promised ‘a copy of this writing and its explanation and the measurements and the details of each item’. Allegro tried his hand in 1960 at uncovering the treasures, but with no luck.
No agreed view exists on the nature of the Copper Scroll. Those who argue in favour of real deposits of gold and silver surmise that the source of the coins and precious metals is either the Temple or the treasury of the Qumran sect. Neither opinion is without serious difficulties. No doubt, the Jerusalem sanctuary was extremely rich and could conceivably account for the enormous sums to which the deposits add up. But how can one account for a record (indeed, two records) of the Temple treasure being hidden, together with their other writings, by people from Qumran who were on hostile terms with the Temple authorities? Also, according to Josephus, who wrote his Jewish War only a few years after the destruction of Jerusalem probably between 75 and 79 CE, the ‘vast sums of money’ belonging to the Temple were still in the treasure chambers when the sanctuary was set on fire in 70 CE (
Jewish War VI:282).
According to Puech’s latest count, the various deposits amounted to 1,672 talents of silver, 362 talents of gold and 1,504 talents of unspecified precious material, plus a large unmeasured quantity of gold and silver. There are also 165 ingots of gold, 19 bars of silver, etc. Could this gigantic wealth have belonged, as Puech, Dupont-Sommer and others suggest, to an ascetic sect which called itself the Community of the Poor? Are the figures exaggerated or was the talent of the Scroll smaller than the Jewish kikkar, estimated to weigh 35 kilograms? Those who argue that the Copper Scroll speaks of real treasure are confronted with an apparently insoluble problem.
On the other hand, the theory, first advanced by J. T. Milik, the official editor of the Copper Scroll, that the document recounts a story about a legendary hidden treasure, runs into equally serious difficulties. Only an unbalanced mind would laboriously engrave on copper in language of utmost seriousness and realism, a twelve-column-long complicated list of sixty-four purely fictional caches. In short, with the Copper Scroll we are still at square one.
The two ostraca found by Professor James F. Strange from the University of South Florida in 1996 on the Qumran site itself are also a puzzle. The text on the second sherd is badly damaged and is without significance. The first is very difficult to decipher and two completely different interpretations have been offered. According to the ‘official’ editors, Frank Moore Cross and Esther Eshel, the potsherd contains the draft of a deed of gift in which a certain Honi, in fulfilment of his oath to the Qumran Community, handed over to Eleazar, son of Nahmani (the Bursar of the sect?) a slave called Hisday of Holon, as well as a house and an orchard. If this reading and interpretation are correct, we have the first external documentary evidence, discovered on the Qumran site itself, regarding a sectarian practice, that of a ‘novice’ handing over his property to an official of the sect (DJD, XXXVI, pp. 497–508).
However, another renowned palaeographer, Dr Ada Yardeni of the Hebrew University, arrived at an entirely different decipherment and explanation. Instead of the name, Hisday of Holon, she reads ‘these sackcloths’, and ‘when he fulfilled his oath to the community’ becomes ‘and every other tree’. Here, with no allusion to the sect, we have a pathetically prosaic donation by Honi to Eleazar of sackcloths, a house, fig trees and olive trees (Israel Exploration Journal, 47 (1997), pp. 233–7).
Both interpretations are problematic. One needs a substantial amount of good will or creative imagination to recognize with Cross and Eshel the crucial term ‘Community’ (yahad) on the ostracon. On the other hand, one would hardly expect a list of valuable gifts, a house and fruit trees to open with the unexciting item of sackcloths. I am afraid we have not yet heard the last word about this humble potsherd, which may or may not hold the key to the identity of the Qumran sect.
This is the summary account of the non-biblical sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls. The three main questions it still leaves open regarding the archaeological evidence, the identity and the history of the Qumran Community will be rein-vestigated in the next chapter.
VIII
Unfinished Business:
Archaeology – Group Identity – History
Having reported directly and, I trust, fairly the story of the Qumran discoveries, followed up by an evaluation of the message of the non-sectarian and sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, I still owe the reader a reconsideration of three major areas of the Qumran complex on which scholarly consensus has not yet been reached. I refer to the interpretation of the archaeological finds, the identification of the Qumran Community and a final attempt to outline the history of the Dead Sea sect. In the case of archaeology, the lack of agreement is partly due to the incompleteness of the available evidence and to the – in my view – mistaken unwillingness of some writers to include the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves among the archaeological data. The two other controversial topics, the identity of the ancient residents at Qumran (in particular whether they were the Essenes of Philo, Josephus and Pliny) and their history demand further treatment because of the necessarily hypothetical character of any conclusion one may reach. None of the texts attaches an easily recognizable label to the Dead Sea community, nor do we find a single clear pointer to a known historical fact. Despite six decades of unceasing intellectual struggle, Qumran archaeology, group identity and history still constitute ‘unfinished business’.
1. Fresh Approaches to Archaeology
As a result of Roland de Vaux’s happy-go-lucky way of conducting his excavations of the site of Qumran, its cemetery and the farm at Ain Feshkha, archaeology is the most unfinished of all the unfinished aspects of Scrolls research. Hardly more than 5 per cent of the graves have been opened and investigated; a good number of the hundreds of coins found in the various strata of the site are not only unpublished, but many of them have apparently gone missing. The thirteen years separating the final dig in 1958 from his death in 1971 were not enough for de Vaux to start, let alone complete, the writing of the official report he was duty-bound to issue about the Qumran excavations. As I once put it, if the slow-motion publication of the Dead Sea manuscripts was the academic scandal of the twentieth century, the miserable handling by de Vaux and his successors of the archaeological finds has stretched the scandal well into the third millennium. And the end of the tunnel is still nowhere in sight.
Archaeological research is meant to play a twofold role vis-à-vis the Qumran material. Its primary aim is to determine and explain the purpose and nature of the ruins and of the objects they contain, as well as to establish the chronology of this ancient settlement and the identity of its original occupants. Since none of the manuscripts, apart from two inscribed potsherds, was discovered among the ruins, archaeology’s second task is to define the relationship, if any, between the inhabitants of Qumran during the time of its occupation in antiquity and the manuscripts discovered in the various caves in the area. Roland de Vaux and his team, whose interpretation of the site as the home of a Jewish religious community was first alluded to in chapter II (p. 39), automatically took for granted that there was a link between the establishment and the Scrolls, and came to adopt almost immediately the identification of the Qumran Community with the Jewish religious organization of the Essenes that flourished during the last two centuries before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Adopting the theory first proposed by Eleazar Lipa Sukenik and André Dupont-Sommer, in 1948 and 1950 respectively, de Vaux and his colleagues felt free to mix the information gathered from the Scrolls with that found in the classical Greek and Latin accounts (Philo, Josephus, Pliny) for the interpretation of the data supplied by archaeology.
In this, they may have been ultimately correct, but they proceeded in a somewhat hasty manner. If we discount the two inscribed potsherds accidentally discovered in the 1990s, which in any case were unknown to de Vaux, not a single manuscript was found on the site itself. Therefore it is theoretically conceivable that the deposit of written material had nothing to do with the inhabitants of the establishment, let alone with their Essene identity. Rightly or wrongly, remove from the equation the religious character of the settlement, and at once the Qumran ruins will be open to a variety of explanations as the history of the research has demonstrated since 1980.
The first broadside against the theory of Qumran as the home of the quasi-monastic congregation of the Essenes was delivered by Professor Norman Golb of Chicago University in various publications between 1980 and 1995. In his view, Scrolls and ruins formed two discrete categories which had strictly nothing to do with one another. In Golb’s view, the manuscripts originated from Jerusalem (from one or several libraries) and came to be hidden in caves in the Dead Sea area during the Roman siege of the Holy City some time between 67 and 70 CE by people unconnected with the Qumranites. Having thus smoothly separated the Scrolls from the establishment, Golb proposed to see in the building complex of Qumran and in particular in its tower, a military establishment, a small rural fort, and in the adjacent cemetery the buria
l place of well over 1,000 fallen defenders of the post.
The second new theory also ignores the Scrolls and treats the Qumran buildings as a country residence constructed in the centre of an agricultural estate by rich landowners from Jerusalem. The Belgian archaeologist couple behind this thesis, Robert Donceel and Pauline Donceel-Voûte (1992, 1994), turned the plaster tables of de Vaux’s scriptorium or manuscript copying room into a dining hall (triclinium). The tables were not used for writing; in fact, they were not tables at all, but couches on which the participants of many a splendid dinner reclined.
In 1994 another fresh idea was launched by Professor Alan Crown and his student Lena Cansdale of the University of Sydney. They saw in Qumran a hostelry for merchants, a kind of caravanserai, lying at a major crossroads on the way from Transjordan via a boat trip by the Dead Sea to Jerusalem. Once again the Scrolls have been left out of consideration.
In the same year (1994), the Dominican Father Jean-Baptist Humbert, the man who inherited the task of producing the final archaeological report on the excavations of Qumran that de Vaux had neglected to write, came up with a compromise solution. He abandoned the thesis of de Vaux in part and sided with the Donceels, accepting that Qumran was first a country villa, similar to other such estates in the region. However, he claimed that around the middle of the first century BCE, it passed to a religious group, possibly after the earthquake which hit the region in 31 BCE. At this juncture, Humbert reverted to de Vaux and to the mainstream interpretation of the Qumran ruins as a religious establishment.
The Story of the Scrolls Page 15