By the 1950s, in addition to H. H. Rowley’s Hellenizing high priest Menelaus (171–62 BCE), two if not three Hasmonean high priests were proposed for the role of the Wicked Priest: Alexander Jannaeus (102–76 BCE), de Vaux’s choice, and Aristobulus II (67–3 BCE) and Hyrcanus II (63–40 BCE), contemporaries of Pompey, jointly championed by Dupont-Sommer.
While the established scholars – de Vaux, Rowley and Dupont-Sommer – argued among themselves, a young man by the name of Geza Vermes, tucked away in Louvain (Belgium), had been working furiously since 1950 on what was to become in 1952 the world’s first doctoral dissertation on Qumran. It was published in 1953. Poring over the evidence relating to the Wicked Priest, a remarkable passage of the Habakkuk Commentary, which had escaped the attention of his elders, caught his eyes:
This concerns the Wicked Priest who was called by the name of truth when he first arose. But when he ruled over Israel his heart became proud, and he forsake God… for the sake of riches. He robbed and amassed the riches of the men of violence who rebelled against God, and he took the wealth of the peoples.
(1QpHab 8:8–12)
According to this text, two stages can be distinguished in the career of this Wicked Priest. At the beginning he was good – being called after the name of truth is definitely something positive – but after he had gained a position of power (‘ruled over Israel’), he was corrupted by military success and money. Were there any Jewish high priests during the relevant period, say between 171 and 63 BCE, who corresponded to such a portrait? Of course, they all cherished power and wealth, but out of the ten or so possible candidates was there anyone who could have met with the sect’s approval at the start of his activity?
Out of this puzzle arose the so-called Maccabaean theory of Qumran origins. Only the two Maccabee brothers, first and foremost Jonathan, but also the younger Simon, heroes of the war of liberation against Seleucid political and religious oppression, had at the start an immaculate pedigree. In addition to the Habakkuk Commentary, the positive attitude towards ‘King Jonathan’ in a poem from Cave 4 (4Q448) deserves quoting.
Holy city for king Jonathan
and for all the congregation of your people, Israel,
who are in the four corners of heaven.
May the peace of them all be on your kingdom.
May your name be blessed.
This poem should be interpreted as aiming at Jonathan Maccabaeus, as has been argued first by myself and then by Émile Puech (see JJS 44 (1993), pp. 294–300 and RQ 17 (1996), pp. 241–170) against the thesis of the official editors Hanan and Esther Eshel and Ada Yardeni, who favoured Alexander Jannaeus (DJD, XI, pp. 403–25). Also John Strugnell and Elisha Qimron, the editors of Some Observances of the Law (MMT) understand this document as a communication addressed by the Teacher of Righteousness and his colleagues to Jonathan whom they still thought they could persuade to change his mind and listen to them. Later Jonathan (and Simon) compromised themselves in the eyes of the leaders of the Community by usurping as non-Zadokites the high priestly function which by tradition was the preserve of the Zadokite pontifical family, to which the priests of the Qumran Community were linked. In 152 BCE, Alexander Balas, a usurper of the Seleucid throne, offered Jonathan the high priestly office, and although he had no genealogical entitlement, he illegally accepted the pontifical office and thus discredited himself in the eyes of the Dead Sea sectaries.
Simon, Jonathan’s brother, shared with him the fame and glory of being treated as a saviour of the Jewish people, but in the judgement of the Qumranites he also followed Jonathan’s downhill course when he consented to be proclaimed dynastic high priest and ruler over Israel (1 Macc. 14:41). Both brothers suffered violent deaths, but Jonathan’s execution by a Syrian Greek general, Tryphon, in 142 BCE (1 Macc. 13:23), fits better the description given in the Commentary on Psalm 37 about the Wicked Priest, who was put to death by ‘the violent of the nations’, than Simon’s demise. The latter, while drunk, was murdered by his son-in-law in 134 BCE in the fortress of Dok, not far from Jericho (1 Macc. 16:14–16).
The Maccabaean theory was first developed in my Louvain thesis, Les manuscrits du désert de Juda (Tournai-Paris, 1953. English translation: Discovery in the Judean Desert, New York, 1956). It argues for a Maccabaean Wicked Priest. This interpretation was soon adopted by several leading Qumran experts (J. T. Milik, F. M. Cross, R. de Vaux) and has since become the mainstream view among Scrolls scholars. An over-complicated variation on the same theme, the oddly titled ‘Groningen hypothesis’, which envisaged Essene splinter groups and six successive Wicked Priests from Judas Maccabaeus to Alexander Jannaeus, is the product of A. S. van der Woude and Florentino García Martínez, two Qumran experts at the University of Groningen.
Combining the literary data with the archaeological evidence, the history of the Qumran Community may be summarized as follows. The movement began in the early second century BCE, close to the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes and the ensuing outbreak of the Hellenistic crisis. The ministry of the Teacher of Righteousness belonged to the middle years of the second century BCE, and small beginnings of a sectarian settlement at Qumran can be traced to the dying years of that same century. The Community flourished by the Dead Sea in the first century BCE from 100 BCE onwards, probably without interruption after the 31 BCE earthquake, and in the first century CE until its violent end almost certainly at the hands of the Romans in 68 CE.
So far the historical reconstruction has relied on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the archaeological evidence and the relevant information from the Books of the Maccabees and the writings of Flavius Josephus, but without the use of the classical notices concerning the Essenes. Assuming that the Essene identification of the Qumran sect is accepted, the following historical addenda may complete the picture.
1. Josephus first mentions the Essene sect, together with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, during the pontificate of Jonathan Maccabaeus (153/2–143/2 BCE) in Jewish Antiquities XIII:171.
2. The Essenes flourished under Herod the Great. They were popular with the king and were excused from taking an oath of allegiance (Jewish Antiquities XV:371–2).
3. Several individual Essenes are named by Josephus. The first, Judas, appears in the company of his disciples in Jerusalem during the rule of Aristobulus I (103–102 BCE). Judas had the reputation of being a prophet, able unfailingly to forecast the future. Among other things, he predicted the death of the brother of Aristobulus (Jewish Antiquities XIII:311–13). Another Essene prophet, Menahem, foretold that Herod would become king of the Jews (Jewish Antiquities XV:373–8). After the death of Herod in 4 BCE, the Essene Simon interpreted a dream of Herod’s son Archelaus and predicted that he would rule as ethnarch for ten years (Jewish Antiquities XVII:345–8). We are also informed that at the age of sixteen, in 53 CE, Josephus himself sought instruction in Essene doctrine and practice (Life, 10–11). Finally, we learn from Josephus of an Essene, by the name of John, who was one of the commanders of the Jewish forces fighting against Rome during the first rebellion. He commanded the district of Thamna in Judaea and the cities of Lydda, Jaffa and Emmaus (Jewish War II:567). A ‘man of first-rate prowess and ability’, he fell in the battle of Ascalon (Jewish War III:11, 19). As Josephus was clearly not a full member, Judas, Menahem, Simon and John are the four Essenes whose names should be joined to those of the three guilty sectaries, Yohanan and two Hananiahs, written in the bad book of one of the Guardians (4Q477), and just possibly Eleazar ben Nahmani and Honi, mentioned on Ostracon 1 from Qumran (see chapter VII, pp. 169–70).
With these supplements to the debate regarding archaeology, group identity and sectarian history, the unfinished business of Qumran has been settled as well as it is possible at this moment. All we need now is another look backwards and forwards to recapitulate the contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to our understanding of Judaism – biblical and post-biblical – and of nascent Christianity and a gaze into the crystal ball to forecast the future of Qumran studies.
IX
The Qumran Revolution in the Study of Biblical and Post-biblical Judaism and Early Christianity
The Dead Sea Scrolls (dating to c. 200 BCE–70 CE) belong to the post-biblical age and their relevance to the Hebrew Bible itself is limited to questions pertaining to the transmission of the text and to the canon of Scripture. As both topics have already been dealt with, only the salient points of the earlier findings will be recapitulated here. Nevertheless, all that the reader will find in the following pages will vindicate the claim made in the opening chapter that the Dead Sea Scrolls have completely ‘revolutionized our approach to the Hebrew Scriptures and to the literature of the age that witnessed the birth of the New Testament’.
1. Judaism
Because no Hebrew biblical manuscripts have survived from pre-Christian times with the possible exception of the Nash papyrus (see chapter VI, p. 96), the contribution of the scriptural Scrolls from Qumran are unparalleled as far as our knowledge of the text of the Old Testament is concerned. What do we learn from them?
The Dead Sea finds partly confirm and partly question the reliability of the wording of the Bible handed down by Jewish tradition. On the one hand, as was shown in chapter VI, the Qumran Scripture is substantially identical with that passed on by the synagogue from the time of Jesus to the present age. On the other hand, the Dead Sea Scrolls furnish documentary proof of what has been surmised before, namely that, prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, unity was not yet achieved and different forms of the Hebrew text coexisted, showing verbal and stylistic variations, additions, omissions and changes in the order of the textual arrangement. Before the Qumran discoveries, we presumed that the Samaritan Bible (restricted to the five books of the Law of Moses), the form of the Hebrew Bible from which the ancient Greek version, known as the Septuagint, was translated, and the type of the text that was to evolve into the traditional (Masoretic) Hebrew Old Testament, existed side by side in different social groups. Qumran has corroborated this theory and has demonstrated that diversity could obtain in one and the same group. This phenomenon implies that the variant readings in the biblical text do not necessarily represent corruptions or deliberate alterations, but can just as well, if not better, echo earlier discrete written traditions. Unity, produced by Jewish religious authority, was usually sought in times of crisis, and was achieved by the selection of one of the existing text forms and the simultaneous rejection of all other competing versions. Such a deliberate unification is assumed to have been part of the general restructuring of Judaism by the rabbis during the years following the catastrophe of 70 CE, which entailed the loss of the Temple and the supreme council of the Sanhedrin as well as the replacement of the aristocratic high priestly leadership of Jewry by rabbis largely of plebeian origin.
The second, less stringent, conclusion that can be drawn from the Dead Sea biblical Scrolls relates to the canon of the Jewish Scriptures. Qumran unfortunately has not provided us with a register listing by name every book of the Bible. All we know is that, with the exception of the Book of Esther (missing also, as has been noted, from the list of the second century CE bishop, Melito of Sardis), some 215 original manuscripts have been retrieved from the eleven Qumran caves. They comprise fragments of more than seventy copies of the Law (the Torah), a dozen specimens of the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings), over forty copies of the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) and more than sixty copies of the Writings (among them thirty-six copies of the Psalms). Nothing specifically proves, however, that these texts belonged to a distinctive class of their own. Their privileged position may be deduced only from circumstantial evidence. For example, some of them (Genesis, Isaiah, several Minor Prophets and the Psalms) are furnished with commentaries. There is no evidence of a running interpretation attached to non-biblical documents at Qumran. Also, extracts from various books that tradition considers as Scripture serve as proof texts in the Community Rule, the Damascus Document and in other Qumran writings. However, the cogency of this argument is weakened if one recalls that a work attributed to Levi, son of Jacob (possibly an early version of the Testament of Levi), and the Book of Jubilees are also used in a similar fashion by the writer of the Damascus Document unless we agree with the authors of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible that these works belonged to the Bible at Qumran (see chapter VI, p. 102). All we can safely deduce is a great likelihood that the writings held to be canonical in rabbinic Judaism enjoyed the same status in the Dead Sea community. This would imply that the list of authoritative books was established while Qumran was in existence, that is to say, before the year 70 CE at the latest, and not in the early decades of the second century CE, as is commonly held.
If so, the debate which gave an opportunity to Rabbi Akiba (martyred under Hadrian in 135 CE) to maintain the canonicity of the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes simply shows that the status quo arrived at probably in the course of the first century BCE, concerning what constituted the Bible, was successfully restated by some rabbis after 100 CE against those other rabbis who sought to remove various disputed items from the traditional register of Scriptures. In this case, the creation of the Palestinian canon must have followed closely the entry into the Bible of the Book of Daniel, finally completed some time around 160 BCE. As Cave 4 fragments of this book, dating to the late second century BCE, prove, the text itself was already firmly fixed within half a century from the canonization of Daniel, and this includes even the switch in it from Hebrew to Aramaic in chapter 2:4 and again back to Hebrew in chapter 8.
In the domain of the Aramaic Bible translation, little novelty is available at Qumran. Two small Aramaic fragments of Leviticus and Job have emerged from Cave 4 with no variants worth mentioning. Cave 11 has yielded larger sections of the Book of Job with stylistic changes. However, the discrepancies should probably be attributed to the difficulties of the Hebrew language the translator of the book had to face rather than to textual variations.
The Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon, of which substantial sections have survived in Cave 1, prefigures the later rabbinic genre of the so-called Palestinian Targums in which the text of the Pentateuch rendered into Aramaic is amalgamated with a free and often extensive supplementary explanation, also in Aramaic. It demonstrates that this type of scriptural interpretation was not the creation of the rabbis in the third to the fifth century CE, as is generally thought, but came into existence probably as early as the second century BCE and consequently existed in New Testament times.
Greek Bible translations from Qumran are also few and far between and stay close to the traditional Septuagint with only minor verbal variations. A notable peculiarity appears in the Greek fragment of Leviticus 4:17 (4Q120) where the sacrosanct divine name ‘YHWH’ is phonetically transliterated as Iao instead of being replaced by the customary term, ‘Lord’ (Kyrios).
Works of Scripture interpretation, other than the so-called ‘rewritten Bible’ – already exemplified by the Book of Jubilees, a paraphrase of Genesis, the Book of Biblical Antiquities falsely attributed to Philo, and Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, retelling the story of the entire Old Testament – open a new chapter in post-biblical Jewish literature. At Qumran, the Reworked Pentateuch (4Q158, 364–7) represents this genre. There are also thematic collections of exegesis devoted to biblical laws (4Q159, 513–14) and interpretative documents on messianic or apocalyptic themes (4Q174–5). However, the principal fresh contribution of Qumran to post-biblical Jewish literature is furnished by continuous commentaries on Genesis, various prophetic books and the Psalms. Most of them aim at outlining and interpreting prophecy in its relation to the Qumran community’s past, present and future history. They constitute the pesher class of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see chapter VII, pp. 162–4). Extracts from them are also occasionally quoted in Qumran writings of a doctrinal nature such as the Damascus Document (see CD 4:14).
Furthermore, the Dead Sea Scrolls have made a substantial contribution to a better grasp of the history of halakhah, the ra
bbinic method of regulating Jewish religious conduct and morality. Indeed, the reinterpretation and adaptation of biblical law to evolving historical and social circumstances did not start after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. The Scrolls already contain examples of the formulation of new rules either through applied Bible exegesis, anticipating the literary genre of the rabbinic Midrash, or in the form of direct commands without scriptural support as attested in the Mishnah and the Talmud, works compiled between 200 and 500 CE.
The midrashic type of lawmaking is practised by the author of the Damascus Document (CD 5:1–2). He demonstrates through legal reasoning the compulsory character of the monogamous marriage by applying to every Jewish male person the law of Deuteronomy relative to the king who was forbidden to ‘multiply wives’ (Deut. 17:17), i.e. to have more than one spouse. The mishnaic genre, simple statement unsupported by Bible citation, is illustrated by the precepts included in MMT (4Q394–9) and the Statutes of the Damascus Document (CD 9–16).
The style of a legal document, organized into divisions according to subject matter like the tractates of the Mishnah and the Talmud, is explicitly exemplified in the Damascus Statutes where we find formal divisional headings such as ‘Concerning the oath of a woman’, ‘Concerning the statute for free-will offering’, ‘Concerning purification by water’, ‘Concerning the Sabbath’, etc., and less formally in MMT where, without express divisional titles, the laws are arranged as relating to the liturgical calendar, ritual purity, marriage and sundry decrees governing the entry into the sect.
The Story of the Scrolls Page 19