VIII
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opened and investigated; a good number of the hundreds of coins found in the various strata of the site are not only unpublished, but many of them have apparently gone missing.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 unconnectedwith 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 burial 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 most comprehensive and determined attack on de Vaux’s idea of an Essene Qumran was launched in 2004 by the recently deceased Hebrew University professor Yizhar Hirschfeld in a fashionably entitled monograph, Qumran in Context: Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence. (Nowadays to be with it, one must treat everything ‘in context’.) Leaving aside the relics dating to the pre-exilic era, Hirschfeld allocates the archaeological finds to three periods. In the Hasmonean era, from the late second century to the midfirst century BCE, Qumran was a small fort and served exclusively military purposes. In the Herodian period, from c. 40 BCE to 68 CE, both Qumran and Ain Feshkha formed a rural estate belonging to a well-to-do Jewish family. Hirschfeld, like the Donceels before him, identified de Vaux’s scriptorium as a triclinium or dining hall, and as far as industries are concerned, saw the production of balsam, for which Jericho and Engedi were world-famous in antiquity, as the distinctive speciality of the Qumran estate. This theory is primarily based on the discovery in a cave, not in close proximity to Qumran (about 3 km to the north), of a small bottle that may have contained balsam according to the ‘very cautious’ suggestion of J. Patrich and B. Arubas (Eretz-Israel, 20 (1989), p. 206*). Here again the Scrolls have no role to play. In Hirschfeld’s view, the only possible connection between the inhabitants of the site and the Scrolls was that they may have assisted Jerusalem Jews, seeking to save their manuscript treasures, in advising them about suitable hiding places in the cliffs. Yizhar Hirschfeld proudly described himself as the champion of a secular Qumran which he had liberated ‘from the burden of religious significance’!
Finally, in an electronic publication issued in 2007, Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, two archaeologists working for the Israel Antiquities Authority, rejected all the previous theories and in the light of their excavation of the site, conducted between 1993 and 2003, concluded that Qumran was an industrial centre primarily devoted to pottery production.
So was Qumran a military establishment (Golb)? A villa rustica or country estate (the Donceels and Humbert)? A luxurious inn for travelling merchants (Crown and Cansdale)? A pottery workshop (Magen and Peleg)? Was it first a fort, then an agricultural settlement and then finally turned into a balsam factory (Hirschfeld)? Or was an original fortress converted in time to become the residence of a Jewish religious group (Humbert)? Or was it, as mainstream scholarship in the footsteps of de Vaux has always held, the centre of a religious community?
Before tackling the revisionist ideas, let me confront their common underlying presupposition, namely that the Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do directly with the people who lived at Qumran at the turn of the era. It is true, let it be repeated, that no scroll, not even the minutest manuscript fragment, has turned up in the ruins themselves. It is also conceivable – even if unlikely – that the more distant natural caves (1–3, 11) may have served as specially chosen hiding places by people who did not live in the area. But the man-made caves (4–10) in the marl terrace within a stone’s throw from the eastern edge of the building complex can hardly be imagined as unconnected with Qumran. Among these caves figures Cave 4, a library or manuscript depository, originally with wooden shelves, containing about two-thirds of over 900 Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars who ignore these archaeological facts in their attempt to interpret the Qumran settlement do so at their own risk. But even the manuscripts deposited in the more distant caves do not lack an indirect, but significant, archaeological link with the Qumran site. Untypical cylindrical scrolls jars found in Cave 1, but almost unattested and definitely uncommon elsewhere, have been discovered both on the Qumran site and in neighbouring caves. In short, not only the great closeness of the majority of the discovered manuscripts to the Qumran establishment, but the presence of the peculiar Qumran-type pottery in Scrolls caves, make it a priori methodologically unsound to consider the manuscripts as unrelated to the nearby habitation.
Moreover, the unexamined theory, first mooted by Norman Golb and unhesitatingly adopted by Yizhar Hirschfeld and others, regarding the provenance of the Scrolls from Jerusalem, runs into a twofold difficulty. Imagine that the manuscripts discovered in the Dead Sea region of the Judaean desert actually had belonged to a Jerusalem institution, even perhaps to the library of the Temple, and their owners or guardians decided to take them to a safe place in a time of danger, why on earth should they have risked carrying large numbers of precious manuscripts to a God-forsaken spot like the faraway Qumran caves when equally good hiding places could have easily been found closer to home? Also, looking at it from a down-to-earth point of view, would the authorities which failed to put the Temple treasure in a safe location (see chapter VII, p. 168), have taken all that trouble to transport to relatively distant Qumran a collection of manuscripts?
A second serious argument militates against the Jerusalem library theory, namely the nature of a notable proportion of the texts. The reason for asserting the Jerusalem origin of the Scrolls is to combat the mainstream opinion that they came from the Essene sect resident at neighbouring Qumran. Yet many of the manuscripts found in the caves are definitely sectarian. Take, for instance, the liturgical calendars as an example. We number fifteen of these among the Scrolls. They all attest an unofficial sectarian calendar and not a single one comprises the time reckoning according to which the priests in Jerusalem regulated their worship. Examined from close quarters, the revisionist historians’ endeavour to ‘secularize’ Qumran by ‘liberating’ it from the Scrolls falls flat. It would even become ludicrous if, in order to combat the theory that the Dead Sea Scrolls were manuscripts deposited by the Qumran Essenes in nearby caves, the revisionists had to fall back on the suggestion that the texts were concealed by Jerusalem Essenes in the Qumran area with which they had no prior connection! To strengthen my sarcasm, let me point out that Josephus’ mention of an ‘Essene gate’ in the Holy City (Jewish War III:145) implies the likely existence of an Essene congregation in Jerusalem.
But even without their deliberate ignoring of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the revisionist theories stand up badly to scrutiny. The only argument in favour of Qumran being a fortress (Golb, Humbert, Hirschfeld) is that it has a reinforced tower, although some of the reinforcement should probably be attributed to repair work after the earthquake which hit Judaea in 31 BCE. But it is well known that towers were not necessarily linked to strongholds; they existed also in orchards and agricultural estates as observation points and even as protection against marauding gangs of brigands. Furthermore, the idea of a military establishment at Qumran is hardly consonant with the thin and shabby perimeter walls and the unsecured water supply. As for the adjacent cemetery consisting of 1,200 individual military graves, this hardly makes sense. If for hygienic reasons the victors had decided to bury the corpses of the fallen enemy, they would surely have thrown them, as Magen Broshi has remarked, into a shallow mass grave and not in neatly arranged individual resting places.
If the idea of a fortress does not fare well, neither does that of a rural mansion in the midst of an agricultural estate (Donceels, Hirschfeld). The arid land of the Dead Sea shore cannot be compared to the fertile oasis of the area of Jericho or Engedi, and Hirschfeld’s assertion that the climate was more favourable to agriculture 2,000 years ago is an unascertainable supposition. The Qumran buildings, devoid of decorative features, do not resemble the structure of a typical villa rustica, and the idea of a tricliniumfor luxury banquets has been blown sky-high by Ronny Reich when he pointed out that the Qumran couch or divan is only 50 centimetres wide, too narrow to allow a person to recline in comfort. The only other plaster furniture of this sort discovered in Judaea and dating to the same period is 1.8 metres wide (Journal of Jewish Studies, 46 (1995), pp. 157–60).
The hostelry surmise (Crown, Cansdale) is the weakest of a set of ill-founded theories. For Qumran to be seen as a caravanserai for merchants travelling from Transjordan to Jerusalem, we must suppose that it lay close to busy roads. But there is no evidence that this was the case. There are no signs of nearby harbour installations either, nor do the ruins reveal remains of international commercial activity. Once I ironically referred to the Crown–Cansdale thesis as the Qumran Hilton theory, an installation providing comfort with swimming pools and a large library to rich salt merchants who sought relaxation in the study of religious literature. As for the unexpectedly large graveyard, attached to a place without regular inhabitants, it would be best explained by the hypothesis of successive outbreaks of salmonella poisoning.
A final word about the Magen–Peleg theory: two working kilns are scarcely enough for the establishment of a pottery manufacturing centre in the middle of nowhere.
The long and the short of the re-examination of the revisionist attempts is that they all lack the strength to undermine the mainstream interpretation of Qumran archaeology. Roland de Vaux’s thesis that Qumran was the home of a Jewish religious community, which in some way was associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, has stood the test by fire. This flattering conclusion does not mean, however, that the original excavator has said the last word on the subject. The understanding of the material objects found at Qumran has moved ahead during the last half century, and now is the moment to catch up with progress.
Over the years, and especially during the last two decades, both field archaeology and further study of the already available evidence have improved the commonly held views but have also questioned some of de Vaux’s interpretations without affecting his generally accepted conclusions. A clear, even magisterial account of the current state of research has been available since 2002 in The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls by Professor Jodi Magness. She has added much valuable information on pottery, water installations, ritual purification, etc. but her most notable innovation concerns de Vaux’s chronology of the site. She is not convinced that de Vaux’s earliest phase (Period Ia) of the communal occupation of Qumran (130–100 BCE) really existed, as the sect, in her opinion, did not settle in the area before 100 BCE. Magness’s opening phase is de Vaux’s Period Ib (100–31 BCE) ending with the earthquake. But as she – like a number of other historians, myself included – does not follow de Vaux’s hypothesis about the devastated site being left unoccupied during the remaining years of king Herod’s reign, her first period of sectarian occupation is dated between c. 100 and Herod’s death in 4 BCE.
All the main propositions of de Vaux’s concerning the communal and religious nature of the settlement still stand. They are testified to by the large assembly hall/dining room and the adjacent pantry with remains of a large quantity of tableware, pots and pans, as well as by ten out of the sixteen pools, some of them with steps leading to the water, which prove that ritual purification was an important part of the life of the ancient occupants of Qumran. Apropos of purity, one must not forget the latrine in Room 51 of the site, situated close to a pool of ritual purification, already referred to by de Vaux and discussed in full detail by Jodi Magness (see pp. 105–113 of her book).
Where did the inhabitants of Qumran sleep? The question of residential accommodation is still debated. It is possible that some rooms on the collapsed second floor served for living quarters. Estimates vary from 10 to 70 persons housed in the buildings. The rest of the population of the site (possibly 150 to 200 in total, judging from the size of the cemetery, according to Magen Broshi) slept in caves, huts and tents. The hypothesis is supported by the discovery by Broshi and Hanan Eshel of relics of tent equipment in the neighbourhood, and domestic utensils in ‘residential’ caves where no scrolls were found (DSD, 6 (1999), pp. 328–48).
A final comment on the fascinating question whether women lived at Qumran: the archaeological evidence implies only a sporadic and insignificant female presence and it should be recalled that most of the women and all the children buried in the southern extension of the cemetery are now identified by Joe Zias as recent Bedouin burials (see chapter II, p. 40). If we approach the problem from the vantage point of a hypothetical male celibate community, we are left to explain the presence of a couple of female skeletons in the western cemetery, together with one spindle whorl and four beads in the sectarian settlement (Magness (2002), p. 178). Whatever these prove, it is not a regular occupation of the establishment by female inhabitants in any way proportionate to the number of male members.
In conclusion, since the communal religious interpretation of the Qumran establishment and the contents of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls mutually confirm one another, it is now reasonably safe to move to the next question and seek to attach a name to the people who occupied the Qumran site some time between the turn of the second century BCE and 68 CE.
2. Identifying the Qumran Community
Having set out the aim, the organizational structure and the hierarchy of the membership of the Jewish groups described in chapter VII, let us now move a step forward and try to identify the Qumran sect with one of the known Jewish religious parties flourishing in Palestine in the pre-70 CEera. Before proceeding, it will be useful to rehearse succinctly the information relative to the structure and the religious ideas of the two types of congregation that the six Dead Sea rules have revealed.
To begin with the married group, attested in the ‘Damascus’ writing (CD) and all the other documents except the Community Rule (S), this new miniature biblical ‘Israel’, with its priests and its laity symbolically divided into twelve tribes and smaller traditional units, is represented as living in towns and ‘camps’ (rural settlements) all over Judaea in the midst of the bulk of the population, Jewish and Gentile, but in self-imposed separation from them. These families, distinguished from the other Jews by their more rigorous sexual mores, ritual observances and the specific education they gave to their children during the first twenty years of their lives, were engaged in farming and practised commerce – among themselves, and with other Jews and, within the framework of restrictive regulations, even with non-Jews. They worshipped in their own ‘appointed times’, but seem to have maintained some contact with the Temple, sending their offerings, and observing, while in Jerusalem, their special rigorous laws concerning ritual purity which required abstinence from marital sex.
The government of the married ‘Damascus’ sect was in the hands of learned Zadokite priests, but in the absence of a qualified priest, a well-trained Levite, member of the lower class of the priestly tribe, could be put in charge. The priest in command of each unit was known as the Guardian, who was acting on his own, without a council. His task was to instruct, exercise pastoral care and oversee the contact between his subjects and the outside world. He was entrusted with the training of the adult Jewish candidates for membership. No doubt he also played a part, together with the parents, in the religious education of the children of the members of his community until they attained the age of enrolment.
Ten elected judges administered justice in accordance with biblical law and communal regulations. They could, apparently, order the execution of persons found guilty of grave offences, and impose lesser penalties on the lawbreakers and those who disobeyed the rules. On the whole, the Community’s precepts were more stringent than those of Scripture – with one exception. The death penalty imposed by the Bible on a person who desecrated the Sabbath is downgraded to a seven-year prison sentence (CD 12:4–6). The rigorousness of the sectarian law may be illustrated by the possibility of ‘fornication’ between a husband and his own wife, a sin that incurred the penalty of expulsion from the group (4Q270). What constituted this ‘fornication’ is not specified. It may have been intercourse with a menstruating wife, or possibly sex with a pre-pubescent, pregnant or post-menopausal spouse if the sect, like the marrying Essenes of Josephus, believed that intercourse was legitimate only for the propagation of mankind.
Contact with non-Jews was envisaged as possible, but subject to special regulations. Gentiles were protected by the law: Community members were forbidden to steal from them or kill them. On the other hand, sectaries were not allowed to sell clean animals or birds to Gentiles for fear that they might sacrifice them to their gods. It was also prohibited, contrary to the custom followed in the Jerusalem Temple, to accept from a Gentile an offering for the sanctuary (MMT, 4Q394, fr. 4–7). Nor were members of the community permitted to sell them a servant who had been a slave prior to being made a proselyte and thus converting to Judaism.
Communal funds were administered jointly by the Guardian and the judges. Members of the Community, who kept the right to handle their property and earnings, were obliged to pay into the common kitty a sum equivalent to two days’ wages per month, which were to be employed for charitable purposes.
The Guardian presided over the periodic assembly of the camp and the overall superior, the Guardian of all the camps, chaired the general assembly of all members once a year on the Feast of Weeks, on which occasion the Covenant was renewed, new members were initiated and unworthy old members excluded.
With the exception of the rules relating to matrimony and ownership of property, the doctrines and beliefs of the married Community, including their expectation of a Messiah of Aaron and a Messiah of Israel, may be presumed to have been essentially the same as those of the celibate sect.
The association described in the Community Rule is also a symbolical Israel in a nutshell, split into priests and laymen and bearing the title of the ‘Community’ (yahad), the ‘council of the Community’, the ‘men of the Law’, the ‘men of holiness’ and even the ‘men of perfect holiness’. The members are described as cut off from the unrighteous. In explicit fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah, ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord’ (Isa. 40:3 quoted in 1QS 8:14), they chose to withdraw to the desert for the study of the divine Law as well as the ways of the spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood, and committed themselves to the practice of all the virtues prescribed in the Torah. The Community was governed by, and followed the teaching of, the priests, Sons of Zadok.
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 Teacher 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. They 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.
Geographical, chronological and organizational arguments may be listed in favour of the identity of the Qumran Community and the Essenes. Whereas Philo and Josephus state that the Essenes lived in various places in Judaea, Pliny speaks of only one renowned Essene settlement at a short distance from the western shore of the Dead Sea where palm trees grow. The last town mentioned before the Essene notice was Jericho and the next two ‘below’ (infra) the Essenes were Engedi and the rock fortress of Masada. Qumran would nicely fit this territorial setting if ‘below’ is interpreted, not as ‘lower down’, but as ‘downstream’ or ‘further south’ on the way to the southernmost site of Masada. The nature of the Qumran ruins (communal buildings, a huge quantity of crockery and many facilities for ritual bathing) strongly support the Essene theory. To lessen the probability of the identification of Pliny’s location with Qumran, one would need a suitable site somewhere on the hills above Engedi. In the 1960s Israeli archaeologists, led by Benjamin Mazar, thoroughly investigated the area without finding any trace of the Essenes. By contrast, Yizhar Hirschfeld in the 1990s believed he had discovered above Engedi remains of wooden huts, but no pools or communal buildings. On the whole, the view that Qumran is Pliny’s Essene village seems by far the most probable.
From the chronological point of view, Qumran was communally occupied from the late second century BCE, or on a more noticeable level at least from 100 BCE to 68 CE. If 100 BCE corresponds to the beginning of the first major architectural developments, the beginnings of the sectarian occupation are likely to date to the end of the second century BCE. This period, suggested by archaeology, matches the existence of the Essenes in Judaea as attested by Josephus. He first refers to them in the time of Jonathan Maccabaeus (mid-second century BCE) and their last mention in the Jewish War coincides with the great rebellion against Rome (66–70 CE) during which the Essenes had bravely resisted Roman tortures. With the destruction of Qumran, the Essenes disappear from the historical horizon.
The most important proofs of identity are the organizational correspondences. Thus initiation was by stages in both groups: a first probationary period was followed by two further years of training. The extremely unusual common ownership of property characterized the life of the Essenes and of the strictly ascetic Qumran group. The Essenes’ renunciation of marriage, except in one of their branches according to Josephus, was equally uncommon. It matches the strict ascetics at Qumran, but not the ‘Damascus’ sect whose members, like Josephus’ special branch of Essenes, approved of marriage. The Essenes were critical of the Jerusalem Temple and so were the celibate Qumran sectaries. Both considered their community as the place of worship approved by God. The meals, blessed by priests, were reserved only for full members both by the Essenes and by the strictly observant Qumran Community. Both opposed oaths, with the exception of the vow made at their entry into the association.
However, there are also some differences. The two major discrepancies – common or private ownership and celibate or married forms of life – resolve themselves once it is recognized that two separate branches of the same movement are attested by both the Scrolls and Josephus. Pliny’s perfunctory statement that the Essenes lived without money (sine pecunia) does not tally with the numerous coins found at Qumran, but it may be explained by exaggerated ‘poetic’ licence and an artistic liking for a nice turn of phrase. Further conflicting features are that the Qumran candidates swore their oath to return to the Law of Moses at the beginning of their training, whereas the Essenes took a vow of allegiance to the Torah at the end. It may have happened on both occasions. Moreover, the ‘Damascus’ sectaries were allowed to have slaves while the Essenes, according to Philo and possibly according to Josephus, opposed this. But the reliability of the statement has already been queried (see pp. 194–5 above). Furthermore, the weighty role of the Zadokite priests and the subject of messianic expectation, well attested in the Scrolls, are lacking in the classical sources. But this silence can easily be assigned to the unwillingness of Philo and Josephus to burden their Gentile readers with complicated Jewish theological concepts. Let us further add the total absence in the Scrolls of the term ‘Essene’ or anything approaching it. Here the most likely reason for the Scrolls’ silence is that the sectaries were described as Essenes only by outsiders; within the group they called themselves ‘men of the Community’, ‘men of holiness’ or ‘men of the Law’ in a somewhat similar way as members of the Catholic order of the Franciscans used to be commonly designated by outsiders as ‘Grey Friars’ and those of the nonconformist Society of Friends are usually called ‘Quakers’. Set against all the weighty common traits the discrepancies appear insignificant.
Another kind of objection to the Essene identification, emphatically raised in 1995 by Professor Martin Goodman, is based on the incompleteness of our information concerning the religious profile of Judaism during the epoch in question. He reminds us that Josephus names only the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots as existing religious parties (‘A Note on the Qumran Sectarians, the Essenes and Josephus’, Journal of Jewish Studies 46 (1995), pp. 161–6). Surely, Goodman claims, there were more than four dissenting religious factions among Jews at the turn of the era? The Talmud speaks of twenty-four sects of heretics. Hence, according to Goodman, the mainstream view that the Qumranites were Essenes is oversimplified: it stands on insecure and shaky foundations.
While this observation is not without value, neither does it deal a fatal blow to the Essene theory. It merely means that if the Qumran sectaries were not Essenes in the absolute sense, they belonged to a company hardly distinguishable from the Essene sect. This reminds me of the scholar who was unwilling to accept that the land of Canaan was occupied by the biblical Joshua and preferred to ascribe the conquest of Palestine to a different military leader who lived in the same period, who acted in a similar fashion and who, according to questionable traditions, was also called Joshua. Joking apart, while the identification of the Dead Sea sect and the Essenes is not an established fact, it is a strongly argued and well-founded hypothesis which will remain tenable until Professor Goodman or someone else comes up with a more convincing alternative.
Rachel Elior’s recent thesis claiming that the members of the Qumran community were not Essenes, because the Essenes never existed and were invented by Josephus, strikes me as an entertaining flight of fancy. As at the moment of writing these lines the theory is known only from press interviews released in March 2009; the interested public will have to await the appearance of the English edition of Memory and Oblivion: The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls, before her claim can be subjected to stringent scrutiny. Rachel Elior’s much-vaunted discovery that the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a priestly group has in fact been common knowledge since the start of Qumran studies, but her assertion that this Community cannot be identified with the Essenes, because the Essenes of the classical sources do not appear in a priestly context, is mistaken. Josephus, although writing largely for a Graeco-Roman readership uninterested in Jewish peculiarities, still felt it necessary to underline the significant role of the priests in Essene life. He reported that the preparation of the sect’s pure food was entrusted to priests and that their common table was presided over by a priest who recited the prayer before and after each meal (Jewish Antiquities XVIII:22; Jewish War II:131). As an indirect pointer, Josephus designated as a ‘sacred robe’ the white garment which constituted the Essene uniform (Jewish War II:131. He refers here to the ceremonial ‘linen’ or ‘fine white linen’ vestment prescribed for the priests by the Bible (Exod. 28:39–43; Ezek. 44:17–19) as well as the Qumran War Scroll (1QM 7:10–11).
Negatively, Elior deduces from the silence of the rabbis that the Essenes did not exist, but in doing so she does not bear in mind that by the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud (200–500 CE), the Essenes had already vanished and consequently there was no practical need for a debate about them. She further argues that the absence of the term ‘Essenes’ from the Scrolls proves that they had nothing to do with the Qumran texts. But such a statement overlooks the fact that the Semitic name ‘Essenes’ (‘Saints’ or ‘Healers’, see p. 192) was used only by outsiders like Philo, Josephus and the Roman Pliny. The initiates of the sect called themselves ‘Men of the Community’, ‘Men of Holiness’, ‘Men of Supreme Holiness’ or ‘the Poor’ in their writings. Such a linguistic phenomenon is quite common in the religious terminology of most languages. Members of the Catholic orders of St Francis of Assisi are officially called Friars Minor (Fratres Minores in Latin), but outsiders, as I have noted, call them ‘Franciscans’ or ‘Grey-friars’. Likewise the members of the ‘Society of Friends’ are popularly known as ‘Quakers’.
The main evidence used for the demonstration of the Essene identity of the Qumran sect consists in the unique features, unattested for any other Jewish group in antiquity, of common ownership of property and male celibacy, reinforced by Pliny’s location of the Essenes on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
Against Professor Elior’s contention that the Essenes were made up by Josephus, attention must be drawn to their very detailed portrayal in Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, and to Josephus’ numerous references to Essene individuals involved in Palestinian Jewish history from the mid-second century BCE to the war against Rome in 66–70 CE. Finally, in his autobiography Josephus states that he himself gained personal experience of Essenism when as a sixteen-year-old young man he joined the Essene community for a time. These concrete factual accounts, easily controllable by Josephus’ contemporaries, do not strike one as the figment of someone’s fertile imagination.
To return to weightier matters, we may need to adopt a fresh point of view in assessing the relationship between the married and the celibate communities. Josephus gives the impression that the non-marrying Essenes formed the main group and the marrying branch was an unimportant side shoot. The much more extensive Qumran evidence in favour of the married sect suggests the opposite view, namely that the ‘Damascus’ type sectaries represented the bulk of the movement, but that the fame of the celibate elite of Qumran reached the ends of the earth. ‘Unbelievable though this may sound, for thousands of centuries a race has existed which is eternal yet into which no one is born,’ Pliny tells us. Understandably, the Jewish apologists Philo and Josephus were only too glad to propagate this notion and present the Essenes as Jewish religious celebrities to their intellectually hungry Graeco-Roman readers.
3. The History of the Qumran-Essene Community
As is well known, the Qumran caves have not yielded one single strictly historical document. Hence any attempt at reconstructing the origin and development of the Dead Sea community must rely on an interpretation of theologically motivated data couched in cryptic language such as Teacher of Righteousness, Wicked Priest, Furious Young Lion, Kittim, etc. I will not be concerned here with the historical hypotheses which have already been shown to be unlikely or indeed unacceptable, like Zealotism or Jewish Christianity (see pp. 189–191). Leaving these out of consideration, what do the hints contained in the Scrolls add up to in regard to the history of the Qumran Community?
The Exhortation of the Damascus Document displays three chronological details of significance. The ‘age of wrath’, the political-religious upheaval corresponding to the first stages of the community, began 390 years after the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The Teacher of Righteousness arrived 20 years later. Finally, about 40 years after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness, his opponents were punished by ‘the head of the kings of Greece’. From the reference to the ‘kings of Greece’ we may conclude that the events have taken place in the Hellenistic period of Jewish history. The straightforward application of the three chronological figures (390, 20 and 40 years) points also to the second century BCE as the historical context of the birth and early development of the sect. Employing simple arithmetic, the onset of the ‘age of wrath’ 390 years after Nebuchadnezzar’s victory in Judaea in 586 BCE brings us to 196 BCE, the beginning of the Syrian Greek (Seleucid) domination of Palestine which commenced with the Seleucid king Antiochus III, the Great’s conquest of the Jewish homeland in 200 BCE, when he defeated the Egyptian-Greek Ptolemies at the battle of Panias. The changeover resulted in increasing Hellenistic influence on the Jews, which in turn provoked the formation of a group of tradition-loving pious men (the Hasidim), the presumed forefathers of the Qumran Community. The appearance, twenty years later, of the Teacher of Righteousness brings us close to the accession to the throne of Antiochus IV, Epiphanes (175–163 BCE), whose hostility to the Jewish religion marked the climax of a major upheaval, the Hellenistic crisis. The length of the career of the Teacher of Righteousness, which started in year 20 of the ‘age of wrath’, is not given. The lower end of the chronological perspective of the author of the Damascus Exhortation is about 40 years after the disappearance of the Teacher.
In mathematical terms: 390 + 20 + X (the Teacher’s ministry) + circa 40 add up to 450 + X. In the early stages of Qumran research, scholars like Manchester University’s Professor H. H. Rowley, took these figures at their face value. The ‘age of wrath’ started in 196 BCE (586–390) and with it the burgeoning community of the pious Hasidim of the pre-Maccabaean period came into being. The Teacher of Righteousness arose in c. 176 BCE and is identified with the martyr high priest Onias III, and the Wicked Priest with the Hellenizing pontiff Menelaus who in 171 BCEordered the murder of Onias III (2 Macc. 4:34–5). The bottom line of the events is to be drawn somewhere in the second half of the second century BCE.
This solution of early Qumran history, plain at first sight, nevertheless runs into a double snag. The first arises from general historical considerations, the second from the Habakkuk Commentary. To take the figure 390 literally in a calculation of biblical chronology is unsound. No ancient Jewish writer had a correct notion of the length of the post-exilic era. In the third century BCE, the Jewish Hellenist chronographer Demetrius counted 573 years – 73 too many – between the Assyrian conquest of Samaria (722/1 BCE) and the start of the rule of Ptolemy IV in Egypt in 221 BCE. The reasonably careful Josephus was also guilty of several miscalculations. Figures relating to the same event can vary even between his Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War. Thus he counted 481 (Antiquities) or 471 (War) years from the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE to the death of the Hasmonean ruler Aristobulus I (103 BCE). The correct figure is 435 years. Again, Josephus made the Jewish temple built in Leontopolis in Egypt by Onias IV last 343 years, whereas the period between 160 BCE (the date of the construction of the temple) and 73 CE (the date of its overthrow) amounts only to 233 years. As for the rabbinic pseudo-historical work known as Seder ‘Olam Rabbah or Great World Order, it allows 490 years to elapse between the first destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the second by Titus in 70 CE. The true figure is 656 years. To accept therefore the 390 years of the Damascus Document for genuine chronology is risky, to say the least.
What stands definitely behind the Damascus Document’s reckoning is the Book of Daniel’s symbolical understanding of Jeremiah’s prophecy concerning the 70 years of rule granted to Babylon (Jeremiah 29:10). According to Daniel, the implied meaning is 70 times seven or 490 years (Daniel 9:24). Without any doubt, this mystical number lurks in the background of the Seder ‘Olam Rabbah and very likely of the Damascus Document. All we need is to assume that the ministry of the Teacher of Righteousness lasted the allegorical 40 years, like Moses’ leadership of the Israelites in the Sinai desert, and we end up with 390 + 20 + 40 + 40 = 490, as the moment of the coming of the Messiah of Aaron and the Messiah of Israel.
Leaving aside this theological chronology, we may reasonably deduce from the cryptic allusions of the Damascus Exhortation that the origins of the Qumran community and the activity of its founder are to be placed in the second century BCE, say between 175 and 125 BCE, definitely during the Hellenistic era of Palestinian Jewish history. The Damascus Document itself is pre-Roman (pre-63 BCE), dated to the end of the second century BCE. To move further ahead, the various pesharim and other forms of exegetical material from Qumran enable the student to draw a neater contour for the historical canvas and fill it in with more colourful detail by providing, among other things, identifiable historical names. The Nahum Commentary and the Habakkuk pesher envisage Jerusalem and the surrounding lands as governed by two classes of rulers: the Greek (Seleucid) kings, Antiochus (Epiphanes) and Demetrius (Eukairos) on the one hand and the rulers of the Kittim who, like the Roman proconsuls, regularly changed. The Kittim-Romans, mentioned also in the fragmentary historical calendar, are portrayed as the ultimate conquerors of the world who later on, in the eschatological age, were to be governed by kings (= emperors). This extended historical horizon, for which the War Scroll (1 and 4QM) and the Book of War (4Q285) furnish additional information, covers sectarian history and eschatological expectation from 175 BCE to the end of the first century BCE, and probably well into the first century CE.
The badly preserved historical calendar provides further pieces for the completion of the puzzle. It mentions the priest John (probably John Hyrcanus I, 135–103 BCE); Shelamzion (Queen Salome Alexandra, 76–67 BCE); Hyrcanus (the high priest John Hyrcanus II, 63–40 BCE) and Aemilius (Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, governor of Syria, 65–62 BCE). To proceed further, the investigation must be focused on the Wicked Priest who, as high priestly ruler of the Jewish nation, is more likely to be identifiable thanks to the Books of the Maccabees and Josephus than the more shadowy leading characters of the sect. This Wicked Priest, being a contemporary and adversary of the Teacher of Righteousness, belongs to the opening phase of sectarian history in the second century BCE.
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 BCEonwards, 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.