The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (10 page)

The membership of the Palestinian group exceeded four thousand. Josephus and Philo locate them in Judaean towns; Pliny refers only to a single Essene settlement in the wilderness between Jericho and Engedi.

Individual congregations, directed by superiors, resided in commonly occupied houses. Initiation consisted of one year of probation, and two years of further training, leading to full table-fellowship on swearing an oath of loyalty to the sect. Only adult men qualified according to Philo and Pliny, but Josephus reports that boys were also trained by them. Serious disobedience resulted in expulsion from the order.

One of the principal characteristics of the Essenes was common ownership of property. New members handed over their belongings to the superiors, who collected also the wages earned by every sectary. Agriculture was the main Essene occupation. Having renounced private possessions, the members received all that they needed: food, clothes, care. Further peculiarities included the wearing of white garments; ritual bathing before meals which were given only to initiates, and cooked and blessed by priests; the rejection of animal sacrifice and of oaths to support their statements, and, above all, of marriage. Josephus, however, admits that one Essene branch adopted the married state as long as sex was used only for the purpose of procreation.

Theologically, they showed extreme reverence for the Law and were famous for their strictest observance of the Sabbath. Their esoteric teachings were recorded in secret books. Experts in the healing of body and soul, they also excelled in prophecy. They preferred belief in Fate to freedom of the will and, rejecting the notion of bodily resurrection, envisaged a purely spiritual afterlife.

The common opinion identifying or closely associating the Qumran sectaries with the Essenes is based on three principal considerations.

A good many contradictions appear in the diverse sources and are not simply due to a lack of harmony between the Scrolls and the Graeco-Latin documents. Thus Qumran attests both communism and private property; married and unmarried states. Likewise, Josephus speaks of celibate and married Essenes and, as has been noted (p. 38 above), the prohibition to ‘fornicate' with one's wife remarkably echoes the married Essenes' ban on marital sex when the woman was not in a state to conceive.
⁶⁹
Furthermore, the Qumran movement incorporated two separate branches and the manuscripts reflect an organizational and doctrinal development of some two centuries. It would be unreasonable to expect complete agreement among the sources. It must finally be borne in mind that the sectarian compositions were written by initiates for insiders, whereas Pliny and Philo, and to some extent even Josephus (although he claims to have undergone a partial Essene education), are bound to have reproduced hearsay evidence, unlikely to echo fully the views and beliefs prevalent among members. Hence the identification of Essenism and the Qumran sect remains in my view the likeliest of all proposed solutions.

The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews. Chroniclers are concerned not with factual information about bygone events, but with their religious significance. In Scripture, the ‘secular' past is viewed and interpreted by the prophets as revealing God's pleasure or displeasure. Victory or defeat in war, peace or social unrest, abundance of harvest or famine, serve to demonstrate the virtue or sinfulness of the nation and to forecast its future destiny. And when prophecy declined in the fifth century BCE, it was still not succeeded by a growth of historiography: only the memoirs of Ezra and Nehemiah and the retelling of the age-old stories of the kings of Israel and Judah in the Books of Chronicles belong to the historical genre. It was followed instead by eschatological speculation, by apocalyptic visions of the end of time, with their awe-inspiring beasts and battles, and by announcements of the ultimate triumph of truth and justice in a future Kingdom of God.

In the Scrolls, the apocalyptic compositions form part of this later tradition. On the other hand, apart from occasional snippets in a liturgical calendar (4Q
322
,
324
), an odd poem alluding to ‘King' Jonathan (4Q
448
), and deductive conclusions made from the comparative study of rules, most of the knowledge we possess of the sect's history originates from works of Bible interpretation. The Qumran writers, while meditating on the words of the Old Testament prophets, sought to discover in them allusions to their own past, present and future. Convinced that they were living in the last days, they read the happenings of their times as the fulfilment of biblical predictions.

Yet all that these non-historical sources provide are fragments. Even with the help of the archaeological data from Qumran they cannot be made into a consistent and continuous narrative. For an understanding of the sect's past as it developed within the larger framework of late Second Temple Jewish history, we have to rely principally on Flavius Josephus, the Palestinian Jew who became a Greek man of letters, and on other Jewish Hellenists, such as the authors of the Books of the Maccabees, and Philo of Alexandria, all of whom inherited the Greek predilection for recording and interpreting the past and set out to depict the life of the Jews of Palestine in itself, and as part of the Graeco-Roman world, from the early second century BCE to the first anti-Roman war in 66-70 CE. It is only with the help of the wider canvas painted by these ancient writers that places can be found for the often cryptic historical allusions contained in the Scrolls.

At the beginning of the second century BCE, Palestinian Jewry passed through a state of crisis. Alexander the Great had conquered the Holy Land in 332 BCE and, after the early uncertainties which followed his death, it became part of the empire of the Greeks of Egypt, known as the Ptolemies. During the third century, the Ptolemies avoided, as much as possible, interfering with the internal life of the Jewish nation and, while taxes were required to be paid, it remained under the rule of the High Priest and his council. Important changes in the patterns of population nevertheless took place during this time. Hellenistic cities were built along the Mediterranean coast, such as Gaza, Ascalon (Ashkelon), Joppa (Jaffa), Dor and Acco, re-named Ptolemais. Inland also, to the south of the Lake of Tiberias, the ancient town of Beth Shean was reborn as the Greek city of Scythopolis; Samaria, the capital city of the Samaritans, was Hellenized as Sebaste; and in Transjordan, Rabbath-Ammon (Amman) was re-founded as Philadelphia. In other words, Greeks, Macedonians and Hellenized Phoenicians took up permanent residence on Palestinian soil and the further spread of Greek civilization and culture was merely a matter of time.

With the conquest of the Holy Land by the Seleucids, or Syrian Greeks, in 200 BCE, the first signs appeared of Jews succumbing to a foreign cultural influence. In the apocryphal Book of Ecclesiasticus, dated to the beginning of the second century BCE, its author, Jesus ben Sira, a sage from Jerusalem, rages against those ‘ungodly men' who have ‘forsaken the Law of the Most High God' (xli, 8). But the real trouble started when Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164 BCE) officially promoted a Hellenizing programme in Judaea that was embraced with eagerness by the Jewish elite. The leader of the modernist faction was the brother of the High Priest Onias III. Known as Jesus among his compatriots, he adopted the Greek name of Jason, and set about transforming Jerusalem into a Hellenistic city, by building a gymnasium there and persuading the Jewish youth to participate in athletic games. As 2 Maccabees describes the situation:

Jason was succeeded by two other High Priests with the same Greek sympathies, Menelaus and Alcimus. In 169 BCE Antiochus IV visited Jerusalem and looted the Temple. But when in 167 he actually prohibited the practice of Judaism under pain of death and rededicated the Jerusalem Sanctuary to Olympian Zeus, the ‘abomination of desolation', the opponents of the Hellenizers finally rose up in violent resistance. An armed revolt was instigated by the priest Mattathias and his sons the Maccabee brothers, supported by all the traditionalist Jews, and in particular by the company of the Pious, the Asidaeans or Hasidim, ‘stalwarts of Israel, every one of them a volunteer in the cause of the Law' (1 Mac. ii, 42-3). Led by Judas Maccabaeus and, after his death on the battlefield, by his brothers Jonathan and Simon, the fierce defenders of Judaism were able not only to restore Jewish worship in Jerusalem, but against all expectations even managed to eject the ruling Seleucids and to liberate Judaea.

The Maccabaean triumph was, however, not simply a straightforward victory of godliness and justice over idolatry and tyranny; it was accompanied by serious social and religious upheavals. There was firstly a change in the pontifical succession. With the murder in 171 BCE of Onias III and the deposition of the usurper, his brother Jason, the Zadokite family, from which the incumbents of the High Priest's office traditionally came, lost the monopoly which it had held for centuries. Furthermore, when Onias IV, the son of Onias III, was prevented from taking over the High Priesthood from Menelaus, he emigrated to Egypt and in direct breach of biblical law, which authorizes only a single sanctuary in Jerusalem, erected a Jewish temple in Leontopolis with the blessing of King Ptolemy Philometor (182-146 BCE). His inauguration of Israelite worship outside Zion, with the connivance of some priests and Levites, must have scandalized every Palestinian conservative, especially other priests who belonged, or were allied, to the Zadokite dynasty.

There was trouble also within the ranks of the Maccabees themselves. The Hasidim - or part of their group - defected when Alcimus, whom they trusted, was appointed High Priest in 162 BCE. This move on their part turned out to be naïve ; Alcimus' Syrian allies massacred sixty of them in one day (1 Mac. vii, 2-20).

Lastly, a major political change came about when Jonathan Maccabaeus, himself a priest but not a Zadokite, accepted in 153-152 BCE pontifical office from Alexander Balas, a usurper of the Seleucid throne. Alexander was anxious for Jewish support and was not mistaken in thinking that an offer of the High Priesthood would be irresistible. For the conservatives this was an illegal seizure of power. But they were even more scandalized by the appointment in 140 BCE, following Jonathan's execution in 143- 142 by the Syrian general Tryphon, of Simon Maccabee as High Priest and hereditary leader of the people by means of a decree passed by a Jewish national assembly.

From then on, until Pompey's transformation of the independent Jewish state into a Roman province in 63 BCE, Judaea was ruled by a new dynasty of High Priests, later Priest-Kings, known as the Hasmonaeans after the grandfather of the Maccabees, Hasmon, or Asamonaeus according to Josephus
(War
1, 36). During the intervening years, all Simon's successors, but especially John Hyrcanus I (134-104 BCE) and Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE), for whom their political role took precedence over their office of High Priest, occupied one by one the Hellenistic cities of Palestine and conquered the neighbouring territories of Idumaea in the south, Samaria in the centre and Ituraea in the north.

Throughout this period of territorial expansion, the Hasmonaean rulers enjoyed the support of the Sadducees, one of the three religious parties first mentioned under Jonathan Maccabaeus (cf. Josephus,
Antiquities
XIII, 171) and regular allies of the government. They were opposed by the Pharisees, an essentially lay group formed from one of the branches of the Hasidim of the Maccabaean age. Already in the days of John Hyrcanus I there was Pharisaic objection to his usurpation of the High Priesthood, though they were willing to recognize him as national leader
(Antiquities
XIII, z 88-98), but on one other occasion, at least, their opposition was overcome by force. Accused of plotting against Alexander Jannaeus in 88 BCE in collusion with the Syrian Seleucid king Demetrius III Eucaerus, 800 Pharisees were condemned by Jannaeus to die on the cross
(Antiquities
xm, 380-83;
War
1, 96-8).

After Pompey's seizure of Jerusalem, the Hasmonaean High Priesthood continued for another three decades, but the political power formerly belonging to them passed to the Judaized Idumaean, Herod the Great, when he was promoted to the throne of Jerusalem by Rome in 37 BCE. It is to the last year or two of his reign - he died in 4 BCE - that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke date the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (Matth. ii, 1; Lk. i, 5).

After the ephemeral rule of the successor to Herod the Great, Herod Archelaus (4 BCE-6 CE), who was deposed by Augustus for his misgovernment of Jews and Samaritans alike, Galilee continued in semi-autonomy under the Herodian princes Antipas (4 BCE-39 CE) and Agrippa (39-41 CE), but Judaea was placed under the direct administration of Roman authority. In 6 CE, Coponius, the first Roman prefect of Judaea, arrived to take up his duties there. This prefectorial regime, whose most notorious representative was Pontius Pilate (26-36 CE), lasted for thirty-five years until 41, when the emperor Claudius appointed Agrippa I as king. He died, however, three years later, and in 44 CE the government of the province once more reverted to Roman officials, this time with the title of procurator. Their corrupt and unwise handling of Jewish affairs was one of the chief causes of the war of 66 which led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and to the subsequent decline of the Sadducees, the extinction of the Zealots in Masada in 74, the disappearance of the Essenes, and the survival and uncontested domination of the Pharisees and their rabbinic successors.