James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (77 page)

One might actually be able to conceive of a ‘
Galut
’ of these ‘
Holy Camps
’ or ‘
Camps of Holiness
’, as this curiously idi
o
syncratic letter would put it – or, in the way it will be put in the first line of the War Scroll, ‘
the Diaspora of the Desert
’ which it, in turn, will identify as ‘
Benjamin
’!
19
As this will be put in the Damascus Document’s somewhat parallel exposition of ‘
the Star Prophecy
’, which will also reference ‘
the Tabernacle of David which is fallen
’ from Amos 5:26–27 and 9:11–12 – this will be ‘
re-erected
’
in a Land
‘
north of Damascus
’ which could also be reckoned as including these ‘
Camps of Holiness
’ or wilde
r
ness ‘
Holy Camps
’ being alluded to here in both the War Scroll and
MMT
.
20

In the new situation defined by contemporary political realities, the flight
across the Jordan
signaled so often in various texts, and the movement expressed archaically as ‘
going out from the Land of Judah
to dwell in the Land of Damascus
’ and specif
i
cally delineated in the Damascus Document as a prelude to ‘
erecting the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus
’, these ‘
Camps of Holiness
’ or ‘
Holy Camps
’ could actually even be conceived of as including, not just
Transjordan
or the New Te
s
tament’s ‘
Perea
’ or
the Decapolis
, but also – as in the various ‘
heresiologies
’ with which we began this analysis – far beyond, all the way up to Northern Syria including Carrhae or Edessa and even ‘
beyond the Euphrates
’, perhaps as far as
Adiabene in present-day Northern Iraq as well.

‘
Do not give Holy Things to Dogs
’, Gentile Gifts in the Temple, and ‘
Zealot
’/
Sicarii
Essenes

Instead of Mark and Matthew’s
Greek Syrophoenician woman
comparing herself and her daughter to the ‘
dogs under the table
’ or Luke’s ‘a certain
Poor man
(
Lazarus
)
wanting to be filled from the crumbs which fell from the Rich Man
’
s table
’ while ‘
the dogs licked his sores
’ – not to mention the
Talmud
’s equally silly exposition of ‘
Ben Kalba Sabu
‘
a
’’s name in terms of
the Poor
‘
coming to his door hungry as a dog and going away filled
’, now the reason
MMT
gives for
banning the
‘
dogs from the Camps of Holiness
’ – carrying with it in particular the meaning of
Jerusalem
and
the Temple
as the
Chief
of these
Holy Camps
– is because ‘
the Dogs
’ in such environments might ‘
eat the bones
(not ‘
the crumbs
’)
with the flesh still on them
’. Here too, it is interesting that it is ‘
the flesh
’ that interests our legal purists not just ‘
the bones
’ – that is,
the dogs
are carnivores pure and simple and, thus, even their presence either
in the camps
or, more particularly,
in the Temple
would
violate the ban on the co
n
sumption of carrion
.

What we have here is probably the original behind the whole circle of allusions regarding these telltale ‘
Dogs
’. Moreover it most certainly is also reflected in James’ rulings to overseas communities in the ban he enunciates on what in Greek, as we have seen, is compressed into the single category of ‘
strangled things
’ but which in other contexts – the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
, for example, or the Koran – is more fully and precisely defined as ‘
carrion
’.
21

There also may be a secondary, more symbolic meaning behind all this and that is of the kind we are seeing in the Go
s
pels, namely,
the use of this
‘
Dogs
’
metaphor to relate to Gentiles
. In the light of the mutual polemics we have been following and the verbal repartee of the kind found in Paul’s Letters, this arcane and curious allusion to
Dogs
from this native Palestinian Jewish document found in multiple copies at Qumran therefore might also be looked on as a veiled allusion to the same kind of thing Matthew 15:27 is intending in his allusion to ‘
even the little dogs eat of the crumbs falling from their master
’
s table
’ (Mark 7:28, as already explained, uses slightly different language: ‘
even the little dogs under the table eat of the children
’
s crumbs
’).

It would also be well to point out at this point that just as Matthew’s presentation of the ‘
dogs under the master
’
s table
’ exchange is followed in 15:30–31 by the allusion to ‘
the dumb speaking
,
the maimed restored
,
the lame walking
,
and the blind seeing
’ while the People ‘
Glorified the God of Israel
’ (in Mark 7:31–37 this is rather depicted by the picture of Jesus curing a deaf and dumb man by ‘
putting his fingers into his ears and spitting on his tongue
’), the barring the dogs from the Temple is preceded in
MMT
by the material
barring the blind and the deaf
from approaching
‘
the purity of the Temple
’ for reasons not u
n
like those signaled in Mark’s vivid depiction of Jesus’ restoration of the deaf-mute’s speaking and hearing.

But there is also a lengthy passage almost directly following ‘
the barring of the dogs from the Temple
’ in
MMT
dealing with the ‘
uncleanness
’ and ‘
cleansing
’ of lepers (1.67–76), a subject – as already underscored – treated throughout the Gospels in the context often of just another simple ‘
touch
’ by Jesus – as, for instance, in Matthew 8:2–3 and
pars
, but also those just encountered in Luke 7:22 and 17:12 above.

In the writer’s view this kind of corresponding subject matter – not to mention an often somewhat analogous sequentiality and what appears to be an almost systematic ideological inversion or reversal – occurs with such frequency that it can hardly be thought to be accidental or coincidental. Again, it should be appreciated that just these categories of persons being either
barred from the Temple
(in this context, the symbolic treatment of ‘
Jesus as Temple
’ should always be kept in mind) or
kept at a distance
in documents at Qumran (this includes
wine-bibbers
,
Sinners
,
prostitutes
,
over-flowing
menstrual bleeders
,
lepers
,
the deaf
,
the dumb
,
the blind
, and
the lame
,
gluttons
,
tax-collectors
, and Roman
Centurions
to name but a few) are
welcomed
by Jesus, not only in
table fellowship
, but also with a miraculous and healing ‘
touch
’!
It is always hard to escape the impression that the people creating these traditions are laughing at what they knew to be native Palestinian ‘
scruples
’ (as Paul would beli
t
tlingly characterize them) or what they saw as anachronistic superstitions – in the process, creating their own supernatural Greco-Roman and Hellenistic semi-divine ‘
Mystery
’ figure, such as an
Asclepius
,
Dionysus
,
Apollo
,
Orpheus
,
Mithra
, or
Osiris
or of the kind an Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Petronius, or Apuleius might create, replacing these irksome, troublesome and, for the most part, even loathsome bans or taboos with this new, less offensive and more agreeable, less strident and more cosmopol
i
tan man-god; and this,
in the very same environment of those insisting on such proscriptions
and, to add insult to injury,
pi
c
turing him as walking around in it
– but how successful, two thousand years worth of success.

In Matthew the allusion to ‘
Dogs
’, as we have seen, occurs in two separate contexts, once with regard to this ‘
Canaanite woman
’ and again at the end of ‘
the Sermon of the Mount
’ – the one apparently in
response to the other (if not Jesus simply responding to himself). In Luke – indirectly echoed in the
Lazarus
material in John – the ‘
Dogs
’ allusion occurs in an entirely different context, in some ways even more closely linked to Talmudic ‘
Ben Kalba Sabu
‘
a
’ scenarios. However these things may be and however one interprets them, the references to ‘
Dogs
’ in Mark and Matthew, anyhow, certainly
have something to do with Gentiles
or, at least, how these two Gospel writers
felt Jews looked upon Gentiles
, namely,
as being no better than Dogs
! The related materials in Luke and John (Luke acting as a kind of bridge to John) also have the not-unrelated reverse of these, that is, a not so thinly-disguised strain of anti-Semitism that runs through both of them.

If we take these allusions to
Dogs
in all contexts as involving
Gentiles
, then even the reference to ‘
dogs
’ as we have it in
MMT
can be seen as a kind of double entendre which, in addition to reflecting the ban on
carrion
of James’ directives to ove
r
seas communities, is also in some manner evoking
Gentiles
or, at least, the way
Gentiles
were being seen or alluded to by Jews. This would include, where
MMT
is concerned,
the banning of Gentiles
and
the rejection of their gifts and
/
or sacrifices
– i
n
cluding those Josephus tells us were being offered
daily
on behalf of the Emperor –
from the Temple
, itself perhaps the over-riding theme of this period, at least where ‘
Zealots
’,
Sicarii
, or
Revolutionaries
were concerned, again especially in the context of Josephus’ description of events leading up to the War against Rome.
22

If this is true – and the author feels that Matthew and Mark are at least playing on this theme (not to mention Matthew’s earlier formulation of the reverse invective, ‘
Do not give
Holy Things
to dogs
’ – here, the ‘
Holy Things
’ links up with ‘
Holy Camps
’ in
MMT
. It is this one is talking about when one speaks of ‘code’s in this period) – then, by extension, this pregnant allusion to ‘
even the dogs eating the crumbs under the table
’ can also be seen as having to do with James’ ban in both Acts and the Pseudoclementine
Homilies
on ‘
things sacrificed to idols
’, itself reflected in Paul’s tendentious discussions in 1 Corinthians 8–11. However general the formulation of this ‘
things sacrificed to idols
’ may be in these three sources (four, if one includes
MMT
), the relationship is always to the Temple – as, for example, it is in Paul’s discussion of the ban in 1 Corinthians 10:18–31.