Three characteristic traits distinguish the sect of the Community Rule from the ‘Damascus’ society: they renounced private ownership of property, having progressively handed over all their belongings to the Community in the course of a two- to three-year-long initiation; they lived a life of strict obedience to superiors and elders; and they practised male celibacy. The last point is never explicitly stated, but appears as a logical necessity in the total absence of legislation relative to anything connected with marriage.
A Guardian stood at the head of each unit of the celibate Community too, a priest who was aided by a Bursar, who administered the common property and was in charge of the material well-being of all the members. The supreme council of the Community comprised three priests and twelve laymen. The religious communism which the sectaries had embraced entailed free exchange among members of the sect, but no exchange of goods with outsiders except after payment.
Initiation was long – lasting over two years – and progressive, allowing the candidates to have an increasing share in the life of the Community. At the end, the ‘novices’ gained full membership and voting rights. The daily communal activity entailed at least one meal, blessed by the priestly superior, and a prayer and study meeting at night. The communal meal was expected to continue even after the onset of the messianic age (1QSa 2:17–22).
The sectaries were subjected to strict discipline with set punishments imposed on transgressors in conformity with their penal code, going from a penalty of ten days to irrevocable dismissal. Every member had his allotted place in the hierarchical order of the Community, an order that underwent yearly reassessment at the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant in the light of the spiritual progress, or the absence of progress, achieved by each sectary.
As an aide-memoire for the annual re-ranking of the members, the Guardian kept a record of the transgressions committed by the sectaries. A damaged list, fascinating and pathetic, has preserved for posterity the names of three misbehaving sectaries together with their recorded wrong-doings (4Q477). A Yohanan son of—was short-tempered; Hananiah Notos either overindulged himself or showed favouritism to his family; another Hananiah loved… (something he should not have done). No doubt, they were reprimanded and downgraded. Those convicted of more serious offences were cursed and expelled from the Community at the annual Renewal of the Covenant with no chance to return.
A brief synopsis of the religious thought and practice of both branches of the Qumran sect is needed before we can attempt an identification. Both types of sectaries claimed to be part of a ‘new Covenant’ (CD 8:21, 35; 1QpHab 2:3), concluded by the Teacher of Righteousness and maintained by the Zadokite priestly leaders of the Community. The members believed they had been granted revealed knowledge and divine grace. Their prayer and worship, performed in conformity with their calendar given by God, coincided with the successive acts of the liturgy performed in heaven by the choir of the angels. Biblical laws concerning ritual purity were sternly interpreted and applied, and ablutions, including a special ‘baptism’ or immersion associated with the entry into the Covenant, were faithfully observed. External acts of worship were qualified empty gestures unless they were accompanied by corresponding inward spiritual attitudes.
Sectarian stance towards the Jerusalem Temple varied. The Damascus Document and the Temple Scroll legislate on cultic matters as everyday realities, insinuating that the members of the married branch continued some kind of contact with the sanctuary in Jerusalem. However, the ascetic branch under the guidance of the Sons of Zadok held that the Jerusalem priests followed the wrong rules and observed the wrong appointed times. Misled by their unholy calendar, they turned the Temple into a place of pollution. In their view, the community in its wilderness exile was the true place of worship, where prayer and ascetic life replaced the Temple sacrifices. This interim arrangement would continue until the liberation of Jerusalem and the reorganization of the cult by the members of the Community in the seventh year of the victorious eschatological war fought by the sect’s Sons of Light against the allied Jewish and Gentile foe of the Sons of Darkness (1QM 2).
The final age was to be inaugurated by the arrival of a messianic-eschatological prophet (1QS 9:11) and two redeemer figures, the priestly Messiah of Aaron, also called the Interpreter of the Law (CD 7:18–20; 4Q171 1:11), and the lay Messiah of Israel (CD 12:23–13:1), also known as the Branch of David or the Prince of the congregation (1QSb 5:20; 4Q285). Belief and hope in an afterlife is sporadically attested without firm indication whether it was seen as bodily resurrection or just as spiritual survival.
How do these pictures of the two varieties of the Qumran Community relate to the Jewish separatist religious bodies that existed during the last centuries preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE? No doubt a good many small religious parties flourished among the Jews at the turn of the era, but apart from the 6,000-strong Pharisees, the unspecified number of Sadducees and Zealots-Sicarii, the 4,000 Essenes, the Egyptian Essene-like Therapeutai of Philo, plus the freshly arisen Jewish-Christians of the New Testament (probably not exceeding a few thousand), there is no group sufficiently well known to allow a meaningful comparison.
Of the sufficiently well-described religious parties, let us first discard the Sadducees, notwithstanding the fact that some of their legal teachings are occasionally echoed in the Scrolls (for example in MMT). The lavish lifestyle of the aristocratic Sadducees is irreconcilable with the mode of existence of either branch of the Qumran Community. Besides, the Sadducees apparently did not believe in angels or in afterlife of any sort, while the Scrolls are full of angels and are not opposed to the idea of some kind of renewed existence after death, probably more in the form of spiritual survival than bodily resurrection.
Similarities with the Pharisees are also noticeable, but only on the general level. Both were pious, devoted to the study and interpretation of Scripture and deeply concerned with legal observance and ritual cleanliness. On the other hand, the Qumran Community recognized the overall doctrinal supremacy of the priests, whereas Pharisaism was essentially a lay movement considering learning as superior to social class. Furthermore, the Pharisees were outward-looking whereas the Qumran sect was closed to the external world, both Jewish and Gentile, and we cannot find a single record attesting Pharisee insistence on common ownership of property.
The Zealot-Sicarii theory was first proposed half a century ago by two scholars from the city of ‘the dreaming spires’, Professor Sir Godfrey Driver and my Oxford predecessor, Dr Cecil Roth. Subsequently it went out of fashion until it was recalled from its otherworldly somnolence by Professor Robert Eisenman in the 1980s. He gave to the thesis an odd Christian twist by turning the Zealots into followers – not of Jesus, but of his brother James. The two main arguments he marshalled in favour of his thesis are derived from the general gist of the War Scroll in which the Kittim-Romans, governed by a king (between 27 BCE and 66–70 CE) are the chief enemies of the community, and from the archaeological discovery of a Qumran Scroll (the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice) in the Zealot stronghold of Masada. But the War Scroll cannot be taken as a historical document. The armed conflict it describes is fictional, with its stages chronologically fixed in advance to fit a forty-year scheme, and the battles directed not by generals, but by priests and Levites, and ultimately won by angels (see chapter VII, pp. 134–5). As for the presence of a single Qumran manuscript at Masada, it could be attributed to the adoption by individual sectaries of the nationalist cause or even to a Zealot occupation of the Qumran site with – or more likely without – the consent of the Community previously residing there.
Neither did the laborious attempts to link the Qumran sect with Jewish Christianity make any genuine headway apart from whipping up interest in the popular media. The trend started in England between 1950 and 1954 with Jacob Teicher, the first of my predecessors in the editorial chair of the Journal of Jewish Studies, and John Allegro of ‘Sacred Mushroom’ fame, both identifying the Teache
r of Righteousness with Jesus. It continued in Australia with Dr Barbara Thiering, who made John the Baptist the Teacher, and ended in California, where Robert Eisenman landed James, the brother of Jesus, with the sectarian lead part of Teacher of Righteousness. The villain of the show, the Wicked Priest, is St Paul according to Teicher and Eisenman, but unexpectedly none other than Jesus in Thiering’s rather idiosyncratic exegesis. Her Jesus, as one might easily have guessed, first marries Mary of Magdala and fathers a daughter and two sons, and after the Magdalene has turned her back on him, Jesus takes another woman by the name of Lydia from Asia Minor (Acts 16:14) and has another son from her. These theories are read into the New Testament text. They fail the basic credibility test, being foisted on, rather than springing from, the evidence. Thus the New Testament words that the Lord opened Lydia’s heart are taken to mean that Jesus made her pregnant. Also, in order to claim credibility, the Judaeo-Christian theory must deny the pre-Christian date of some of the essential Qumran source material, such as the Habakkuk Commentary, despite the results of the carbon 14 tests performed in two of the world’s leading laboratories in 1990–91 and 1994 (see chapter II, p. 31). The Habakkuk Commentary was carbon-dated to between 110 and 5 BCE. The positive aspects of the comparison between the Scrolls and the New Testament will be shown in chapter IX.
That leaves us with the Essene hypothesis that has been the front-runner ever since Eleazar Lipa Sukenik first advanced it sixty years ago. To assess its value, we must set against our synopsis of the archaeological and literary evidence derived from Qumran the testimony of the classical Greek and Latin sources relating to the mysterious community portrayed by two Jewish writers and a Roman first-century CE writer. Philo’s Therapeutai, described in his book On the Contemplative Life, do not need to be taken into consideration despite the many similarities they display, as they are located by the Alexandrian author exclusively in the delta of the Nile, close to the Mareotic Lake, and not in Palestine, the homeland of the Essenes. There are some later sources too, but they contain nothing significantly different, so the examination of the older writings will suffice.
The Jewish authors, Philo and Flavius Josephus, have left two accounts each, one long and detailed (Philo, Every Good Man Is Free, 75–91; Josephus, Jewish War II:119–61), and one short (Philo, Apology for the Jews, quoted in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica VIII:6–7; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVIII:18–22). However, the Antiquities passage of Josephus may not be an independent witness, as it appears to be based on Philo’s Apology. Finally, Pliny the Elder has produced a brief, but splendidly written rich notice in Natural History 5:17, 4 (73). Noteworthy is the claim of Josephus that when he was sixteen years old, he had first-hand experience of Essenism as well as in the Pharisaic and Sadducean ways of life (Life, 10–11), although the few months he spent with them were clearly not enough for him to become an Essene, and in any case he tells us that at the end he joined the ranks of the Pharisees.
The etymology and the meaning of the name (Essaioi or Essenoi in Greek and Esseni in Latin) is still debated. Philo derives it from the Greek term, ‘the holy’ (hosioi). A good number of modern scholars tentatively link hosioi with the Syriac hase, meaning ‘the pious’. I favour another possible etymology based on the Aramaic ’asen/’asayya (healers), linked to Josephus’s assertion that the Essenes, experts in the therapeutic qualities of plants and minerals, were concerned with the cure of the sick (Jewish War II:136) and on Philo’s description of Essene-like Egyptian ‘Therapeutai’, who owed their name to being healers of the body and the soul (Philo, On the Contemplative Life, 2). (All the relevant Greek and Latin texts with facing English translation are available in The Essenes according to the Classical Sources, edited by G. Vermes and M. Goodman (Sheffield, JSOT Press, 1989).)
Philo and Josephus give the number of the Essenes as just exceeding 4,000, comparable in size to the 6,000 Pharisees mentioned by Josephus during the reign of Herod the Great. Both writers make them reside in many towns of Judaea or even in every town of Palestine. Philo later contradicts himself and on doctrinal grounds declares that they shunned the cities because of urban immorality and places them in the spiritual countryside, which was obviously more to his liking. Pliny mentions only one Essene settlement, situated off the western shore of the Dead Sea somewhere between Jericho and Engedi.
Details concerning the sect can be garnered from all the sources. The local congregations, governed by superiors, dwelt in commonly owned and occupied houses. Candidates for membership (only grown-ups according to Philo and Pliny; adults as well as young men according to Josephus) had to wear a white robe and an apron, and had to carry a hatchet with the hygienic purpose of burying excrement. Father de Vaux believed he had found one such hatchet at Qumran (Vetus Testamentum 9 (1959), pp. 399–407). The ‘novices’ had to undergo instruction for one year before they were admitted to the ablutions of the Essene purity system. A two-year long initiation followed, at the end of which an oath of fidelity was sworn and table fellowship gained. Serious breaches of the rules were punished by expulsion, decided by a court of no fewer than 100 judges.
The Essenes practised religious communism or, as Pliny puts it more pungently, lived ‘without money’ (sine pecunia). Property and earnings were handed over to the superiors and all the needs of the members were catered for by a bursar. They were allowed to help the needy, but required special permission to support relatives. Their main occupation was agriculture. Philo asserts, possibly for his own philosophical reasons, that they were forbidden to manufacture weapons or to indulge in buying and selling as it could lead to cupidity. Josephus, on the other hand, concedes that they were allowed to carry weapons for self-protection against robbers. The commonly held idea of Essene pacifism is not borne out by the texts. A high-ranking commander of the Jewish rebels against Rome, John the Essene, was a member of the sect (see p. 211).
The Essenes rejected pleasure and sought to control passions. Their diet was frugal and they wore their garments until they fell to pieces. Among the Essene characteristics Philo and Josephus list rough appearance (they refused to anoint themselves), the wearing of white robes, frequent ritual baths, the avoidance of spitting and, on the Sabbath, of defecation. The sect’s rejection of marriage is attributed to misogyny: living with a wife was judged incompatible with communal peace. Pliny bluntly asserts that they lived ‘without women, renouncing sex altogether, having only palm trees for company’ (sine ulla femina, omni venere abdicata, socia palmarum). The archaeologists have noted remains of palm trees at Qumran.
In an appendix to his longer notice on the Essenes, Josephus refers to a branch of the sect that allowed marriage. Only a regularly menstruating girl, who was presumed to be fertile, could become a bride. Since sex was permitted exclusively for the propagation of the human race, husbands were to keep away from pregnant (or post-menopausal?) wives. No doubt for ethical reasons, Philo stresses that the Essenes had no slaves: slave ownership would have clashed with his idea of love of freedom, which he also attributed to the Essenes.
The Essenes also disapproved of swearing an oath to prove the veracity of their words, declined participation in Temple sacrifices, and symbolically sacrificed among themselves instead. Nevertheless they sent offerings to Jerusalem. They may even have had an establishment in the Holy City somewhere in the area of the ‘Essene gate’ mentioned by Josephus (see p. 178). Their communal meals were prepared by priests following strict purity rules. They ate twice daily, taking a purificatory bath before each repast and every meal was preceded and followed by a grace recited by a priest.
As far as their religious convictions were concerned, the Essenes revered the Law and Moses the Lawgiver. Philo, once more attributing to them his own preferences, emphasizes their addiction to allegorical Bible interpretation. Fate, that is divine Providence, was held by them to be superior to human free will. Besides the teachings of Scripture, they also cherished the esoteric doctrines of their own secret books, open only to full members. The
y were venerated as prophets able to foretell the future infallibly and as expert healers with special knowledge of the medicinal plants and minerals.
Only Josephus reports on Essene eschatology. They believed, he tells us, in the survival of the soul after death, destined either for eternal joy or for everlasting torment. Bodily resurrection is nowhere alluded to, indeed it could hardly be conceived by people who considered the body as the prison of the enslaved soul, a soul that longed for liberation during earthly life and took its delight in freedom from matter after death.
In the light of the foregoing two portraits, can one assert that the Qumran community and the Essene sect were one and the same institution? The answer is no and yes. If to identify the two, absolute accord on every single point is required between the Scrolls and the classical evidence, the answer must be negative. But bearing in mind the nature of the sources, is total unison conceivable? First, the documents are of fundamentally different character. The Dead Sea texts were written by members of an esoteric sect and were intended for the use of initiates only. Conversely, Philo and Pliny, and even Josephus, were outsiders and mostly addressed a non-Jewish readership in the Graeco-Roman world. For their benefit, Josephus vaguely compares the Essenes to the followers of Pythagoras (Jewish Antiquities XV:371) as he has declared the Pharisees similar to Stoics and the Sadducees to Epicureans. Moreover, both Philo and Josephus have produced two descriptions which are not altogether uniform. For these reasons we must allow some elasticity in the evaluation of the sources. After all, even the various Qumran rules indicate different types of organization and occasionally even clash with one another. The variations may be due to diverse causes among which evolving practices (such as penalties of various length given for the same transgression) may be the most likely.
The Story of the Scrolls Page 17