When Eisenman was given, and passed on to Biblical Archaeology Review, the computer print-out which inventoried all the Qumran material in the hands of the international team, there were listed, among the items, additional versions and/or fragments of the ‘Damascus Document’. Having been found at Qumran, they were obviously much earlier than those of the Cairo ‘geniza’, and probably more complete. It was the Qumran parallels and the fragments of the ‘Damascus Document’ that Eisenman and Philip Davies of Sheffield requested to see in their formal letter to John Strugnell, thereby precipitating the bitter and vindictive controversy of 1989. Why should this document be such a bone of contention?
The ‘Damascus Document’ speaks firstly of a remnant of Jews who, unlike their co-religionists, remained true to the Law. A ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ appeared among them. Like Moses, he took them into the wilderness, to a place called ‘Damascus’, where they entered into a renewed ‘Covenant’ with God. Numerous textual references make it clear that this Covenant is the same as the one cited by the ‘Community Rule’ for Qumran. And it is obvious enough — no scholar disputes it — that the ‘Damascus Document’ is speaking of the same community as the other Qumran scrolls. Yet the location of the community is said to be ‘Damascus’.
It is clear from the document’s context that the place in the desert called ‘Damascus’ cannot possibly be the Romanised city in Syria. Could the site for ‘Damascus’ have been in fact Qumran? Why the name of the location should have been thus masked remains uncertain — though simple self-preservation, dictated by the turmoil following the revolt of ad 66, would seem to be explanation enough, and Qumran had no name of its own at the time. In any case, it can hardly be coincidental that, according to the international team’s computer print-out, no fewer than ten copies or fragments of the ‘Damascus Document’ were found in Qumran’s caves.15
Like the ‘Community Rule’, the ‘Damascus Document’ includes a list of regulations. Some of these are identical to those in the ‘Community Rule’. But there are some additional regulations as well, two of which are worth noting. One pertains to marriage and children — which establishes that the Qumran community were not, as Father de Vaux maintained, celibate ‘Essenes’. A second refers — quite in passing, as if it were common knowledge — to affiliated communities scattered throughout Palestine. In other words, Qumran was not as isolated from the world of its time as de Vaux contended.
The ‘Damascus Document’ fulminates against three crimes in particular, crimes alleged to be rampant among the enemies of the ‘Righteous’, those who have embraced the ‘New Covenant’. These crimes are specified as wealth, profanation of the Temple (a charge levelled by the ‘Temple Scroll’ as well) and a fairly limited definition of fornication — taking more than one wife, or marrying one’s niece. As Eisenman has shown, the ‘Damascus Document’ thus echoes the ‘Temple Scroll’ in referring to issues of unique relevance to the period of the Herodian dynasty.16 And it echoes, as we shall see, a dispute in the community which figures more prominently in another of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’. This dispute involves an individual designated as ‘the Liar’, who defects from the community and becomes its enemy. The ‘Damascus Document’ condemns those ‘who enter the New Covenant in the land of Damascus, and who again betray it and depart’.17 Shortly thereafter, the document speaks of those ‘who deserted to the Liar’.18
The ‘Damascus Document’ also echoes the ‘Community Rule’ and the ‘War Scroll’ by speaking of a Messianic figure (or perhaps two such figures) who will come to ‘Damascus’ — a prophet or ‘Interpreter of the Law’ called ‘the Star’ and a prince of the line of David called ‘the Sceptre’.19 On five subsequent occasions in the text, there is a focus on a single figure, ‘the Messiah of Aaron and Israel’.20
The significance of this Messiah figure will be explored later. For the moment, it is worth considering the implications of ‘Damascus’ as a designation for Qumran. To most Christians, of course, ‘Damascus’ is familiar from Chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles, where it is taken to denote the Romanised city in Syria, that country’s modern-day capital. It is on the road to Damascus that Saul of Tarsus, in one of the best-known and most crucial passages of the entire New Testament, undergoes his conversion into Paul.21
According to Acts 9, Saul is a kind of inquisitor-cum-’enforcer’, dispatched by the high priest in the Temple of Jerusalem to suppress the community of heretical Jews — i.e. ‘early Christians’ — residing in Damascus. The priesthood are collaborators with the occupying Romans, and Saul is one of their instruments. In Jerusalem, he is already said to have participated actively in attacks on the ‘early Church’. Indeed, if Acts is to be believed, he is personally involved in the events surrounding the stoning to death of the individual identified as Stephen, acclaimed by later tradition as the first Christian martyr. He himself freely admits that he has persecuted his victims ‘to death’.
Prompted by his fanatical fervour, Saul then embarks for Damascus, to ferret out fugitive members of the ‘early Church’ established there. He is accompanied by a band of men, presumably armed; and he carries with him arrest warrants from the high priest in Jerusalem.
Syria, at the time, was not a part of Israel, but a separate Roman province, governed by a Roman legate, with neither an administrative nor a political connection with Palestine. How, then, could the high priest’s writ conceivably run there? The Roman Empire would hardly have sanctioned self-appointed ‘hit-squads’ moving from one territory to another within its domains, serving arrests, perpetrating assassinations and threatening the precarious stability of civic order. According to official policy, every religion was to be tolerated, provided it posed no challenge to secular authority or the social structure. A Jerusalem-based ‘hit-squad’ operating in Syria would have elicited some swift and fairly gruesome reprisals from the Roman administration — reprisals such as no high priest, whose position depended on Roman favour, would dare to incur. Given these circumstances, how could Saul of Tarsus, armed with warrants from the high priest, possibly have undertaken his punitive expedition to Damascus — if, that is, ‘Damascus’ is indeed taken to be the city in Syria?
If ‘Damascus’ is understood to be Qumran, however, Saul’s expedition suddenly makes perfect historical sense. Unlike Syria, Qumran did lie in territory where the high priest’s writ legitimately ran. It would have been entirely feasible for the high priest in Jerusalem to dispatch his ‘enforcers’ to extirpate heretical Jews at Qumran, a mere twenty miles away, near Jericho. Such action would have thoroughly conformed to Roman policy, which made a point of not meddling in purely internal affairs. Jews, in other words, were quite free to harry and persecute other Jews within their own domains, so long as such activities did not encroach on the Roman administration. And since the high priest was a Roman puppet, his efforts to extirpate rebellious co-religionists would have been all the more welcome.
This explanation, however, despite its historical plausibility, raises some extremely awkward questions. According to the consensus of the international team, the community at Qumran consisted of Judaic sectarians — the so-called ‘Essenes’, a pacifist ascetic sect having no connection either with early Christianity or with the ‘mainstream’ of Judaism at the time. Yet Saul, according to Acts, embarks for Damascus to persecute members of the ‘early Church’. Here, then, is a provocative challenge both to Christian tradition and to adherents of the consensus, who have studiously avoided looking at the matter altogether. Either members of the ‘early Church’ were sheltering with the Qumran community – or the ‘early Church’ and the Qumran community were one and the same. In either case, the ‘Damascus Document’ indicates that the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be distanced from the origins of Christianity.
The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’
Found in Cave 1 at Qumran, the ‘Habakkuk Pesher’, or ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, represents perhaps the closest approximation, in the entire corpus of kno
wn Dead Sea Scrolls, to a chronicle of the community — or, at any rate, of certain major developments in its history. It focuses in particular on the same dispute cited by the ‘Damascus Document’. This dispute, verging on incipient schism, seems to have been a traumatic event in the life of the Qumran community. It figures not just in the ‘Damascus Document’ and the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, but in four other Qumran texts as well; and there seem to be references to it in four further texts.22
Like the ‘Damascus Document’, the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ recounts how certain members of the community, under the iniquitous instigation of a figure identified as ‘the Liar’, secede, break the New Covenant and cease to adhere to the Law. This precipitates a conflict between them and the community’s leader, ‘the Teacher of Righteousness’. There is mention, too, of a villainous adversary known as ‘the Wicked Priest’. Adherents of the consensus have generally tended to regard ‘the Liar’ and ‘the Wicked Priest’ as two different sobriquets for the same individual. More recently, however, Eisenman has effectively demonstrated that ‘the Liar’ and ‘the Wicked Priest’ are two quite separate and distinct personages.23 He has made it clear that ‘the Liar’, unlike ‘the Wicked Priest’, emerges from within the Qumran community. Having been taken in by the community and accepted as a member in more or less good standing, he then defects. He is not just an adversary, therefore, but a traitor as well. In contrast, ‘the Wicked Priest’ is an outsider, a representative of the priestly establishment of the Temple. Although an adversary, he is not therefore a traitor. What makes him important for our purposes is the clue he provides to the dating of the events recounted in the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’. If ‘the Wicked Priest’ is a member of the Temple establishment, it means the Temple is still standing and the establishment intact. In other words, the activities of ‘the Wicked Priest’ pre-date the destruction of the Temple by Roman troops.
As in the ‘War Scroll’, but even more explicitly, there are references that can only be to imperial, not republican, Rome — to Rome, that is, in the 1st century AD. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, for example, alludes to a specific practice — victorious Roman troops making sacrificial offerings to their standards. Josephus provides written evidence for this practice at the time of the fall of the Temple in ad 70.24 And it is, in fact, a practice that would make no sense under the republic, when victorious troops would have offered sacrifices to their gods. Only with the creation of the empire, when the emperor himself was accorded the status of divinity, becoming the supreme god for his subjects, would his image, or token, or monogram, be emblazoned on the standards of his soldiers. The ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, therefore, like the ‘War Scroll’, the Temple Scroll’ and the ‘Damascus Document’, points specifically to the Herodian epoch.
10. Science in the Service of Faith
According to the consensus of the international team, the historical events reflected in all the relevant Dead Sea Scrolls occurred in Maccabean times — between the mid-2nd and mid-1 st centuries bc. The ‘Wicked Priest’, who pursues, persecutes and perhaps kills the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’, is generally identified by them as Jonathan Maccabaeus, or perhaps his brother Simon, both of whom enjoyed positions of prominence during that epoch; and the invasion of a foreign army is taken to be that launched by the Romans under Pompey in 63 bc.1 The historical backdrop of the scrolls is thus set safely back in pre-Christian times, where it becomes disarmed of any possible challenge to New Testament teaching and tradition.
But while some of the Dead Sea Scrolls undoubtedly do refer to pre-Christian times, it is a grievous mistake — for some, perhaps, deliberate obfuscation — to conclude that all of them do so. Pompey, who invaded the Holy Land in 63 bc, was, of course, a contemporary of Julius Caesar. At the time of Pompey and Caesar, Rome was still a republic, becoming an empire only in 27 bc, under Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian, who took the imperial title of Augustus. If the Roman invasion referred to in the scrolls was that of Pompey, it would have involved the armies of republican Rome. Yet the ‘War Rule’ speaks of a ‘king’ or ‘monarch’ of the invaders. And the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’ is even more explicit in its reference to victorious invaders sacrificing to their standards. It would therefore seem clear that the invasion in question was that of imperial Rome — the invasion provoked by the revolt of ad 66.
Professor Godfrey Driver of Oxford found numerous textual references within the scrolls that provide clues to their dating. Focusing in particular on the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, he concluded that the invaders could only be ‘the Roman legions at the time of the revolt in ad 66’. This conclusion, he added, ‘is put beyond doubt by the reference to their sacrificing to their military standards’.2 His statements, however, elicited a vicious attack from Father de Vaux, who recognised that they led inexorably to the conclusion that ‘the historical background of the scrolls therefore is the war against Rome’.3 This, of course, de Vaux could not possibly accept. At the same time, however, he could not refute such precise evidence. In consequence, he contrived to dismiss the evidence and attack only Driver’s general thesis: ‘Driver has started from the pre-conceived idea that all scrolls were post-Christian, and that this idea was based on the fallacious witness of orthography, language and vocabulary.’4 It was, he declared, for professional historians ‘to decide whether [Driver’s] motley history… has sufficient foundation in the texts’.5 It is interesting that de Vaux, who taught biblical history at the Ecole Biblique, should suddenly (at least when he had to answer Professor Driver) don a cloak of false modesty and shrink from considering himself an historian, taking refuge instead behind the supposed bulwarks of archaeology and palaeography.6 In fact, archaeological data reinforce the indications of chronology provided by the internal data of the scrolls themselves. External evidence concurs with internal evidence — evidence of which the consensus would seem to remain oblivious. At times, this has led to an embarrassing faux pas.
De Vaux, it will be remembered, embarked on a preliminary excavation of the Qumran ruins in 1951. His findings were sufficiently consequential to justify a more ambitious enterprise. A characteristic lassitude set in, however, and no full-scale excavation was undertaken until 1953. Annual excavations then continued until 1956; and in 1958, an associated site at Ein Feshka, less than a mile to the south, was also excavated. In his eagerness to distance the Qumran community from any connection with early Christianity, de Vaux rushed his conclusions about dating into print. In some instances, he did not even wait for archaeological evidence to support him. As early as 1954, the Jesuit professor Robert North noted no fewer than four cases in which de Vaux had been forced to retract on his dating. North also found it distressing that, even on so crucial a matter, no specialists ‘independently of de Vaux’s influence’ were asked to contribute their conclusions.7 But it was not de Vaux’s style to invite opinions that might conflict with his own and shed a more controversial light on the material. Nor was he eager to announce his errors when they occurred. Although quick to publish and publicise conclusions that confirmed his thesis, he was markedly more dilatory in retracting them when they proved erroneous.
One important element for de Vaux was a thick layer of ash found to be blanketing the surroundings of the ruins. This layer of ash patently attested to a fire of some sort, which had obviously caused considerable destruction. Indeed, it had led to Qumran’s being partially, if not wholly, abandoned for some years. A study of the coins found at the site revealed that the fire had occurred at some time towards the beginning of the reign of Herod the Great, who occupied the throne from 37 bc until 4 BC. The same data indicated that rebuilding had commenced under the regime of Herod’s son, Archelaus, who ruled (not as king, but as ethnarch) from 4 BC until AD 6.
According to de Vaux’s thesis, the Qumran community consisted of supposedly placid, peace-loving and ascetic ‘Essenes’, on good terms with Herod as with everyone else. If this were the case, the fire which destroyed the community should have resulted not f
rom any deliberate human intention — from an act of war, for example — but from an accident, or a natural disaster. Fortunately for de Vaux, a large crack was found running through a cistern. Although independent researchers found no indication that the crack extended any further, de Vaux claimed to have traced it through the whole of the ruins, the whole of the Qumran community.8 Even if it did, a number of experts concluded, it could probably be ascribed to erosion.9 For de Vaux, however, the crack, such as it was, seemed the result of one of the many earthquakes the region has suffered over the centuries. Instead of trying to identify the cause of the crack, in other words, de Vaux went rummaging for an earthquake that might have been responsible. As it happened, there was a more or less convenient earthquake on record. Josephus speaks of one that occurred towards the beginning of Herod’s reign, in 31 Be. This, de Vaux concluded, had caused the fire which led to the abandoning of the community. He did not bother to explain why rebuilding did not commence for a quarter of a century before, suddenly, proceeding with noticeable rapidity.
Robert Eisenman points to the strikingly precise timing of the delay in rebuilding. It coincides perfectly with Herod’s reign. No sooner had he died than reconstruction promptly began — and part of this reconstruction consisted of strengthening the defensive towers, as well as creating a rampart. It would thus seem clear, for some reason which de Vaux chose to ignore, that no one dared to rebuild Qumran while Herod remained on the throne. But why should that be the case if the community were on as congenial a footing with Herod as de Vaux maintained, and if the destruction of the community resulted from an earthquake? It would appear much more likely that the community was destroyed deliberately, on Herod’s orders, and that no reconstruction could begin until after his death. But why should Herod order the destruction of a community so placid, so universally loved, so divorced from political activity?
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception Page 18