The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (13 page)

To begin with it should be pointed out that four members of the Community are actually mentioned by the Jewish historian, three of them associated with prophecy, one of the distinctive interests of the Teacher of Righteousness himself. The first, called Judas, is encountered in Jerusalem surrounded by a group of pupils taking instruction in ‘foretelling the future', which probably means how to identify prophetic pointers to future events. Josephus writes of him that he had ‘never been known to speak falsely in his prophecies', and that he predicted the death of Antigonus, the brother of Aristobulus I (104-103 BCE)
(Antiquities
XIII, 311-13). A second Essene prophet, Menahem, apparently foretold that Herod would rule over the Jews (xv, 373-8). Herod showed his gratitude to him by dispensing the Essenes, who were opposed to all oaths except their own oath of the Covenant, from taking the vow of loyalty imposed on all his Jewish subjects. A third Essene named Simon interpreted a dream of Archelaus, ethnarch of Judaea (4 BCE-6 CE), in 4 BCE to mean that his rule would last for ten years (XVII, 345-8). John the Essene, the last sectary to be referred to by Josephus, was not a prophet, but the commander or
strategos
of the district of Thamna in north-western Judaea, and of the cities of Lydda (Lod), Joppa (Jaffa) and Emmaus at the beginning of the first revolution
(War
11, 567). A man of ‘first-rate prowess and ability', he fell in battle at Ascalon (III, II, I9).
⁷²

Finally, Josephus depicts in vivid language the bravery of the Essenes subjected to torture by the Romans.

Since it would appear from this passage that the Romans were persecuting not individuals, but a group, it is tempting, bearing in mind the archaeologists' claim that the Qumran settlement was destroyed by the Romans, to associate it with the story of Essenes captured by the Dead Sea. If such a surmise is correct, the sect's disappearance from history may well have been brought about in the lethal blow suffered by its central establishment during the fateful summer of 68 CE. The fact that no attempt was made to recover nearly 800 manuscripts from the caves confirms, it would seem, such a reconstruction of the end of Qumran and, with the annihilation of its central establishment, of the whole Essene movement.

The first essays in the 1950s on the religious outlook of the Qumran sect all suffered from a serious defect in that scholars in those days tended to envisage the Scrolls as self-contained and entitled to independent treatment. Today, with the hindsight of five decades of research and with the entire corpus to hand, it is easier to conceive of the theology of the Community as part of the general doctrinal evolution of ancient Judaism.

Nevertheless, it is no simple task to follow that development itself, the reason being that the systematic exposition of beliefs and customs is not a traditional Jewish discipline. In a sense, the Instruction on the Two Spirits, incorporated in the Community Rule, alluded to earlier (p. 28), is an exception, forming the one and only doctrinal treatise among ancient Hebrew writings. The theology of Judaism, biblical, inter-Testamental, medieval or modern, when written by contemporary Jewish authors, is often modelled consciously or unconsciously on Christian dogmatic structures: God, creation, human destiny, messianic redemption, judgement, resurrection, heaven and hell. Such structures may and sometimes do distort the religious concepts of Judaism. For example, the interest of the Church in the messianic role of Jesus is apt to assign a greater importance to Messianism in Jewish religion than the historical evidence justifies, and Paul's hostility to the ‘legalism' of Israel obscures the Jewish recognition of the humble realities of everyday life prescribed by the Law as no mere ‘works' but as a path to holiness walked in obedience to God's commandments.

Since the key to any understanding of Judaism must be the notion of the Covenant, it may safely be taken as an introduction to Essene religious thought. The history of mankind and of the Jewish people has seen a series of such covenants. God undertook never to destroy mankind again by a flood; in exchange, Noah and his descendants were required to abstain from shedding human blood and, on the ritual level, from eating animal ‘flesh with the life, which is the blood, still in it' (Gen. ix, 1-17). To Abraham, who was childless and landless, God offered posterity and a country, provided he led a perfect life and marked his body and that of all his male progeny with a visible reminder of the Covenant between himself and heaven, circumcision (Gen. xvii, 1-14). Again, in the days of Moses the Israelites were declared ‘a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation' (Exod. xix, 5), God's special possession, on condition that they obeyed the Torah, the divine Teaching of the religious, moral, social and ritual precepts recorded in the Pentateuch from Exodus xx and repeated in the farewell discourse addressed by Moses to his people in the Book of Deuteronomy. After the conquest of Canaan and the distribution of the land to the tribes, the fulfilment of God's promise to Abraham, the Covenant was renewed by Joshua and the Israelites reasserted their commitment to their heavenly Helper (Jos. xxiv). From then on, the biblical story is one of continuous unfaithfulness to the Covenant. But God was not to be thwarted by human unworthiness and ingratitude, and for the sake of the handful of just men appearing in every generation he allowed the validity of the Covenant to endure. Though he punished the sinful and the rebellious, he spared the ‘remnant' because of their fidelity to it. From time to time, saintly leaders of the Jewish people, King David and King Josiah before the Babylonian exile (2 Sam. vii; 2 Kings xxiii, 1-3) and Ezra the Priest after the return from Mesopotamia (Neh. viii-x), persuaded them to remember their Covenant with God with solemn vows of repentance and national rededication; but the promises were usually short-lived. This would no doubt account for the development of an idea in the sixth century BCE of a ‘new Covenant' founded not so much on undertakings entered into by the community as on the inner transformation of every individual Jew for whom the will of God was to become, as it were, second nature.

It was this same Covenant ideology that served as the foundation of the Qumran Community's basic beliefs. The Essenes not only considered themselves to be the ‘remnant' of their time, but the ‘remnant' of all time, the final ‘remnant'. In the ‘age of wrath', while God was making ready to annihilate the wicked, their founders had repented. They had become the ‘Converts of Israel' (cf. CD IV, 2; 4Q
266
fr. 5 i). As a reward for their conversion, the Teacher of Righteousness had been sent to establish for them a ‘new Covenant', which was to be the sole valid form of the eternal alliance between God and Israel. Consequently, their paramount aim was to pledge themselves to observe its precepts with absolute faithfulness. Convinced that they belonged to a Community which alone interpreted the Holy Scriptures correctly, theirs was ‘the last interpretation of the Law' (4Q
266
fr. 11;
270
fr. 7 ii), and they devoted their exile in the wilderness to the study of the Bible. Their intention was to do according to all that had been ‘revealed from age to age, and as the Prophets had revealed by His Holy Spirit' (1QS VIII, 14-16; cf. 4Q
265
fr. 7 ii).

Without an authentic interpretation it was not possible properly to understand the Torah. All the Jews of the inter-Testamental era, the Essenes as well as their rivals, agreed that true piety entails obedience to the Law, but although its guidance reaches into so many corners of life - into business and prayer, law court and kitchen, marriage-bed and Temple - the 613 positive and negative commandments of which it consists still do not provide for all the problems encountered, especially those which arose in the centuries following the formulation of biblical legislation. To give but one example, the diaspora situation was not envisaged by the jurists of an autonomous Jewish society.

Torah interpretation was entrusted to the priests and Levites during the first two or three centuries following the Babylonian exile. Ezra and his colleagues, the ancient scribes of Israel, ‘read from the book of the Law... made its sense plain and gave instruction in what was read'. In this passage from the Book of Nehemiah viii, 8, Jewish tradition acknowledges the institution of a regular paraphrase of Scripture known as Targum, or translation into the vernacular of the members of the congregation. When the parties of the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, etc., came into being with their different convictions, they justified them by interpretations suited to their needs.

A classic example of idiosyncratic Bible interpretation in the Scrolls concerns a law on marriage. Since no directly relevant ruling is given in the Pentateuch on whether a niece may marry her uncle, Pharisaic and rabbinic Judaism understands this scriptural silence to mean that such a union is licit. When the Bible wishes to declare a degree of kinship unlawful, it does so: thus we read apropos of marriage between nephew and aunt, ‘You shall not approach your mother's sister' (Lev. xviii, 13). Thus a tradition surviving in the Babylonian Talmud is able to go so far as even to praise marriage with a ‘sister's daughter' and to proclaim it as a particularly saintly and generous act comparable to the loving-kindness shown to the poor and needy (Yebamoth 62b). The Qumran Essenes did not adopt this attitude at all. On the contrary, they regarded an uncle-niece union as straightforward ‘fornication'. Interpreted correctly, they maintained, the Leviticus precept signifies the very opposite of the meaning accepted by their opponents; the truth is that whatever applies to men in this respect applies also to women.

The Temple Scroll proclaims clearly this prohibition in proper legal terms:

Again, according to the strict views of the sectaries, fidelity to the Covenant demanded not only obedience to the Law, to all that God has ‘commanded by the hand of Moses', but also adherence to the teaching of ‘all His servants, the Prophets' (1QS 1, 2-3). Although not expressly stated, this special attention to the Prophets implies, firstly, that the Essenes subscribed to the principle incorporated into the opening paragraph of the Sayings of the Fathers in the Mishnah that the Prophets served as an essential link in the transmission of the Law from Moses to the rabbis.

The second inference to be drawn is that the sect believed the Prophets to be not only teachers of morality, but also guides in the domain of the final eschatological realities. But as in the case of the Law, their writings were considered to contain pitfalls for the ignorant and the misinformed, and only the Community's sages knew how to expound them correctly. Properly understood, the Books of Isaiah, Hosea and the rest indicate the right path to be followed in the terrible cataclysms of the last days. A simple reading can convey only their superficial meaning, but not their profounder significance. The Book of Daniel sets the biblical example here when it announces that Jeremiah's prediction that the Babylonian domination would last for seventy years is not to be taken literally; the real and final message is that seventy times seven years would separate Nebuchadnezzar from the coming of the Messiah (Dan. ix, 21-4). But the Qumran sectaries went even further than Daniel. They argued that it is quite impossible to discover the meaning without an inspired interpreter because the Prophets themselves were ignorant of the full import of what they wrote. Habakkuk, for instance, was commanded to recount the history of the ‘final generation', but he did so without having any clear idea of how far ahead the eschatological age lay. God ‘did not make known to him when time would come to an end'. Knowledge of the authentic teaching of the Prophets was the supreme talent of the Teacher of Righteousness. The surviving Bible commentaries are almost all concerned with predictions concerning the ultimate destiny of the righteous and the wicked, the tribulations and final triumph of the ‘House of Judah' and the concomitant annihilation of those who had rebelled against God. But in addition to this general evidence of the subject-matter, the Scrolls directly impute to the Teacher a particular God-given insight into the hidden significance of prophecy. He was ‘the Teacher of Righteousness to whom God made known all the mysteries... of His servants the Prophets' (1QpHab VII, 1-5). He was ‘the Priest [in whose heart] God set [understanding] that he might interpret all the words of His servants the Prophets, through whom He foretold all that would happen to His people' (1QpHab 11, 8-10). He was the Teacher who ‘made known to the latter generations that which God had done to the latter generation, the congregation of traitors, to those who departed from the way' (CD 1, 12-13). The Teacher's interpretation alone, propagated by his disciples, offered true enlightenment and guidance.