The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (9 page)

Two types of meeting are provided for, with equal laconism: the ‘assembly of the camp' presided over by a priest or a Levite and the ‘assembly of all the camps' (CD XIV, 3-6). Presumably the latter was the general convention of the whole sect held on the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant, the annual great festival alluded to in 4QD (266,
270
), when both the ‘men of holiness' and the ‘men of the Covenant' confessed their former errors and committed themselves once more to perfect obedience to the Law and the sect's teachings. According to the available texts, the sectaries were to be mustered and inscribed in their rank by name, the priests first, the Levites second, the Israelites third. A fourth group of proselytes is unique to the ‘towns', but as has been observed these were Gentile slaves converted to Judaism. A further remark that in this order the sect's members were to ‘be questioned on all matters' leads one to suppose that the allusion must be to the yearly inquiry into their spiritual progress mentioned in the Community Rule (CD XIV, 3-6).

Two Cave 4 manuscripts of the Damascus Document describe the expulsion ceremony of an unfaithful member. He was cursed and dismissed by the Priest overseeing the Congregation and cursed also by all the inhabitants of the camps. Should the latter maintain contact with the renegade, they would forfeit their own membership of the sect (4Q
266
fr. 11 ii;
270
fr. 7 i-ii).

Apart from these familiar directions, we learn only that the priest who mustered the gathering was to be between thirty and sixty years old and, needless to say, ‘learned in the Book of Meditation'. The ‘Guardian of all the camps', in his turn, was to be between thirty and fifty, and to have ‘mastered all the secrets of men and the language of all their clans'. He was to decide who was to be admitted, and anything connected with a ‘suit or judgement' was to be brought to him (CD XIV, 7-12).

As for the initiation of new members, the Statutes appear to legislate for young men reaching their majority within the brotherhood and for recruits from outside. This is not entirely clear, but the instruction that an aspirant was not to be informed of the sect's rules until he had stood before the Guardian can hardly have applied to a person brought up within its close circle (CD xv, 5-6, 10-11).

Of the sect's own young men the Damascus Document writes merely:

The Messianic Rule is more discursive. There, enrolment into the sect is represented as the climax of a childhood and youth spent in study. Teaching of the Bible and in the ‘precepts of the Covenant' began long before the age of ten, at which age a boy embarked on a further ten years of instruction in the statutes. It was not until after all this that he was finally ready.

The newcomer from outside who repented of his ‘corrupted way' was to be enrolled ‘with the oath of the Covenant' on the day that he spoke to the Guardian, but no sectarian statute was to be divulged to him ‘lest when examining him the Guardian be deceived by him' (CD xv, 7-11). Nevertheless, if he broke that oath, ‘retribution' would be exacted of him. The text subsequently becomes fragmentary and unreliable, but he is told where to find the liturgical calendar which his oath obliges him to follow.

It should be added here that one big difference between the organization of the brethren in the towns and those of the ‘monastic' settlement is that new members were not required to surrender their property. There was none of the voluntary communism found at Qumran. On the other hand, where the desert sectaries practised common ownership, those of the towns contributed to the assistance of their fellows in need. Every man able to do so was ordered to hand over a minimum of two days' wages a month to a charitable fund, and from it the Guardian and the judges distributed help to the orphans, the poor, the old and sick, to unmarried women without support and to prisoners held in foreign hands and in need of redemption (CD XIV, 12-16).

When the two varieties of sectarian life are compared, we find many similarities, especially since the fragments of 4QD and 4Q
265
have become accessible, but some of the differences still remain striking. In the desert of Qumran men lived together in seclusion; in the towns they were grouped in families, surrounded by non-members with whom they were in inevitable though exiguous contact. The desert brotherhood was to keep apart from the Temple in Jerusalem until the restoration of the true cult in the seventh year of the eschatological war; the town sectaries participated in worship there. The judges of the towns had no counterparts at Qumran. The Qumran Guardian was supported by a Council; the town Guardians acted independently. Unfaithful desert sectaries were sentenced to irrevocable excommunication, or to temporary exclusion from the common life, or to suffer lighter penances; the penal code concerned with the towns envisages also the death penalty (whether actually executed or not) as well as corrective custody. The common table and the ‘purity' associated with it played an essential role at Qumran; in connection with the towns the common meal, but not the pure food, goes unmentioned. Furthermore, at Qumran all the new recruits came from outside; in the towns, some were converts but others were the sons of sectaries. The desert novices underwent two years of training and were instructed in the doctrine of the ‘two spirits'; the towns' converts were subjected to neither experience. In the desert, property was owned in common; in the towns, it was not. And last but not least, the desert community appears to have practised celibacy, whereas the town sectaries patently did not.

Yet despite the dissimilarities, at the basic level of doctrine, aims and principles, a perceptible bond links the brethren of the desert with those of the towns. They both claim to represent the true Israel. They both are led by priests, Zadokite priests according to 1QS, the Damascus Document and the Messianic Rule, but not 4QS
^b
(=4Q
256
), 4QS
^d
(=4Q
258
) and MMT.
⁶⁸
Both form units of Thousands, Hundreds, Fifties and Tens, both insist on a wholehearted return to the Mosaic Law in accordance with their own particular interpretation of it. They are both governed by priests (or Levites). The principal superior, teacher and administrator of both is known by the unusual title of mebaqqer. In both cases, initiation into the sect is preceded by entry into the Covenant, sworn by oath. Both groups convene yearly to review the order of precedence of their members after an inquiry into the conduct of each man during the previous twelve months. Above all, both embrace the same ‘unorthodox' liturgical calendar that sets them apart from the rest of Jewry.

There can be only one logical conclusion: this was a single religious movement with two branches. It does not, however, answer all our questions. It does not tell us in particular whether the differentiation resulted from a relaxation or from a hardening of the original ascetic rules. Neither are we told whether the sectaries of desert and towns maintained regular contact among themselves. After all, the history of religions furnishes scores of examples of sister sects which turned into mortal enemies. Did the Qumran and towns fellowships profess and practise unity? A few vital clues suggest that they did.

One indication of a living relationship between the two groups derives from the Qumran library itself. In it were discovered no less than ten copies of the Damascus Document and other writings reflecting the same form of life. It seems hardly likely that they would have figured so prominently among the Qumran literary treasures if they had been the rule books of some rival institution. Besides, there was no trace of any other book in the caves relating to an opposing religious faction except perhaps in the shape of rebuttal in MMT. Another pointer towards unity appears in the passage of the Damascus Document outlining the procedure for the ‘assembly of all the camps' and prescribing that the members were to be ‘inscribed by name' in hierarchical rank. This clause corresponds exactly to the statute in the Community Rule ordaining a yearly ranking of the sectaries (IQS 11, 19-23), with a solemn ritual for the Renewal of the Covenant (for an analysis of the rite, see pp. 80-81). This leads us to suppose that the Feast of the Covenant, when the desert brethren held their annual spiritual survey, was also the occasion for that of the towns. Can we go further still and establish that the two ceremonies took place, not only at the same time, but at the same place? In effect, the literary and archaeological evidence tends to support the theory that the ‘assembly of all the camps', identical with the yearly assembly of the Qumran branch, gathered at Qumran.

The first clue turns on the qualifications of the
mebaqqer
of the Community Rule and the Damascus Document respectively. As may be remembered, the superior at Qumran was required to be expert in recognizing ‘the nature of all the children of men according to the kind of spirit which they possess' (IQS 111, 13-14), while the
mebaqqer
of the towns was to be concerned rather more with a man's ‘deeds', ‘possessions', ‘ability', etc., than with his inner spirit. When, however, the Damascus Document describes the attributes needed of the ‘Guardian of all the camps', what do we find but a reformulation of those accredited to the superior of the desert community, that he should know ‘all the secrets of men and all the languages of their clans'? It would emerge from this, therefore, that the Guardian of all the camps and the Guardian at Qumran were one and the same person. The next hint comes from the fact that the Damascus Document is directed to both desert and town sectaries. As an example, the passage from the Exhortation advising men to choose whatever is pleasing to God and to reject whatever he hates, ‘that you may walk perfectly in all His ways and not follow after thoughts of the guilty inclination and after eyes of lust' (CD 11, 15-16), seems to be addressed to celibates. Yet in this very same document we later come upon injunctions aimed explicitly at non-celibates:

The Exhortation would seem in short to be a sermon intended for delivery on a certain occasion to married and unmarried members of the sect; and as its theme is perseverance in the Covenant, the appropriate setting would be the Feast of the Renewal of the Covenant in the third month (4Q
266
fr. II;
270
fr. 7 i-ii), i.e. the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost (see below, pp. 79-80), and the venue, Qumran.

These literary pointers are supported by two archaeological finds. Firstly, the twenty-six deposits of animal bones buried on the Qumran site - goats, sheep, lambs, calves, cows or oxen - have for long intrigued scholars. Can J. T. Milik be correct in identifying them as the remains of meals served to large groups of pilgrims in the Qumran mother-house of the sect (
Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea
, p. 117)? Naturally, he too connects the gathering with the Covenant festival.

The second archaeological clue also is concerned with bones. The skeletons of four women and one child, and possibly of two further female bodies and those of two children, were found in the extension of the Qumran cemetery. Now, if the Renewal of the Covenant was attended by sectaries from the towns and their families, this may well account for the presence of dead women and children among the otherwise male skeletons of the graveyard proper.

Drawing the threads of these various arguments together, there would seem to be little doubt not only that the desert and town sectaries were united in doctrine and organization, but that they remained in actual and regular touch with each other, under the ultimate administrative and spiritual authority of the shadowy figure of the Priest, of whom we hear so little, and his dominant partner, the Qumran Guardian, Guardian of all the camps. Qumran, it seems, was the seat of the sect's hierarchy and also the centre to which all those turned who professed allegiance to the Council of the Covenant.

Prior to Qumran, the primary sources concerning the Essenes, a Jewish religious community flourishing during the last two centuries of the Second Temple era (c. 150 BCE-70 CE), were furnished by the Greek writings of two Jewish authors, Philo of Alexandria
(That Every Good Man Should be Free,
75-91;
Apology for the Jews,
quoted in Eusebius,
Praeparatio evangelica
VIII, 6-7) and Flavius Josephus (
War
11, 119-61;
Antiquities
XVIII, 18-22), and by the Roman geographer and naturalist, Pliny the Elder, who left a short but very important notice in Latin
(Natural History
v, 17, 4[73]). For a more detailed account, see Geza Vermes and Martin Goodman,
The Essenes According to the Classical Sources
(Sheffield, 1989). Despite the apparent importance attributed to it by Philo, Josephus and Pliny, the sect is not explicitly mentioned either in the New Testament or in rabbinic literature. There is no general agreement regarding the meaning of the group's name: Essaioi or
Essenoi
in Greek, and
Esseni
in Latin. The designation may signify ‘the Pious', or ‘the Healers', devoted to the cure of body and soul. If the latter interpretation is adopted, it provides a parallel to the Greek
Therapeutai,
the title given by Philo to an Egyptian-Jewish ascetic society akin to the Essenes (cf.
HJP
11, 593-7; Vermes-Goodman, The
Essenes
... , 15-17). There are a number of other, less well-established, explanations.