CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE LEGACY OF AKHENATEN

image Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.

And in a short space the tribes of living things are changed, and like runners hand on the torch of life.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II, line 771

I believe that I have now established beyond the balance of reasonable doubt that the early Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), Joseph and Moses were all heavily influenced by the religion and culture of early Egypt – particularly that of the Amenhotep family and Pharaoh Akhenaten.

The endorsement of the Copper Scroll’s connection between a sect at Qumran that guarded the scroll’s secrets inherited over 1,300 years earlier, and Akhenaten, can leave little doubt that there was a commonality between the two communities. That connection extended to religious beliefs that, in turn, affected the formative principles of the three great monotheistic religions of the world.

The connections between Akhenaten and the Qumran-Essenes are too numerous to be mere coincidence, and there are more to come!

When Akhenaten died, attempts were made by other Egyptians to remove all traces of his inscriptions and of his teachings. The monotheistic ‘torch of light’ that the followers of Akhenaten picked up was eventually to become bifurcated – carried by the priestly heirs of Akhenaten in Egypt, and by Moses and the Hebrews into the deserts of Sinai.

Akhenaten’s religious revolution left an indelible mark on the development of early Judaism, and the record of those early, formative years has been preserved for us in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As descendent authors and guardians of the holy texts, it therefore would not be surprising to find characteristics of Akhenaten’s beliefs and other Egyptian influences evident amongst the Essenes, even after so long a period of immersion in a foreign culture and a refined Judaism that had cleansed itself of as many foreign influences as possible. If my assumptions are correct, it should be possible to detect a greater Egyptian influence within the closed sect than was apparent in the common body of Judaism. And we do.

In fact the Qumran-Essenes exhibited many of the characteristic beliefs of the Atenist priests that came out of Egypt – modified by time, but still in a very recognizable form. Their strong sense of an inherited mission, mysterious customs and exclusivity can all be fully explained in terms of their sacred connection to the priests of Akhenaten.

As well as the influences carried over from the Akhenaten period, there are also ‘overlaying commonalities’ of more general Egyptian effects, garnered from across the spectrum of Egyptian paganism and social practice.

Three main subjects remain on the agenda. I have presented the weighty evidence linking Akhenaten and the Qumran-Essenes, mainly through the unravelling of the Copper Scroll, and I will now delve further into the body of the Dead Sea Scrolls to see what additional evidence can be found from them. I will then take a more general look at how many of these ‘overlaying commonalities’ from Egypt have entered the conscious and subconscious mind of the western world and its religions. Finally, there are two loose ends relating to the mysterious pseudo-Jewish communities of priestly-soldiers at Elephantine, in Southern Egypt, and to the Falasha Jews of Lake Tana in Ethiopia, that need tying up.

These two latter locations are, as I have already suggested, possible places where residual treasures of the Copper Scroll might still be found.

ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE FROM THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

The contents and format of the Dead Sea Scrolls, commentaries by contemporary writers and the findings of archaeologists at the Qumran ruins provide a vast number of threads from which to weave a tapestry depicting the lives and thinking of these hermit-like people. At the time of Jesus they numbered about 4,000 across Judaea, with some 200 resident and working in the area of Qumran at any one time.

They talked in terms of apocalyptic events and of a ‘last days’ eschatological philosophy. Their ‘War Scroll’ speaks of the final battle in which two Messiahs – one kingly, one priestly – will triumph. Their way of life was geared to preparing themselves for this great event. They were the ‘righteous ones’ whose mission was to preserve and protect the true faith.

Excavations at Qumran have shown that there was a settlement there between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, shortly before the Babylonian exile. This was destroyed during the fall of the Southern Kingdom. Several centuries later, around 150 BCE, it was resettled by the Essene Community and remained occupied until a severe earthquake in 31 BCE badly damaged the buildings, causing the inhabitants to leave Qumran for a short period.2

No-one seems to know quite where they went in the interim period between 31 and 4 BCE when they returned. One suggestion is that the Qumran-Essenes journeyed to Damascus because the city finds mention in their texts. But this seems very unlikely. Earlier, I proposed an association with Damascus during the previous Babylonian exile, which seems a much more plausible explanation for its mention.

The archaeological evidence finds them returned to Qumran at a peculiarly coincidental date. The Community that was to affect so markedly the teachings of Jesus returned to its home in the year 4 BCE, the year now accepted by most scholars as that of Jesus’s birth. Those writers that attempt to make close links between the Qumran-Essenes and Jesus might even postulate that they went to visit Jesus at Bethlehem in the meantime, but there is no evidence to that effect. The Community site was eventually destroyed in 68 CE by the Romans.

COMMUNITY RULES AND LIFESTYLE

A passage from Josephus gives an insight into the daily lives of the Qumran-Essenes:

Before the sun is up they utter no word on mundane matters, but offer to him certain prayers, which have been handed down from their forefathers, as though entreating him to rise. They are then dismissed by their superiors to the various crafts in which they are severally proficient and are strenuously employed until the fifth hour, when they again assemble in one place and, after girding their loins with linen cloths, bathe their bodies in cold water. After this purification, they assemble in a private apartment which none of the uninitiated is permitted to enter; pure now themselves, they repair to the refectory, as to some sacred shrine. When they have taken their seats in silence, the baker serves out the loaves to them in order, and the cook sets before each one plate with a single course. Before meat, the priest says a grace; thus at the beginning and the close they do homage to God as the bountiful giver of life. Then laying aside their raiment, as holy vestments, they again betake themselves to their labours until evening. On their return they sup in like manner.

The Jewish War II

Some of the Essenes’ main characterizing features were that they did not recognize the Temple practice in Jerusalem, they held all goods in common (a theme picked up in the New Testament, Acts 2:44) and disapproved of sacrifices. They stressed prayer, study, ennoblement of the spirit, and ritual purity and cleanliness through the purification of bathing. They maintained an hierarchical structure of discipline, had a different calendar from the general Jewish population and therefore celebrated their festivals at different times from the rest of the population.3

Our knowledge of the behavioural requirements of the members of the Community throws intriguing light on what lay behind their thinking and beliefs. Much of this knowledge comes from a Dead Sea Scroll that deals with Community Rules. It has been identified as the final part of the Damascus Document and is corroborated by another version from the Egyptian Genizah Collection.4 The piece deals with a disciplinary convocation of the Council of the Essenes that is addressed by ‘the Priest commanding the many’. His role can be discerned (from analysis of both documents), as that of Head of the Community, the final arbiter of the law, the knower of all the ‘secrets’ and the senior priest. He is referred to variously as the ‘Mebaqqer’ or ‘Hamerverkah’ – ‘The Merverkyah’. How long this title had existed is not certain, but in sound it has a remarkable resemblance in the role to the name of the High Priest of the Great Temple to Aten, at Akhetaten. His name can be found inscribed on his tomb at Amarna and transliterates as ‘Mervyre’. The Council are the ‘sons of Levi’, the priestly strain of Israel from which the High Priest would be drawn.

Curious as to why documents found in Egypt should corroborate scrolls found by the Dead Sea, the next step in my journey took me to Cambridge, courtesy of two rather eccentric Scottish Presbyterian ladies – Mrs Agnes Lewis and Mrs Margaret Gibson.

The Genizah Fragments

It was customary in Victorian times (and earlier in the eighteenth century) for British gentry to make the ‘Grand Tour’ of famous foreign landmarks and historical sites. Our two inveterate ladies, however, were more than just casual tourists and made themselves learned in the history of the Middle East. Their journeys took them off the beaten track, ferreting out the mysteries of the Biblical lands. One such mission led them to an obscure part of Fostat, Old Cairo, into the dingy dim interior of a thousand-year-old synagogue named ‘Ben Ezra’. High in the wall of a back area of the building they discovered a ‘Genizah’ – a place of safe-keeping for documents. There they found a cache of papyrus, vellum and paper, unparalleled in importance and comparable in significance to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They carried some of the fragments back to England and, in May 1896, Agnes Lewis brought them to the attention of Dr Solomon Schechter, Reader in Talmudic Literature at Cambridge University (who later became President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America).

Dr Schechter’s excitement can be imagined. Realizing the possible ramifications of the find, he enlisted the moral and financial support of Dr Charles Taylor, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge. Together they journeyed to the synagogue in Cairo and were given permission to bring all the remaining fragments back to England.5

Why was this discovery so significant, particularly in relation to the Damascus Scroll? The Collection has within it an enormous archive of religious and secular documents, much written between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE; some dating back to 600 CE and others up to the nineenth century. They illumine Jewish religious experience of these periods and refer back to Biblical times. There are hand-written letters and manuscripts by some of the most influential Hebrew scholars of the Middle Ages, including Moses Maimonides and Jehudah Halevi; Zadokite documents; ancient liturgy; poetry; music; and letters from Palestine, Babylonia and Spain.6

Some of the oldest papyrus documents are pages from the Old Testament Book of Kings and Psalms. They are written in Greek, and are copies of the second-century Aquila version of the Bible.

Among many Hebrew texts is a tenth century CE copy of the ‘Wisdom of Ben Sira’, which dates back to the second century BCE. It contains poetic syllogism or reasoning, and proverbs that advocate a life of moderation. The texts were translated into Greek by Ben Sira’s grandson in 132 BCE and incorporated into the Apocrypha as Ecclesiasticus. The Hebrew text of this work was previously thought lost, and therefore it was not included in the Hebrew Bible. Authenticity of the Genizah copy was later confirmed by its similarity to finds amongst scrolls excavated from Masada, in Israel. Although basically the same, there are differences in the Genizah text when compared to the Greek from which our modern Apochryphal Ecclesiasticus is translated.

The fragments of Jewish prayers and commentaries prove, as the Director of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge, Dr Stefan Reif (now Professor of Medieval Hebrew Studies at Cambridge University), put it: ‘that there had been at the least an intermittent active Jewish presence in Israel, since biblical times right through the early centuries up to the time of the Crusaders in the thirteenth century CE.’

What was most significant, for my line of enquiry, was a reference amongst the Genizah fragments to the mysterious Zadokite brotherhood of scribes that we now know as the Qumran-Essenes, some forty years before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Genizah contained two copies of the so-called Damascus Document, similar to ones found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. How this document, which was obviously a sectarian text peculiar to the Qumran-Essenes, could turn up in a Cairo synagogue 2,000 years after it was thought to have been composed has proved, as one can imagine, somewhat of a conundrum. The conventional explanation is that a version was discovered in the caves of Qumran around 800 CE and somehow found its way to Egypt.

This idea is based on the contents of a Syriac letter sent by Timotheus I, Patriarch of Seleucia (726–819 CE), to Sergius Metropolitan of Elam (who died c.805 CE).7 The letter refers to the finding, by an Arab, of Hebrew and other scrolls in a rock-dwelling near Jericho.8 According to the letter’s contents, Jews from Jerusalem came out to study the documents and found them to be ancient books of the Old Testament, together with over 200 Psalms. There is no known reference in Jewish literature to the find that, considering the apparent excitement amongst those who rushed out of Jerusalem when they heard about it, and its obvious importance, is rather surprising.

The supposition that somehow the Damascus Document of the Cairo Genizah was a later copy of the Dead Sea Scroll version of the Damascus Scroll, which also happened to be hidden in caves near the Dead Sea, and this latter document (or a copy of it), eventually found its way from this find in the eighth century to Cairo, seems rather fanciful. Especially as the Timotheus episode makes no mention of the Damascus Document, which would have been one of the more significant finds, and that the dates of the Genizah Damascus Documents (there are two differing versions of the original composition) are tenth and twelfth centuries CE respectively.

From the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls versions and the Cairo Genizah versions (which collectively are generally referred to as the CD (Cairo-Damascus) scrolls), it is apparent that the original Damascus Document may have been written soon after the destruction of the First Temple, from its references to Damascus and King Nebuchadnezzar. But there are also ‘exhortations’ on how to obey God’s laws that seem to date from much earlier times.

How the Damascus Documents found in the eighth century actually made their way to Cairo is a matter of conjecture; I am not convinced by the conventional explanation.

One possible scenario that gets over these difficulties goes like this: the Damascus and Psalms scrolls found in the hills near Jericho in the eighth century CE, were originally written by the Qumran-Essenes and were subsequently lost. We know that the Qumran-Essenes wrote copies of the Damascus document and knew more psalms than the canonical 150. The Damascus scrolls found in Cairo were copied from much earlier examples of the text written shortly after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, which found their way to Heliopolis (Cairo) through the interaction of residual Atenist priests at Heliopolis with the old strand of priestly guardians in Judah from whom the Qumran-Essenes were descended.

We know that Heliopolis was the first place where an Atenist temple was built and that it was likely to have remained a centre for secretive monotheistic worship.

THE MESSIANIC ‘SOLDIERS OF LIGHT’

Buffeted from desert to Temple and Temple to desert by the sandstorms of time, the ‘Priestly Essenes’ had seen their sacred place of worship desecrated by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. After returning from exile in Babylon, they had preserved their beliefs and way of life and eventually found sanctuary in the forbidding reaches of the Dead Sea.

Now, near the turn of the Millennium, their successors had witnessed the restoration of their sacred Temple by Herod – only to see others not of the Zaddokic line of high priests usurping the role, and a golden Roman eagle perched on the roof.

Therefore to the Essenes the Second Temple was a place of intense contradiction. The holy place, central to their inheritance, was occupied by alien forces and governed by the whims of Herod, a lackey of Rome. Its size and shape were not to their liking and, worse still, from around 31 BCE onwards two lambs were sacrificed every day by the Temple priests for the ‘well-being’ of the Roman Emperor and the Roman Empire – anathema to many Jewish groups and especially to the Qumran-Essenes. No wonder they took the earthquake of 31 BCE that caused widespread destruction in the area of the Judaean Desert (and their own settlement), as a portent that they were right, and that their belief in an imminent apocalypse was justified.

It soon becomes apparent from reading the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Essenes of Qumran considered themselves an elite messianic group, who had retreated from the fray of the Temple and the priesthood, and who sought refuge in the wilderness to protect their piety. Isaiah aptly describes their role:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Isaiah 40:3

The need ‘to retreat’ for some of the Essenes was part of their searching for a reaffirmation of the divine Covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai – a searching for the purity and essence of Torah and Hebrew teachings. They looked on themselves as the ancestral custodians of the ‘light of truth’.

The Qumran Dead Sea Scroll known as the ‘Manual of Discipline’ (The Community Rule), sets out the requirement for a ten-year period of study, after which, at the age of twenty, students have to undergo a test of public examination to verify their understanding of the law and their own integrity.9 A year of ‘probation’ followed, after which the student was again examined. If he passed this test he served a further year of probation before a proposal for full membership of the Brotherhood was put to the vote. If accepted, the student was made to swear an oath of loyalty. The minimum age to hold office in the Brotherhood was twenty-five, and the ‘fourth degree of holiness’ (referred to by Josephus) could not be reached before the age of thirty. (It is interesting to note the similarity in the use of the terms ‘Brotherhood’, ‘degree’, and ‘master’ to those used in the Masonic movement, where members refer to each other as brothers and utilize biblical titles.10) The Essenes’ spiritual leader was known as the ‘right teacher’ – a title identified with Moses in his final blessing to the children of Israel (Deuteronomy 33). Successive ‘right teachers’ had the role of holding the community to the true interpretation of the Torah whilst they awaited the coming of a prophet like Moses and ‘two Messiahs’.

This waiting was accompanied by an immersion in the holy scriptures and by the following of an ascetic way of life. Each year a cumulative total of 120 nights were to be spent in prayer and study. Personal possessions and income were to be given to the Community; in turn the Community looked after the individual’s needs. Living and eating were communal, and garments were plain and purely functional. (There are many similarities in this ‘unselfish’ way of life to the modern ‘Ashrams’ of America, the ‘Kibbutz’ of modern Israel and in Christian monasteries over the ages.)

There was a strong hierarchical structure within the community. At the top was the ‘right teacher’. Priests, aided by Levites, dictated the doctrine of the group. All members could vote in an assembly on other, non-doctrinal matters, whilst general day-to-day administration was in the hands of a triumvirate of priests and twelve helpers. Everyone had a ‘pecking order’ in relation to their level of learning and holiness, as determined by their peers.

Throughout the scrolls describing the feelings and activities of the Essenes, there is a connective embodiment of repeated themes and motifs, which endow these works with a sense of collective purpose: ‘Sons of Light’ fighting ‘Sons of Darkness’, messianic portents, battles with evil, the fruits of righteousness.

The scrolls’ fundamental themes are of persons who are:

The first three of these themes are recognizably strongly Jewish, the latter three carry Christian overtones.

It is the transitional/post-First Temple prophets that the Essenes looked to for their inspiration. They closely associated themselves with the ‘Sons of Zadok’ – the select priests of the Temple – using the term ‘Zaddikim’ as having an alternative meaning of ‘the righteous ones’ to describe themselves. They are the holy caucus who carry the true torch of light handed on to them through Moses.

There are continual references throughout the Scrolls to the part played by the Temple priests, and it is clear that the Essenes considered themselves the keepers of the Covenant – part of the direct line of priests that attended the Holy Shrines. This can be seen in the Scrolls dealing with the Testament of the priestly Levi, of Aaron and of Kohath. These are the ‘Righteous seed’ – Zaddikim – which the Essenes continually claim as their birthright.

…and God of gods for all eternity. And he will shine as a Light upon you and He will make known to you His great name and you will know Him, that He is the Eternal God and Lord of all creation, and sovereign over all things, governing them according to his will…Thus you will grant to me a good name among you, together with joy for Levi and happiness for Jacob, rejoicing for Isaac and blessing for Abraham, inasmuch as you guarded and walked in the inheritance. My sons, your fathers bequeathed to you Truth, Righteousness, Uprightness, Integrity, Purity, Holiness and the Priesthood.

‘Testament of Kohath’, Fragment 1, Column 111

Even after some 1,500 years there is still recognizably an Egyptian style of phrasing, and the continual allusion to light reiterates the significance of the sun and light in Akhenaten’s theology.

MYSTICISM AND KABBALAH

In some of the Dead Sea Scrolls there is a visionary mysticism that borders on ‘Kabbalah’ (see Glossary), whilst mysticism and allusions to magic are not excluded.

Practices of divination, magic, astrology, spells and the wearing of magic amulets were still not uncommon amongst the Jewish people at the time of Christ, but they were frowned upon by the Rabbinic teachers.*47 On the surface, this makes it all the more surprising to find from scrolls 4Q318, 4Q560 and 4Q561 that the Essenes – a fervently devout, God-fearing group – may have followed, or at least documented these kinds of cultist beliefs.12

The fragmentary documents are difficult to understand in detail, but the document catalogued as 4Q560 is an amulet warning against evil spirits. It seems to be an incantation for a spirit to protect a body from male and female demons who might poison or invade it. The echoes of Egypt are not difficult to discern. The use of amulets in ancient Egypt was, as discussed earlier, very common for the living and for the dead. For example, in Chapter 156 of the ‘Book of the Dead’, or in Chapter 151 of the Papyrus of Ani, we find amulet incantations by ‘two Heart-souls’ called to bring spirits to protect the body and drive away devils that may wish to destroy it.

Belief in evil spirits and mysticism was a necessary part of the Qumran-Essenes’ dualistic concept of the universe. There were for them two spirits created by God: good and evil. These forces vied to influence man in his behaviour. All that was good came from the dominion of light. All that was evil came from the dominion of darkness. (This idea has been echoed in the Persian ‘Zoroastrian’ idea of the supreme deity – Ahura Mazda – but in this philosophy it is he, rather than man, who must choose between good and evil.)

The Book of Hagu

Rabbinic teaching and the Torah both denounce study of mystic ‘hidden secrets’ as dangerous. The Qumran-Essenes’ philosophy rejected magic, but positively required study of these mystic ‘hidden secrets’. Many of these Kabbalistic-like mysticisms can be traced back to early Egyptian traditions and the idea that Pharaoh and the select priests were entrusted with such hidden secrets.

This hidden knowledge must have been handed down by word of mouth or by secret texts, but were there any secret texts kept even from the ordinary Qumran-Essene members?

The question brings us to the mystery of the Book of Hagu (or Hagi). The book is mentioned in the Damascus Scroll and in the Manual of Discipline (1QS) as being fundamental; it was mandatory to understand it for anyone who wished to act as a judge of the congregation. So far, no-one has identified what the Book is or where it came from. Some scholars, such as Yigael Yadin,13 consider it might be the Temple Scroll or another, as yet undiscovered, scroll. Either way it appears to be a Book of Divine Law dating back to the time of Moses and Joshua – known to the Qumran-Essenes, but not known to the general Jewish community of Canaan or Israel.

Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were, as previously mentioned, written in Aramaic square script, paleo-Hebrew (much older lettering), or Greek. There are however some examples in Nabatean Note A,*48 and ten manuscripts written in ‘Cryptic A’, ‘Cryptic B’ and ‘Cryptic C’. These have been partially deciphered, but reference is made in the Damascus document and other Dead Sea Scrolls to a mysterious ‘Midrash Sefer Moshe’ (MSM) text. This text is know to have been written in ‘Cryptic A’ and was personal to the ‘Maskil’, or leader, of the community – ‘for his eyes only’. This document (catalogued as 4Q249) that, unfortunately, has not yet been found, could well be the key to the secret ‘knowledge’ of the community and appears to be the basic source of rules and authority for the community.14

I do not have a firm view as to what form the Book of Hagu really took. It was undoubtedly of tremendous importance in the eyes of the Qumran-Essenes. The references to it demonstrate that this lineage of devout, priest-like people possessed exclusive religious works, which must have come from outside traditional Jewish knowledge and been in their keeping for many centuries. The vows that new entrants to the Order were required to take (attested to by Josephus), were lengthy and mainly about piety towards God, observing the community’s rules and maintaining righteous thoughts and behaviour. However, the Qumran-Essenes undoubtedly had secrets to hide because one of these vows was: ‘to safeguard the secret books’.

THE QUMRAN-ESSENE CALENDAR

As I looked for other Egyptian antecedents amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most startling I found relates to the calendar used by the Qumran-Essenes. As mentioned in Chapter 1, it is solar based, relying on the sun’s movement, and gave them a year that contained 364 days. The twelve months each had thirty days and one of four extra days were added at the end of each three-month period. The basis for the Qumran-Essene solar calendar is spelled out in detail in their Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch and in the calendrical texts (4Q320–30). The solar calendar was physically confirmed by Father Roland de Vaux in 1954, by the finding of a stone ‘sundial’ in the Qumran ruins.

The ‘sundial’ was almost certainly used by the Essenes to enable ‘physical’ measurement of days and intervals in a solar calendar.15 Not only were explicit details of the solar calendar given in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was a mandatory requirement that it be followed. Those who did not follow the original (solar) calendar are harshly castigated in the Damascus documents.

The intriguing thing is, the Essene calendar was quite different from the Rabbinic Jewish calendar, which was, and still is, based on lunar movements, giving a year of 354 days.*49

For the ancient Egyptians their year was, like the Qumran-Essenes, solar based – made up of twelve months of thirty days with five intercalary days added. These additional days were related to festivals for the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.16

The question I asked myself was, why did the Qumran-Essenes only add four extra days rather than the conventional Egyptian calendar’s five? I believe a likely answer is that when Akhenaten became Pharaoh, these five traditional gods were persona non grata and he needed other festivals to equate with the intercalary days. There were many other traditional Egyptian festivals to choose from, the most important being the New Year Festival, the Festival of Sokar, the Festival of the Raising of the Sky and the Festival of the Potter’s Wheel. The choice, however, was severely limited as most of the major and minor festivals were built around pagan gods. The most likely outcome, therefore, was that Akhenaten opted for the three traditional ‘crop’-related festivals of the Nile’s inundation, spring and harvest, supplemented by the Festival of the New Year.

This would explain why the Qumran-Essenes only added four intercalary days to their solar calendar – a procedure that was in tune with their stated affiliations to order and conformity with ‘the natural laws’, and in nonconformity ‘with the festivals of nations’. The four festivals the Qumran-Essenes celebrated were Passover (Pesach), the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot, Pentecost), the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) and the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) – all equivalent to those celebrated by the normative Jewish community, but all celebrated on different dates.17

The fifth Jewish festival, ‘Purim’, traditionally dating back to the fifth century BCE Persian period of Jewish history, was celebrated in the general community but would have been superfluous to the calendrical needs of the Qumran-Essenes. This could explain why the Dead Sea Scrolls – which contain two almost complete versions of Isaiah and passages from every single book of the Old Testament, as well as apocryphal, pseudepigraphic and sectarian works – have nothing from the Book of Esther for which Purim is the related Festival.18

The life-cycle of any community is critically controlled by the calendar it follows. The ability of the Qumran community to maintain their own version of the Israelite calendar is indicative of their extreme independence from mainstream Judaism – theirs was the same solar-based calendar that Akhenaten and the early Egyptians used.

FESTIVALS AND JUBILEES

Another calendrical difference from mainstream Judaism, maintained by the Qumranites, related to Festivals or ‘Jubilees’. These significant years for priestly celebration are documented in a Dead Sea Scroll known as ‘Heavenly Concordances’ (4Q319A).

Taking their guidance from the creation story of Genesis 1:4, the Community looked for signs in the sky:

And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night: and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.’

Because their calendar was solar, rather than lunar based, years in which the sun and moon were aligned at the beginning of a year were signs of momentous portent worthy of celebration. For the Qumran-Essenes that happened in years one and four of six-year rotations. There is no mention in the scrolls of a first Jubilee, but a second Jubilee is listed as commemorable after a period of forty-eight years. The first Jubilee period must therefore have been a lesser number of years, but nevertheless a significantly long period to justify celebration, and to be divisible by six. It could have been after thirty, thirty-six or, perhaps, forty-two years. Lesser Jubilees would then fall in the fourth year of a six-year period, and at the end of the cycle or at the beginning of the seventh year.

This system of Jubilees was quite unique to the Qumran-Essenes and not part of normal Jewish practice. The ‘Book of Jubilees’, which describes these requirements, is considered pseudepigraphic, i.e., non-canonical anonymous writings, thought to be from the period 200 BCE to 200 CE. But the system was not unknown in Egypt a thousand years earlier.

By now this phrase is becoming quite repetitive, but the evidence is, again, very convincing.

The ‘Sed’ or ‘Jubilee’ festivals celebrated in ancient Egypt were an ongoing tradition that can be traced back well before the period of Akhenaten, and were considered of fundamental importance for the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs.

The main Jubilee was celebrated in year thirty of a pharaoh’s reign; a lesser, secondary Jubilee was celebrated in the thirty-fourth year and a tertiary Jubilee in the thirty-seventh year. These ceremonials are well documented, for example, those in the reign of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father.19 They involved long-range planning and preparations, erection of statues, large building projects and the design of new clothing and apparel. The event itself took the form of regal processions, a reenactment of the pharaoh’s enthronement, feasting and national events.

For Akhenaten, ‘celebrator of Jubilees’20 who only reigned long enough to celebrate lesser Jubilees, they were opportune occasions for his multi-talented abilities in literature, design and architecture to be exploited. Under his instructions, Akhenaten’s chief sculptor created new forms of ‘expressionism’ previously unseen in Egyptian artform. Portraits and statues appeared with elongated, Modigliani-like features. Figures were no longer represented in a rounded form, striving for realism, but as aquilinized creations with sharp features and enlarged heads. One can imagine that the inspiration for Akhenaten’s new perspectives may have been related to his worship of Aten and came to him when he gazed at the long shadows cast by solid objects illuminated by an oblique sun.

However one looks at the celebration of Jubilees as they are described by the Qumran-Essenes at the time of Christ, they have a striking resemblance to practices only too familiar to the Egypt of 1,500 years earlier.

There are other similarities between the Essenes’ culture and philosophy and that of ancient Egypt, for example, seen in the way the Qumran-Essenes viewed the forces of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’.

THE SCROLL OF MOSES’ BIBLICAL FATHER

The Dead Sea Scroll of the ‘Last Words of Amram’ – the Biblical father of Moses – describes two forces struggling over possession of the spirit of his dead body. Both beings exhibit the reptilian features of an asp and a viper, whilst the one of ‘darkness’ is known as ‘Belial’ and the one of ‘light’ is known by three names. They ‘watch’ over the dead body, but inner knowledge will save Amram from the ‘King of Wickedness’.

Many interpretations have been made of the origins of this passage, but one possibility that does not seem to have been examined is its parallels to the Egyptian myth of Osiris. All the elements are there. Horus, the redeemer, ‘watches’ over Osiris in his state of suspended death to protect him from the god of darkness, Seth, whilst the serpent doors are guarded by the gods. The serpent was from ancient times an emblem of moral evil and therefore dread for the Egyptians, and they had long believed in a ‘limbo filled with snakes’.21 The combining of gods into three was, as has been seen previously (in Chapter 5), a common feature of Egyptian lore, and a body in limbo was to be revived by ‘three entities’ – the soul (ba), intelligence (xu), and genius (ka).22

If this scroll is referring to the Biblical father of Moses, as the name implies, it is certainly saying that he was not an Hebrew.

BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT

So many are the conventionally inexplicable passages of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the life-patterns of their authors, the Qumran-Essenes, that can be clarified by comparison with ancient Egyptian custom – particularly that of the Akhenaten period – that it becomes irresistible to link the two.

I think it is quite reasonable to say that the proposition that Judaism emerged out of Akhenatenism has many justifications, just from the evidence already cited. The deep philosophical bases of monotheistic religion, evident even at the time of Moses, is unlikely to have emerged from a group of nomadic Patriarchs. We have already seen how Egyptian religion had moved inexorably towards a consensus that there was only one supreme God. The development of that conviction accelerated with the Amenhotep pharaohs, culminating in Akhenaten’s complete break with multi-deity worship and idolatry.

The Essenes were the children of the Akhenaten priests in the same manner as Christianity and Islam are the children of Judaism – the torch bearers of the eternal light of God.

If Moses did acquire his depth of monotheistic understanding from Egypt, then the obvious question arises – is there any other evidence or acknowledgement, from within the Bible or other related sources, that the Biblical Commandments and Laws, other than the very early ‘Noahite Laws’, pre-dated Moses?

If I am correct, there should be. If there is such evidence, it would be powerful additional proof of my suppositions.

The immediate answer is a qualified ‘No’ – at least as far as conventional Torah and the Bible admit. However, as already mentioned, religions tend to be selective in their memories and distance themselves from their early antecedents! This apparent lack of confirmation of an earlier structure of Laws is therefore only to be expected. Later Rabbinic teaching does, however, tend to talk in terms of Noahite Laws and Mosaic Laws, as if to half-heartedly admit: ‘Well, if there are any pre-Moses laws they were basic and quite under-developed.’

The pre-Moses ‘Noahite Laws’, which have been deduced from Genesis 9:4–7, etc., are considered to number seven in total and forbid:

The seventh requires the establishment of courts and justice. There is no specific mention of keeping the Sabbath holy, or other precepts.

When, however, one looks at the oldest known Hebrew and Aramaic sources of the Bible – the Dead Sea Scrolls – and especially those of them that do not relate to specific descriptions of the Qumran Community, but to pre-Exodus references, there is a clear, unambiguous acknowledgement that the Commandments of Moses were extant and operative before the time of Moses. This conclusion is not just my own interpretation; it is the view of eminent scholars like Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Dwight D. Swanson and Philip R. Davies,23 the latter being published within a programme of Judaic Studies sponsored by Brown University in America.

These pre-Exodus references are to be found in the Qumran-Essene ‘Jubilees Scroll’, in the ‘Damascus Document’ and in the ‘Temple Scroll’. ‘Two of these scrolls represent the law as having been fully known before Sinai.’24

Many derivations of ‘the laws’ can be seen in pre-Sinai writings of Egypt. As Raymonde de Gans expresses it in his work Toutankhamon,25 referring to post1422 BCE and moral concepts that are:

curieusement formulée en termes négatifs à la manière des Dix Commandements de Moise. Souvent très long et très détaillé, ce plaidoyer nous fournit des indications précises sur le Code Moral de l’Egypte antique.

curiously formulated in negative terms in the style of the Ten Commandments of Moses. Often very long and very detailed, this pleading gives us a precise indication of the Moral Code of ancient Egypt.

‘Jubilees’

The Jubilees Scrolls of the Qumran-Essenes record that the Sinai law was known, and observed, by the Patriarchs.

And He said to us: I am going to take for Myself a people among my peoples. And they will keep the Sabbath and I will consecrate them as My people and I will bless them. They will be My people and I will be their God. And I chose the descendants of Jacob among all those I saw. And I confirmed him for Me as the firstborn son and consecrated him to Me for ever and ever. The seventh day I will teach them so that they keep the Sabbath on it above all . . . And this is the testimony of the First Law.

Jubilees, Fragment 1

In Fragment 7, Terah is talking to his son Abraham:

You my son, keep His precepts His decrees and His judgements; do not go after idols or after carved or cast effigies. And do not eat any blood of an animal, cattle or any bird which flies in the air.

Other commandments in Jubilees include prohibition from: accepting a bribe; evil deeds; abominations; and defiling the Holy of Holies.

The Damascus Document

The Damascus Document is independently corroborated by the Genizah version found at the Cairo Synagogue,26 and many of its passages can be found in the Torah. There can be little doubt as to its validity in our investigations, or to the authenticity of the other texts. All three scrolls confirm the Mosaic Laws as having been fully known before Sinai.27 It is also apparent that these documents did not originate with the Qumran-Essenes but are copies of much earlier texts.

Columns 2 and 3 of the Damascus Document read as follows:

because they did as they wanted and did not keep the commandments of their maker, until His anger was aroused against them. Because of it the children of Noah went astray, as did their families; through it they were cut off.

Abraham did not follow it, and he was accounted as a friend because he kept the commandments of God and did not choose what he himself wanted.

And he passed on [the Commandments] to Isaac and Jacob, and they kept [them] and were written down as Friends of God and covenant partners for ever.

The children of Jacob went astray because of them and were punished according to their error. And their children in Egypt walked in the stubbornness of their heart in taking counsel against the Commandments of God and doing each one as he thought right.

Columns 5 and 6 read:

For in ancient times there arose Moses and Aaron, by the hand of the Prince of Lights, and Belial,*50 with his cunning, raised up Jannes**51 and his brother during the first deliverance of Israel… (My italics)

And in the age of devastation of the land there arose those who shifted boundary and made Israel stray.

And the land became desolate, for they spoke of rebellion against God’s precepts through the hand of Moses and also of the holy anointed ones.

The phrase: ‘by the hand of the Prince of Lights’ as the force behind Moses and Aaron is, I believe, a deeper reference to the Pharaoh Akhenaten, for whom rays of light in the form of a hand with outstretched fingers were symbolic of his belief in God. (Although it is even more likely that it is a reference to ‘Meryra’, the High Priest of Akhetaten, who was also an hereditary Prince.) Figure 5 shows Akhenaten worshipping Aten at the Great Temple of Akhetaten.

The Temple Scroll

Still on the theme that the Mosaic Commandments pre-dated Sinai, the balance of authoritative opinion is that the ‘Temple Scroll’ was not an internal Qumran Community document but derived from much earlier times. The assertions within the Temple Scroll itself, that the commandments and Covenant that the Israelites were ordered to follow pre-date Sinai, are most intriguing, especially when compared to the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 31:31–33 talks of a new Covenant between the Lord and Israel.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord: but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After these days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they will be my people.

The theme is taken up in the New Testament, in Hebrews 8, and is generally seen in Christian theology as the pivotal point of a ‘new beginning’.

However, in the Temple Scroll, the covenant for the new Temple is not the covenant made with those who led the Hebrews out of Egypt, but with the original patriarchs of Leviticus:28

Like the covenant which I made with Jacob at Bethel…

The Temple Scroll contradicts Jeremiah, and maintains that there is no new Covenant. It does, however, clarify Jeremiah’s meaning of a ‘new Covenant’ as referring to a new inward understanding of the old Covenant.29

THE TEMPLE

Intriguingly, the above quotation from the Essene Temple Scroll, ‘…the covenant for the new Temple…’, suggests the possibility that there was an older Temple – one prior to Solomon’s First Temple.

This apparent knowledge of an older Temple makes the attitude of the Qumran community to the Temple at Jerusalem all that more easy to understand. It has already been noted that the Qumran-Essenes were not at all happy with the manning, procedures and geometry of the Second Temple. Their dissatisfaction must also have been directed at the First Temple that, although not as elaborate, was dimensionally essentially the same.

The Essenes considered the priests corrupt, the festival rituals inappropriate and the size of the building too small, with the wrong number of courtyards. They wanted it to have three courtyards, rather than two. Detailed measurements of the First Temple are given in I Kings 6 and 7, II Chronicles 3 and 4, and are referred to in I Chronicles 28 as being given to Solomon by his father David. The description in Ezekiel 40–47 appears to differ from the earlier Biblical descriptions and seems to be rather more a ‘vision’ of an hypothetical temple rather than a real one. Most scholars, in fact, view Ezekiel’s description as a half-remembered idyllic vision of how the Holy Temple should be constructed. Without going into the complexities of this description, there is one feature that has convinced most scholars that Ezekiel was fantasizing.

And when the man that had the line in his hand went forth eastwards, he measured a thousand cubits, and he brought me through the waters; the waters were to the ankles. Again he measured a thousand, and brought me through the waters; the waters were to the knees. Again he measured a thousand, and brought me through; the waters were to the loins. Afterwards he measured a thousand; and it was a river that I could not pass over; for the waters were risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over.

Ezekiel 47:3–5

Ezekiel’s guide is telling him that the Temple is 510m (taking a cubit as 0.51m) from a very wide river. Later in the Old Testament Chapter Ezekiel makes it quite clear that this very wide river is to the west of the Temple and that there were trees on either side of the river. The description given by Ezekiel bears no relation at all to the geography of the Temple mound at Jerusalem. However, look again at the maps showing the position of the Great Temple of Akhenaten in Figures 14 and 19. Of course, rivers change course over thousands of years, but geological studies show that in this instance the river has hardly changed its course over the years. Today there are very few visible signs of Akhenaten’s Great Temple, but we know from archaeological work precisely where it stood and even now there are still trees on either side of the Nile, which is particularly wide at this stretch. If you walked 500m from the Great Temple you would be up to your ankles in the water of the River Nile!

There are many other features of Ezekiel’s vision that are reminiscent of the Great Temple at Akhetaten and its surroundings. There are also some that are quite confusing and that do not appear to relate to the Great Temple. To analyse them in detail would take another book, but his description of the proximity of a large river to the Temple, and its precise distance, could well indicate that it was Akhenaten’s Temple that he was talking about.

According to I Kings and II Chronicles, the First Temple at Jerusalem was effectively an enlarged edition of the desert Tabernacle, and measured 60 cubits (30.6m) in length, 20 cubits (10.2m) in breadth and 30 cubits (15.3m) in height. (This is based on the Egyptian cubit measurement of 51cm; however, it is likely that by the date of the building of the First Temple, c.940 BCE, the ‘Royal Cubit’ of 53.3cm may have been used.) The inner sanctuary was 20 x 20 x 20 cubits.

Surrounding and abutting the Temple were storehouses, priests’ quarters, service buildings and Solomon’s Palace, in a similar structural complex to that seen at Akhetaten.

Notable differences from the Tabernacle descriptions were the addition, by Solomon, of a large brazen altar, ten lavers (rather than one) in the outer court – plus a very large one for the priests, ten seven-branched candlesticks rather than one, and two huge cherubim with 20-cubit long wings forming a protective shade over the Ark in the inner sanctum, which was in total darkness.

Similar outline designs of temples built in the same period have been found in Canaan and Syria, but it is interesting to draw a comparison between the much earlier Great Temple at Amarna. Whilst Solomon’s Temple appears to have been considerably smaller, there are some remarkable similarities. The Great Temple was oriented north-west–south-east, whilst Solomon’s Temple was probably oriented east to west, and their overall plan sizes are in almost exact proportion – 1:3. The parallel requirement for utter darkness in the inner sanctuary of Egyptian temples has already been remarked on in Chapter 5.

One puzzle, however, is that the the ‘Temple Scroll’ found at Qumran goes into great detail on the forms of animal sacrifice that are to be carried out in the Temple, and animal sacrifice continued in the Temple at Jerusalem throughout the period of the Qumran-Essenes. The legislative requirements for sacrifice are repeated in parts of the Books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and all these books were of importance to the Qumran-Essenes. However, I have previously suggested that, not only did the Qumran-Essenes, like Akhenaten, not practice holocaust sacrifice, they were against it.

For the Qumran-Essenes, their rules required the Community to be ‘without the flesh of holocausts [burnt offerings] and the fat of sacrifices’. A ‘sweet fragrance’ was to be sent up to God, and prayer was to be ‘an acceptable fragrance of righteousness’.30 No evidence of sacrificial shrines, rituals or sacrificial remains have ever been discovered at Qumran.

The view has been advanced that the Temple Scroll is not a Qumran composition; I tend to go along with this view in relation to the descriptive passages dealing with sacrifices, which are clearly rooted in a post-exilic Canaanite setting. A possible explanation is that whilst one group of the conflicting strands of temple priests, who influenced the writing of the Old Testament, condoned animal sacrifice (and the worship of the god Astorath in conjunction with God), the other group of temple priests abhorred it. Going back to the ‘Golden Calf’ incident in Sinai, the condoners were most likely derived from the Aaronic priestly line, as opposed to those who traced their ancestry back to Moses. The passages in the holy texts that advocate holocaust sacrifice could therefore have been promoted by the writers that supported this view.

SQUARING THE CIRCLE

One can postulate from our new understanding of their heritage that, with their disenchantment with the Second Temple from both a religious and structural viewpoint, and their separation from normative Judaism, the Qumran-Essenes felt increasingly marginalized. Their only hope for a return to authentic monotheism – Atenism – was in the return of their ‘Messiah of Holiness’. When the Damascus Document of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Genizah collection cite both Moses and the ‘hands of the anointed Messiah of holiness’ as the givers of the Commandments, they are almost certainly referring to Moses and another lawgiver – Akhenaten? – who had the status of a Kingly Messiah. The Priestly Messiah in this context can only be Meryra, the High Priest of Akhetaten, who was also an hereditary Prince.

As a corollary to the above conclusion, it becomes evident that many other of the controversially perplexing statements and attitudes expressed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have not been easy to explain previously, now have very plausible explanations.

For example, there must have been a reason for the ‘catastrophic messianic’ perspective of the Community. It could have been related to the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. However, although the Qumran-Essenes venerated the concept of the Temple, they did not approve of the First (or Second) Temple and anticipated an imminent messianic age when all would be put right. Why should they be upset over the destruction of a Temple that they detested? Another, more likely, explanation can be proposed: the death of their King and loss of the Temple at Akhetaten, as the centre of their religious world, left an abiding memory of how their world should have been and that only dreams of the future could offer them the catharsis of reinstatement.

As guardians of the original covenant, the Qumran-Essenes were convinced that they were the only true Israelites and that all other Jews were in the wrong. Their messianic fervour foresaw two Messiahs coming to save them: one Kingly and the other Priestly, with Aaronic connections – i.e., a saviour dating back to the times in Egypt.

The Dead Sea Scroll texts written in the third century BCE referring to a King as ‘Son of God’ are, as Lawrence Schiffman, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, asserts: ‘the statement of a notion already in existence, and not a reference to Jesus’.31 This notion is entirely consistent with the concept of the King, or Pharaoh, being the appointed human representative of God on earth, and of his High Priest being the second of the Messiahs they awaited.

The imagery of a Messiah who ‘…will extend his hands to the bread’, described in the Messianic Rule of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is unmistakably reminiscent of the extended hands of Aten towards the bread of offering. The Community’s conviction of a future that was ordained confirms their overt belief in predestination, in direct contradiction of Jewish teaching at the time and of today. Needless to say, belief in predestination was the current canon in the religion of Akhenaten.

Suddenly a lot of other things fall into place. Many references in the New Testament not only allude to the coming of the Messiah, but state that the Messiah took an active part in the Old Testament. Professor A. Hanson, of Hull University, who wrote Jesus Christ in the Old Testament in the 1960s, put it more strongly: ‘Paul (and John) frequently perplexes us by apparently throwing Christ’s activity back into the Old Testament’.32 Perhaps they are merely reflecting an older tradition that one Messiah had already been on earth.

Polygamy, The Gander and The Goose

The rules applying to the Qumran-Essenes on marriage are spelled out in the Damascus Document. They prohibit a man to take two wives and positively reject polygamy. The practice is condemned by the Document as unacceptable fornication. (King David, c.1000 BCE, is exonerated apparently because he was not privy to the laws, which were kept hidden in the Ark of the Covenant.)

Marriage between uncle and niece is not forbidden by the Mosaic Law and seems to have been quite acceptable in normative society, but marriage between aunt and nephew is forbidden. What was sauce for the gander was not sauce for the goose. The Damascus Document, however, maintains that the Law applies equally to males and females, and that both connubia are forbidden.33

The Temple Scroll of the Essenes also confirms this sanction and makes it clear that whilst marriage after the divorce or death of a first wife is acceptable, polygamy is not.

The attitude of the Egyptians, particularly the Pharaohs pre- and post- Akhenaten, appears to be rather similar to that of the Kings of Canaan. They were polygamous and could take numerous wives, for sexual pleasure and to procreate the dynastic line.

Akhenaten appears to have taken a different stance – a stance echoed by the Qumran-Essenes. As far as is known he only had one wife to bear his children throughout his life, and there is no mention of another sexual relationship in Egyptian chronicles (although there is mention in the Tell-Amarna Letters of a ‘diplomatic’ wife). The circumstantial evidence that he practised and preached monogamy can be discerned from the fact that whilst his wife, Nefertiti, produced six daughters for him (there was possibly a seventh), he did not ‘do’ a Henry VIII and get rid of her to obtain a son. Nor did he take additional wives – despite the inevitable pressure to ensure the continuity of his dynastic line through a son.

A Second Torah?

It is amongst the Essene writings on marriage that further strong evidence can be found of the extreme antiquity of the texts of these ‘Guardians of the Ark of the Covenant’. We come back to the enigmatic statement in the Damascus Document that King David was apparently unaware of the ‘hidden laws’ that related to marriage and other divine injunctions. How could it be that the general populace, many of the priests and the King of his people were not acquainted with a huge chunk of divine writ?

Carbon dating and palaeographic comparisons place the writing of the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls at 300, possibly 350, BCE. The Damascus texts, which apparently existed at the time but were not available to King David, make the link from these dates back to the time of David, and to the time of Joshua before the entry of the Hebrews into Canaan, c.1200 BCE, as the following passage reveals:

And about the Prince it is written: he should not multiply wives to himself. However, David had not read the sealed book of the law which was in the ark, for it had not been opened in Israel since the day of the death of Eleazar and of Jehoshua, and Joshua and the elders who worshipped Ashtaroth had hidden the copy until Zadok’s entry into office.

Damascus Document, Column 5

The Torah confirms the Damascus texts in relation to David’s ‘taking of more concubines and wives’ (II Samuel 5) and also tends to confirm the implication that the contents of the Ark were, at that time, privy to a select priestly line only and not available to David. II Samuel 6 describes how the Ark of the Lord was brought from Baalim, but that David was initially afraid to go near it, or to bring it to the tent he had prepared for it in the City of David. The Ark was left in the keeping of Obed-edom until David changed his mind.

The references to Baalim, which indicate an association to idolatrous worship of Baal, and to Ashtaroth, a favoured god of the Amenhotep faction, also support the contention that David had not yet seen, or taken to heart, the contents of the Ark and had allowed a degree of backsliding amongst his people.

Even with the Ark of the Covenant in his possession it is not clear that David had an understanding of all the laws. Later Biblical writings also confirm the assertion of the Qumran-Essenes that the priests kept at least some of the Torah hidden from the people. This can be clearly deduced from the Second Book of Kings, and to an event that, in itself, led to profound changes in the way Judaism was practised.

And it came to pass in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, that the King sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshullam, the scribe, to the house of the Lord, saying, ‘Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he may sum the silver which is brought into the house of the Lord, which the keepers of the door have gathered of the people…’ …And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, ‘I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.’ And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

II Kings 22:3–4, 8

What on earth was going on here? Does this mean that one of the Five Books of Moses, apparently given to him on Mount Sinai, had been lost for at least 400 years? You may well ask, but that is exactly what the Bible is saying. It means someone or some persons were privy to a different and sometimes contradictory, version of the laws and commandments, versions which may have been as old as 1200 BCE but also incorporated new ideas developed around 600 BCE.

Alternatively, this Book was fully originated around 600 BCE, and did not exist before. Because this ‘newly found book’ is written in a style consistent with the seventh century, it is believed by most scholars to have been a product of that era, developed by its authors to put across their own contemporary programme of views and given authority by pretending it was a work of Moses.

The Scroll that Shaphan read and brought to the King was almost certainly, in essence, what we now know as the Book of Deuteronomy. When King Josiah, who was in the eighteenth year of his reign in 621 BCE, read the Scroll he immediately realized its significance, decreed that sacrifices should henceforth only be performed at Jerusalem and immediately stopped sacrifices everywhere else in Israel. According to II Kings, he destroyed all the other shrines and altars sited on high places, at Beth-El, Ahaz, Carmel and on the hills around Jerusalem, and had all the associated priests put to death. (It appears he left Mount Gerizim untouched.)

This measure had the effect of controlling sacrifices that, up until that time, had been subject to local cultic abuse and pagan practices – worship of Baal, Astarte, and even possible child sacrifice to Moloch, by earlier Kings in times of dire trouble. (All sacrifices within Judaism were finally ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.)34

We can date the finding of the Scroll of Deuteronomy by King Josiah reasonably precisely to 621 BCE from excavations at Megiddo, where the King was slain by the Egyptian Pharaoh Nechoh in 608 BCE.

The conclusion must be that a priestly group, which I believe can only have been the predecessors of the Qumran-Essenes, were aware that David was in the wrong in 1000 BCE, and that their ‘Second Torah’ held additional and sometimes contradictory details of the Pentateuch that derived from well before 1000 BCE.

There is not enough space in this book to consider all the detailed similarities that exist between the writings and prayers of Akhenaten and those of the Qumran-Essenes (and on into Hebrew, Christian and Muslim texts). It will suffice to cite the generality of themes running throughout both varieties of texts. Themes of reverence to light, truth, peace, predestination, ritual washing, and admonitions against the forces of darkness, lying, insincerity, serpents and vipers.

One specific example illustrates the flavour of these similarities. The Dead Sea Scrolls record ‘daily prayers’ that the Qumran-Essenes followed every morning and every evening, as did the priests of Akhenaten.

Longer Prayer found at the tomb of Panehesy at El-Amarna, Egypt35 Daily Prayers of the Essenes, found at Cave 4 at Qumran36
   
Homage to Thee! And at the rising of the sun . . .
Thou dawnest in the sky and shinest in to the vault of the heavens,
the morning on the horizon of heaven, they shall bless.
coming in peace the Lord of Peace.  
   
All mankind lives at sight of Thee, They shall say: Blessed be the
the whole land assembles at Thy rising; God of (Israel). Today He
their hands salute Thy dawning. renews in the fourth [gate of light ...] for us the rule
  [...][...] teen [...] the heat of the [sun] when it crosses
  [. . . with the streng]th of His powerful hand
  [peace be with you].37

We see in 4QFlorilegium, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave 4 discussed by Professor George Brooke in his extensive work on the subject ‘Exegesis at Qumran’,38 another reference to light, in Fragments 6–7:

They shall cause your laws to shine before Jacob and your laws before Israel.

THE LINKS FROM AKHENATEN TO THE QUMRAN-ESSENES

It is now possible to summarize the essential and exclusive elements that connect the Qumran-Essenes to the priests of Akhenaten. We find that the Qumran-Essenes:

All of these elements, apart from the penultimate one, were quite contrary to the practices and beliefs of mainstream Judaism that the Essenes were surrounded by.

Taken en masse, it is evident that the Qumran-Essenes were aware of and pursued a number of characteristic religious practices and rituals, many in fundamental contravention to mainstream Judaism, that can only be explained as being derived from practices and beliefs of the Egyptian Akhenaten period.