The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Scrolls and Judaism

CHAPTER 5

When the Scrolls first came to light, scholars were mainly impressed by the difference between the worldview they disclosed and that of traditional, rabbinic, Judaism. Most striking was a passage in the Community Rule, which became known as the Instruction on the Two Spirits:

From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before ever they existed He established their whole design, and when, as ordained for them, they come into being, it is in accord with His glorious design that they accomplish their task without change. The laws of all things are in His hand and He provides them with all their needs.

He has created man to govern the world, and has appointed for him two spirits in which to walk until the time of His visitation: the spirits of truth and injustice. Those born of truth spring from a fountain of light, but those born of injustice spring from a source of darkness. All the children of righteousness are ruled by the Prince of Light and walk in the ways of light, but all the children of injustice are ruled by the Angel of Darkness and walk in the ways of darkness. The Angel of Darkness leads all the children of righteousness astray, and until his end, all their sin, iniquities, wickedness and all their unlawful deeds are caused by his dominion, in accordance with the mysteries of God …

The nature of all the children of men is ruled by these (two spirits), and during their life all the hosts of men have a portion of their divisions and walk in their ways. And the whole reward for their deeds shall be for everlasting ages, according to whether each man’s portion in their two divisions is great or small. For God has established the spirits in equal measure until the final age, and has set everlasting hatred between their divisions … But in the mysteries of His understanding and in His glorious wisdom, God has ordained an end for injustice, and at the time of the visitation he will destroy it forever. (trans. Vermes)

Here was a dualistic vision of the world without parallel either in the Hebrew Bible or in later rabbinic Judaism. On this account, the presence of evil in the world is due to the fact that God divided the world between good and evil at creation. There was some ambiguity as to whether people are assigned completely to one lot or the other, or rather are given shares in each. But the human condition seemed predetermined in either case.

Another dimension of this dualism was spelled out in the War Scroll, which was also one of the original seven texts found in Qumran Cave 1, which is introduced as “The rule of the war on the unleashing of the attack of the sons of light against the company of the sons of darkness, the army of Belial.” The scroll provides instructions for a final war between the opposing dualistic forces. The sons of light are led by the archangel Michael. The sons of darkness include the Kittim,1 usually identified as the Romans in this text, and are led by Belial, a Satanic figure. The battle is divided into seven phases. Each side prevails in three lots, but in the seventh the mighty hand of God prevails.

Apocalyptic Judaism

The expectation of a final battle between good and evil was not especially new in Jewish tradition. Decisive divine intervention is a standard theme in the prophetic literature. It becomes even more prominent in the apocalyptic literature that came to prominence in the second century BCE. The word apocalypse is derived from the Greek word for revelation. An apocalypse is a supernatural revelation, which reveals secrets of the heavenly world, on the one hand, and of eschatological judgment on the other. The Book of Daniel is the only full-blown example of the genre in the Hebrew Bible. It portrays the persecution of the Judeans by the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes in the years 167–64 BCE in mythological terms. The gentile kingdoms are portrayed as beasts rising from the sea, imagery drawn from ancient Near Eastern myths. The Judeans, however, are aided by the archangel Michael, described as the prince of Israel, and the holy ones of the Most High, or the angelic host. In the end, the gentile beast is destroyed, and the kingdom is given to a human figure, “one like a son of man,” who comes on the clouds, as Yahweh did in the Hebrew Bible. This figure should most probably be identified as the archangel Michael. Daniel also promises that the “wise,” who are killed in the time of persecution, will be raised from the dead and will shine with the stars. In apocalyptic idiom, this means that they will become companions to the host of heaven. Daniel is the first clear attestation of the hope for resurrection in the Hebrew Bible.

Other examples of apocalyptic literature are found in the books of Enoch, several of which date from the late third or early second century BCE. Enoch had supposedly been taken up to heaven before the Flood, so he was uniquely positioned to reveal both the mysteries of the universe and the course of history. Jewish apocalyptic writings are typically pseudonymous, that is, they are ascribed to people other than their real authors. The supposed authors typically lived in much earlier times, and so they could accurately “predict” the course of history down to the time of the actual authors. This in turn added to the credibility of the real predictions about the events of the end-time. Some of the books of Enoch are concerned with the movements of the stars and with cosmological details that are hidden from humanity, including the abodes of the dead. Others give extensive overviews of history in the form of prophecy, and predict a final judgment. Since Enoch was supposed to have lived long before Moses, the earliest books of Enoch make no overt reference to the Law of Moses, and accordingly seem to represent a kind of Judaism that is very different from the rabbinic tradition.

With the exception of the Book of Daniel, the apocalyptic writings that flourished in the years 200 BCE to 100 CE were not preserved in Jewish tradition. Some survived, usually in translation, in Christian circles, and even then most of them were unknown for centuries in the Christian West. 1 Enoch, a collection of five books of Enoch, was preserved in Ethiopia, where it was regarded as sacred scripture. At the end of the eighteenth century, it was brought back to England by a Scottish traveler, and in the early nineteenth century it was translated first into English and then into German. A series of other apocalypses were subsequently discovered, in such languages as Syriac and Old Church Slavonic. These writings were not overtly Christian, but neither did they conform to traditional Judaism. Consequently, in the nineteenth century, it was often suggested that they represented the writings of the Essenes, the mysterious sect described in Greek and Latin writings but unknown in Hebrew sources. This suggestion took hold even though the Greek and Latin writers did not ascribe apocalyptic views to the Essenes. Writings that did not fit well in the categories of traditional Judaism were ascribed to a group that was not acknowledged in that tradition, in effect ascribing the unknown to the unknown.

As we have seen already, the belief that the Dead Sea Scrolls were writings of the Essenes arose almost immediately after their discovery, in part because the Roman author Pliny had located an Essene community west of the Dead Sea, and in part because of the similarity between the account of the Essene organization by Josephus and the Community Rule found at Qumran. The fact that the Scrolls contained apocalyptic writings was now taken as confirmation of their Essene origin. “Another argument in favour of the identification of the Jewish New Covenant with the Essenes,” wrote Dupont-Sommer, “is the following fact which has considerable implications: it happens that a number of writings whose Essene origin was formerly held by serious scholars to be at least very probable, can be equally connected with the sect of the New Covenant in the light of the recent discoveries.”2 Not only were several copies of the Book of Daniel found at Qumran, but also fragments of other revelations attributed to Daniel. Aramaic fragments of most of the books of Enoch were found, as were Hebrew fragments of the Book of Jubilees, which seems to be cited as scripture in the Damascus Document. Other Aramaic fragments were related to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Before the discovery of the Scrolls, it was possible to doubt whether pseudepigraphic writings like 1 Enoch were really Jewish. The Scrolls settled that issue, at least in the case of books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which were now attested in their original languages. The Scrolls, then, provided further evidence of a strand of Judaism that was at variance with the tradition taken up by the Rabbis. Its concerns were dominated by eschatological expectation rather than by debates about the exact interpretation of the Law.

Zoroastrian Influence?

The apocalypticism of the Instruction on the Two Spirits and the War Scroll, however, was notably different from that of Enoch and Daniel. It was more strongly dualistic, insofar as humanity was divided ever since creation between forces of light and darkness. The closest parallel to this worldview was found in the teachings of the Persian prophet Zoroaster. Consider the following account of Zoroastrianism by the Greek author Plutarch:

But they (the Persians) also relate many mythical details about the gods, and the following are instances. Horomazes is born from the purest light and Areimanius from darkness, and they are at war with one another … Theopompus says that, according to the Magians, for three thousand years alternately the one god will dominate the other and be dominated, and that for another three thousand years they will fight and make war, until one smashes up the domain of the other.3

In this account, the two spirits seem to be primordial. In the hymns of Zoroaster, the Gathas, which are the oldest part of Zoroastrian tradition, the two spirits are the twin children of Ahura Mazda, the wise lord (Horomazes in Plutarch’s account), who is the supreme God. The evil spirit is associated with “the Lie.” In the Damascus Document, the opponent of the Teacher is known as “the man of the Lie.”

Scholars had long suspected that the whole system of thought known as apocalypticism, which appears as a novelty in Judaism in the second century BCE, might be influenced by Zoroastrianism. Besides dualism, Zoroastrianism is characterized by determinism, and by the division of history into periods. Belief in resurrection is attested in Persian religion long before it appears in Judaism. Scholars have been wary of attaching much importance to Zoroastrian influence, however, for two reasons. Many of the most important sources for Zoroastrianism are relatively late (sixth to ninth centuries CE), and while they clearly preserve old traditions, it is often difficult to delineate them. Moreover, very few scholars are trained both in ancient Judaism and in Zoroastrianism. Students of ancient Judaism tend to shy away from texts they cannot read in their original language and whose context they do not understand. Consequently the question of Zoroastrian influence has seldom received the attention it deserves. Nonetheless, the similarity of the two worldviews is evident, and cannot be denied.

It was perhaps unfortunate that the scholar who first demonstrated the affinities of the dualism of the Scrolls with Iranian religion, Karl-Georg Kuhn, had been an active member of the Nazi party, and was tainted with anti-Semitism.4 After the war, Kuhn tried to distance himself from his Nazi past, without fully acknowledging the extent of his involvement. He was, however, one of the few German scholars of his generation who had been trained in rabbinics, and he had a good philological foundation that included knowledge of Persian. Eventually, in 1964, he was accepted into the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, on the nomination of Gerhard von Rad and Günther Bornkamm, both of whom had been staunch opponents of the Nazis and members of the confessing church. Whatever Kuhn’s earlier sins, and whatever his ideology remained, he became a founding father of German scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and trained several important scholars (G. Jeremias, H.-W. Kuhn, H. Stegemann). The affinities with Zoroastrianism were not taken to lessen the Jewish character of the Qumran sect. Kuhn wrote that it was, on the one hand, firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, and that its legal observance, or Halakah, was stricter than that of the Pharisees. It relied on the Torah and the Prophets, like other branches of Judaism. On the other hand, its worldview and self-understanding, as disclosed in passages such as the Instruction on the Two Spirits, were fundamentally different from that of the Pharisees.5

An Apocalyptic Tradition

Many scholars were reluctant to believe that a Jewish community obsessed with ritual purity and strict observance of the Law of Moses could have been influenced by Zoroastrianism. The idea that it was an apocalyptic community, however, took hold. In the words of Frank Moore Cross: “The Essenes prove to be the bearers, and in no small part the producers, of the apocalyptic tradition of Judaism.”⁶ Cross recognized that the sect was not the child of a single parent, and he was fully aware that priestly laws of ritual purity were also of fundamental importance. The priestly element resulted from the fact that the traditional Zadokite line had been ousted from the Jerusalem temple before the Maccabean revolt, and was shut out from power when the Maccabees (Hasmoneans) took over the High Priesthood. These displaced priests were thought to be the core of the Qumran sect. The apocalyptic tradition was inherited from the Hasidim of the Maccabean era. These “pious ones” are mentioned only a few times in the books of Maccabees. They were supporters of the Maccabees, but sought to make peace when a High Priest from the traditional family (Alcimus) was appointed. At various times, the Hasidim have been credited with composing the whole range of apocalyptic literature, but there is no indication of this in the few references in the books of Maccabees. In any case, the apocalyptic tradition constituted an alternative in Palestinian Judaism to the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition, and it was this tradition that would eventually be taken up by Christianity.

All of this had already been claimed for the Essenes in the nineteenth century on the basis of very little evidence. Now the evidence for the apocalypticism of this sect was substantial, not only in the Instruction on the Two Spirits and the War Scroll but also in a host of fragmentary prophetic texts. The view that the Essenes were the bearers of the apocalyptic tradition involved some oversimplification. They were evidently bearers of it, but apocalypticism was not confined to a single movement. Neither is it possible to trace a direct line from the Essenes, or from the apocalyptic tradition, to early Christianity. Christianity, like the Essenes themselves, absorbed influences from more than one quarter.

The apocalyptic view of the Scrolls and the sect has persisted, but it has taken some new forms over the years. In the 1970s and ’80s, a suggestion took hold that the Essenes had formed in exile in Babylon, and had returned to Judea in the second century BCE. This theory, put forward especially by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor of the École Biblique, always had a tenuous basis. It depended in part on seeing “Damascus” in the Damascus Document as a code name for Babylon. Eventually, it faded from the discussion. In reaction against this view, however, Adam van der Woude and Florentino García Martínez, of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, put forward what became known as the “Groningen Hypothesis,” reaffirming the view that the sect had developed out of the apocalyptic tradition in Judea. (The theory had some other distinctive features that need not concern us here.) Gabriele Boccaccini, an Italian scholar teaching at the University of Michigan, gave the theory a new twist by defining the tradition as “Enochic Judaism,” which in Boccaccini’s view posed an alternative to the Zadokite tradition of the High Priestly line, and also to the Mosaic tradition. Both the Groningen Hypothesis and Boccaccini’s theory about “Enochic Judaism” rested on valid observations about the continuities between the apocalypticism of the Scrolls and the books of Enoch, but both were reductive in recognizing only a single line of tradition behind the Scrolls.

The Scrolls in Jewish Scholarship

The first two decades of Scrolls scholarship were dominated by Christian scholars, who, naturally enough, were primarily interested in the light the Scrolls might shed on Christianity. Since the bulk of the Scrolls, except for those that had been acquired by Sukenik and Yadin, were under Jordanian control, Jewish scholars did not have access to the fragments, but had to rely on the publications of the official editorial team, and these were frustratingly slow. Consequently, in this period there were few attempts to relate the Scrolls to rabbinic Judaism.

There were exceptions. Saul Lieberman, a great Talmudic scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, compared the organization described in the Community Rule with that of the Pharisaic fellowship (havurah), which also regulated admission by grades of purity.7 He also sought to shed light on the Scrolls by considering various allusions to heterodox practices in rabbinic literature.⁸ Chayim Rabin went further, and argued that the Qumran group was a diehard Pharisee group trying to uphold “genuine” Pharisaism (as they understood it) against the more flexible ideology introduced by the Rabbis in authority.9 He looked for his evidence mainly in the Damascus Document, which, unlike the texts from Qumran Cave 1, contained significant discussion of legal interpretations. These ventures, however, were but footnotes to the discussion in this period. As a representative Jewish interpreter of the Scrolls in this period, one can consider Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin, who published a popular introduction to the corpus in 1957. Like his father before him, Yadin identified the sect with the Essenes. Like most scholars, he argued that the Pharisees were the “Seekers after Smooth Things,” the enemies of the sect, who appear in several texts, including the Damascus Document but especially in a commentary on the prophet Nahum. (The Hebrew word for “smooth things,” chalaqot, is a play on the word for legal rulings, halakot.) He inferred this, however, from historical allusions in the biblical commentaries rather than from discussion of biblical interpretations. Yadin was hesitant about the Wicked Priest, but favored identification with Alexander Jannaeus, the Hasmonean king and High Priest in the first quarter of the first century BCE. He noted, correctly, that the Teacher was himself a priest. While he did not pronounce on the causes of the secession of the sect, one might well infer that they involved disputes within the priesthood, as was commonly assumed at the time.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1967, however, had great repercussions. The Scrolls in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem were now under Israeli control. Even though the Israelis allowed the official editorial team to remain in place for more than two decades, their control over the situation would eventually be decisive for the publication of the corpus. More immediately significant, however, was the recovery of the long document known as the Temple Scroll from the antiquities dealer Kando, by Yadin’s soldiers. The publication of this text by Yadin, first in Hebrew in 1977 and then in English in 1983, would be a milestone in the study of the Scrolls.

The Temple Scroll

The Temple Scroll, from Qumran Cave 11, was the longest text recovered from the caves around Qumran. It is presented as a God’s revelation to Moses. It begins with the renewal of the Sinai covenant at Exodus 34, and then turns to the building of the Temple in Exodus 35. It takes its name from a lengthy discussion of the structure and furnishings of the Temple, the laws relating to it, and the ritual calendar. It also deals at length with purity rules for the temple and the holy city. The final section of the manuscript is a rewriting of the laws of Deuteronomy 12–23, unrelated to the temple. This last section includes an extensive treatment of the Law of the King from Deuteronomy 17, which restricts the authority of the king even farther than was the case in the biblical text, and subjects him to the authority of the priests.

This text is of exceptional interest for several reasons. The laws are presented as the direct speech of God, using the first person for the speaker. For that reason, some scholars assume that it was intended to replace the traditional Torah, and that it was in effect a new formulation of the Torah. Others doubt this, and suppose that it was meant to supplement and interpret the existing Torah. It could hardly have stood alone as the only version of the Torah. It does not, for example, include the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, the claim of divine authority is startling.

In part, the Temple Scroll stands in a tradition that goes back to Ezekiel 40–48, which provides a new, ideal layout for the Temple after the Babylonian Exile. (Another text describing a new, ideal, Jerusalem, called, appropriately, “the New Jerusalem Text,” was also found at Qumran.) It is a utopian document, not always realistic. It enlarges the size of the temple, so that it would have occupied most of the city of Jerusalem as it then was. It was not, however, a temple for the end of days. It would be replaced in the end-time.

In part, the Scroll is an attempt to harmonize the differences between the various laws in the Torah. In some cases, it goes beyond anything that is written in the traditional biblical text. It does not, in any case, present its new rulings as interpretation of an older Torah. Rather, it presents them as direct revelations from God. In this it differs sharply from other texts found at Qumran, including the Damascus Document. For this reason, also, the majority of scholars have concluded that it was not strictly speaking a sectarian document, but may have been composed before the sect broke away from the rest of Judaism. It does not engage in polemics against the opponents of the Teacher and his movement, in the way that we find, for example, in the Damascus Document. Nonetheless, it is evidently indicative of the tradition from which the Scrolls emerged.

The importance of the Temple Scroll for our story, however, does not lie primarily in its specific teachings, but rather in the prominence that it gives to religious law, especially to laws relating to purity. The date of composition is uncertain—late second or early first century BCE seems probable—but opinions differ. In any case, it shows that Jewish teachers were examining their scriptures to settle questions of religious law a couple of centuries before the rabbinic corpus was compiled. Jewish scholars who had been trained in rabbinic literature now had a corpus of material with similar concerns to work on in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Consequently, there was an upsurge of interest in Halakah, or religious law, in the Scrolls, led by such scholars as Joseph Baumgarten and Lawrence Schiffman. This was a topic that had received only passing attention in the period before 1967.

The Halakic Letter, 4QMMT

Another important text was first revealed to the scholarly world in 1984. This text is known as 4QMMT (Miqat Maase ha-Torah, “Some of the Works of the Law”), also known as the Halakic Letter (or letter about religious law). The text is not actually in the form of a letter, but it seems to be a treatise addressed to a leader of Israel, presumably a High Priest, urging him to accept the writer’s interpretation of the Law rather than that of a third party. It concludes by telling him that if he does this, it “will be counted as a virtuous deed of yours, since you will be doing what is righteous and good in His eyes, for your own welfare and for the welfare of Israel.” It was presented at the first International Conference on Biblical Archaeology, in Jerusalem, in April 1984, by John Strugnell and Elisha Qimron, a young Israeli scholar whom Strugnell had invited to collaborate with him. In the view of Strugnell and Qimron, this text was “a letter from the Teacher of Righteousness to the Wicked Priest,” and it outlined the fundamental issues between sect and the authorities in Jerusalem. One passage stated explicitly: “we have separated ourselves from the multitude of the people … and from being involved with these matters and from participating with [them] in all these things.”

This text had been noted in the 1950s and labeled 4QMishnaic, because of its manifest similarity to rabbinic law. As such it held little interest for the Christian scholars who were working on the Scrolls, and it was set aside. Only when Israeli scholars were brought into the work of editing was the significance of this text recognized. It contained the most explicit statement found anywhere in the Scrolls about the reasons for which this group had separated itself from the rest of Judean society. Contrary to what had been widely supposed, the sect did not originate in a dispute over the High Priesthood. Rather, it originated in a dispute over the fine points of religious law.

Part of the text dealt with the religious calendar. (There is some dispute as to whether this part of the text is a separate document.) The importance of the calendar for the sect had been recognized early on. In the commentary on Habakkuk, we are told that the Wicked Priest confronted the Teacher on “the Day of Atonement, his Sabbath of rest.” Since it is unlikely that the (wicked) High Priest would have staged this confrontation on the day when he himself was celebrating the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), it was evident that the two figures observed different cultic calendars. The Scrolls generally attest to a solar calendar of 364 days, whereas the traditional calendar observed in the Temple was a lunar calendar of 354 days. Most scholars agree that calendrical difference was a major reason why the sect had to withdraw from the Temple. The solar calendar is found already in the Temple Scroll and in the Book of Jubilees, both of which are likely to have been written before the sect actually broke off. Differences could simmer for a time, but eventually they led to action.

The main body of 4QMMT, however, deals with some twenty issues bearing on holiness and purity, sacrifice and tithing, forbidden sexual unions, and the like. In each case, the view of the author’s group (“we”) is contrasted with that of another group (“they”). For example:

concerning liquid streams: we are of the opinion that they are not pure, and that these streams do not act as a separative between impure and pure. For the liquid of the streams and that of the vessel which receives them are alike, (being) a single liquid.

So a stream of liquid that is being poured into an unclean vessel is itself impure. From the viewpoint of Christian scholars, and indeed of many modern Jews, many of these issues seem trivial, but for the author and his opponents these matters determined whether the Law was being properly observed.

Several of the issues discussed in 4QMMT appear again in rabbinic literature. The views of the opponents (the “they” group) generally correspond to those of the rabbis, and consequently were those of the rabbis’ predecessors, the Pharisees. In some cases, the views espoused in the Scroll correspond to those of the Sadducees. This does not necessarily prove that the author and his group were Sadducees, but that they had a similar approach to the Law. In all cases, the views of the “we” group are stricter than those of their opponents. While 4QMMT does not explain how the author arrived at his positions, the issue was evidently the correct interpretation of the Torah of Moses. The author appeals to the addressee to study the book of Moses and the books of the Prophets and the writings of David. It may well be that the sectarians believed that the true interpretation of the Law had been revealed to them, but if so the revelation came in the course of their study.

There are other indications in the Scrolls that the sect, presumably the Essenes, was at odds with the Pharisees, whom they called “seekers after smooth things.” What became clear from 4QMMT was that these disputes about religious law were the primary factor in the separation of the sect, not only from the Pharisees but from the rest of society. In fact, this might already have been inferred from the Damascus Document, which says that God had revealed to the sect the hidden things in which Israel had gone astray. These “hidden things” included the cultic calendar, but also “the three nets of Belial” (CD 4): fornication, riches, and profanation of the Temple. On each of these matters, the sect held a different interpretation of the Law than that of the authorities who controlled the Temple. Again in CD 6 we are told that the members of the new covenant

shall take care to act according to the exact interpretation of the Law during the age of wickedness … They shall distinguish between clean and unclean, and shall proclaim the difference between holy and profane. They shall keep the Sabbath day according to its exact interpretation, and the feasts and the Day of Fasting according to the finding of the members of the New Covenant in the land of Damascus. They shall set aside the holy things according to the exact teaching concerning them.

It is clear from such passages as this that the exact interpretation of the Law was the raison d’être of the sect. Only when 4QMMT became known, however, was this fact fully appreciated.

4QMMT may also give us a better idea of when this sect broke off from the rest of Judaism. When would a sectarian leader have been likely to appeal to the High Priest to adopt his group’s rulings rather than those of the Pharisees? The Pharisees were embroiled in conflicts especially in the early first century BCE. They clashed especially with Alexander Jannaeus, the Hasmonean king who ruled from 103 to 76 BCE. At one point the Pharisees led a revolt against him, on the grounds that he was not fit to be High Priest, and he responded by having some six thousand people killed. He later crucified some eight hundred of his opponents. On his deathbed, however, he advised his queen Salome Alexandra to make peace with the Pharisees. She did so, and entrusted them with the government. According to Josephus,

she permitted the Pharisees to do as they liked in all matters, and also commanded the people to obey them; and whatever regulations, introduced by the Pharisees in accordance with the tradition of their fathers, had been abolished by her father-in-law Hyrcanus, these she again restored. And so, while she had the title of sovereign, the Pharisees had the power. (Ant 13. 408–9)

She appointed Hyrcanus II High Priest and he served in that capacity until 67 BCE. He later had a second term from 63 to 40. We should not be surprised if the reversal of royal attitude toward the Pharisees and their rulings provoked a protest from the other sects. This is perhaps the time in Hasmonean history when a High Priest was most likely to take action against people who were contesting the Pharisaic interpretation of the Torah. Josephus says that the Pharisees tried to persuade the queen to kill those who had urged Alexander to put the eight hundred to death, and that they themselves assassinated some of them. We are told in a commentary on Psalms found at Qumran that the Wicked (High) Priest tried to kill the Teacher. This struggle for sectarian hegemony provides a plausible context for the conflict about the Pharisaic interpretation of the Law, when both sides would have sought the endorsement and support of the High Priest. In fact, the great bulk of the historical references in the Scrolls refer to people and events in the first half of the first century BCE. In contrast, there is no evidence of sectarian conflict in the middle of the second century BCE (the time of Jonathan Maccabee), which had been, and in some circles still is, presumed to be the time of the Teacher and the Wicked Priest.

Mysticism in the Scrolls

We should not suppose, however, that the sectarians were only concerned with religious law. It is evident that they had a dispute with the Temple. The Damascus Document says that “none of those brought into the covenant shall enter the Temple to light His altar in vain” (CD 6). It is not clear whether this means that they should not enter the Temple at all, or only that they should be careful to follow the correct procedures (by sectarian standards). The accounts of Essene practice in this regard are inconsistent. Philo says that they show their piety not by offering sacrifices but by purifying their minds. Josephus, however, says that they send offerings to the temple but use different rituals and are barred from entering the common enclosure. The latter account may be compatible with what we read in the Damascus Document. The Community Rule, however, says nothing about sending offerings to the Temple, but regards the community itself as a substitute for the Temple cult:

It shall be … a house of holiness for Israel, an assembly of supreme holiness for Aaron … they shall be the elect of goodwill, who will atone for the Land and pay to the wicked their reward. (1QS 8)

Normally, the Temple cult atoned for the Land by offering the prescribed sacrifices. Since the Temple, in the eyes of the sectarians, was defiled, it fell to them to perform atonement by the way they lived.

There was probably some progression between the situation envisaged in the Damascus Document and that in the Community Rule. The break with the Temple had become more complete.

Separated as they were from the Temple, the sectarians tried to harmonize their lives with the liturgy of the angels in heaven. A text first published in 1959 by John Strugnell, known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifices, was originally named an “Angelic Liturgy.” It describes, but does not cite, the prayers and blessings pronounced by various angels, e.g., “In the name of his holiness, the seventh of the sovereign Princes shall bless with seven words of his marvelous holiness all the houly founders of knowledge.” Presumably, the human community joined in this praise. The Thanksgiving Hymns, or Hodayot, also indicate that the members of the community believed that they were in communion with the angels. The hymnist thanks God, for “thou hast cleansed a perverse spirit of great sin that it may stand with the host of the Holy Ones, and that it may enter into community with the Sons of Heaven” (1QH^a 11). There was, then, a mystical dimension to sectarian life. A hymn appended to the end of the Community Rule says:

My eyes have gazed on that which is eternal,

on wisdom concealed from men,

on knowledge and wise design (hidden) from the sons of men …

God has given them to his chosen ones as an everlasting possession and has caused them to inherit the lot of the Holy Ones.

He has joined their assembly to the Sons of Heaven

to be a Council of the Community. (1QS 11)

It is not clear whether members of the sect had mystical practices whereby they experienced ascent to heaven, like later Jewish mystics. (Most of the classic Jewish mystical texts come from the early Middle Ages.) In chapter 4 we had occasion to refer to the so-called Self-Exaltation Hymn, where the speaker boasts of a throne in heaven, and of being reckoned with the gods. The late Morton Smith, who had a somewhat idiosyncratic view of Jesus as a magician and practitioner of occult arts, claimed that this text showed that other Jews around the turn of the era had mystical practices whereby they could ascend to heaven. This, he thought, lent credibility to the view that Jesus was also a mystic. But the figure in the Self-Exaltation Hymn is exceptional in any case, and it is not clear whether he was thought to have made a round trip to heaven during his earthly life. He may be an imaginary figure, such as the eschatological High Priest, or a messiah of some sort. The Thanksgiving Hymns speak of being in communion with the angels. They do not speak of going up to heaven. It may be that the angels were supposed to come down, or that space was irrelevant.

In the apocalypses of Enoch and Daniel, fellowship with the angels in heaven was the reward promised to the righteous after death. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the sectarians attained this state when they joined the new covenant and participated in its liturgies. Oddly enough, the Scrolls do not speak clearly about resurrection (there are a few disputed passages), although they clearly affirm eternal life for the righteous and damnation for the wicked. They cannot have been unaware of physical death; there was a huge cemetery a stone’s throw from the buildings at Qumran. But they seem to have believed that they had made the essential transition when they joined the community. Josephus says that the Essenes believed in immortality of the soul but not resurrection of the body. This was putting the matter in language that Greek and Roman readers would understand. Hebrew speakers did not have the Platonic concept of the soul. Nonetheless, it seems that Josephus was essentially right. The life of the spirit, by which people could mingle with angels even in this life, would continue after death, regardless of the decomposition of the body.

All these texts from the Scrolls are important for the history of Jewish mysticism, even though it is not here as fully developed as it would be centuries later.

Liturgy in the Scrolls

The Scrolls also shed new light on the development of Jewish liturgy. They contain more than a hundred different prayers and numerous religious poems, most of them previously unknown. The Scrolls provide evidence that already before the turn of the era, communal prayer was a religious obligation, at least in some quarters. There were specified times and occasions, and sometimes specified wording. All of this anticipates later rabbinic liturgy, but neither the times nor the rationale for prayer in Scrolls was necessarily the same as what developed later. Here, as in the matter of religious law, we find that the Scrolls address matters that were also of interest to the rabbis centuries later, but that they do not necessarily address them in the same way.

The Scrolls and Common Judaism

The case of liturgical practice may serve to raise an important and difficult question about the significance of the Scrolls. Do these texts tell us only the beliefs and practices of a sect, whether that sect was large or small, isolated or widespread? Or do they give us a window onto what may be called “common Judaism,” or concerns that were shared by all Jews of the time, regardless of sectarian affiliation? The texts from Cave 1, which set the tone for discussions of the Scrolls for a long time, were predominantly sectarian. We cannot assume that the Community Rule, or the War Scroll, or even the Hodayot, were typical of anyone outside the “new covenant,” or the sect usually identified as the Essenes. As more and more of the corpus of texts from Cave 4 became known, however, it became clear that many of the Scrolls were not especially sectarian in character. An article by Carol Newsom on “‘Sectually Explicit’ Literature from Qumran,”10 published in 1990, marked a watershed in this regard. Thereafter, it was increasingly accepted that many texts found among the Scrolls might have been shared by other groups at the time. A collection of non-canonical psalms has no distinctively sectarian features. Several wisdom texts similarly contain no reference to sectarian community structures. Many of the prayers could in principle have been used outside the new covenant. Much of the literature preserved in Aramaic appears to have been composed before the sect developed its separate identity. There is then much in the Scrolls that can be taken as broadly representative of Judaism in this period.

Nonetheless, it remains a tricky question how far the Scrolls can be taken as representative of the Judaism of their day. It remains true that the collection does not include anything that can be identified as Pharisaic, and little if anything that is supportive of the Hasmoneans. (4Q448, A Prayer for King Jonathan, probably Alexander Jannaeus, may date from the time when he was at war with the Pharisees, who were the arch-enemies of the Qumran sect.) The Scrolls may not be the library of the community that lived at Qumran, but they are likely to be the combined libraries of Essene communities, taken to the desert for hiding in a time of crisis. The corpus is to some degree defined by the sect, which was a voluntary association, with its own rite of entry and new covenant. This means that some aspects of Judaism, especially those associated with the enemies of the sect, are likely to be excluded or under-represented. That said, nobody can be sectarian all the time. As we shall see in chapter 6, the Essenes shared a corpus of scriptures with other Jews, even if they interpreted them differently. They also retained some stories, poems, and prayers that did not touch on the divisive issues of the day. Moreover, they attest to certain trends and dominant concerns by the disputes they record, even in cases where the sectarian viewpoint was distinctive. Even if they withdrew from the Jerusalem Temple, they testify to the kinds of debates to which the Temple gave rise in this period.

It is evident that there was considerable diversity in Judaism around the turn of the era, and that it was not a case of contented pluralism. Rival sects and parties hated each other with a perfect hatred, on occasion. Nonetheless, there were also unifying factors—the belief in a single God, shared scriptures, widespread concerns about purity and correct observance, even if these also gave rise to conflict. There was shared ethnic identity too, but it is evident that the true people of God, in the eyes of the sectarians, was not determined by ethnicity alone. It was not sufficient to come from the people of the covenant. It was also necessary for each individual to enter into a new covenant, on the basis of sectarian interpretation.

Apocalypticism and Law

The last thirty years or so have undeniably seen a great shift in the perception of the Scrolls and their importance. That shift was marked emphatically by Lawrence Schiffman, when he entitled his 1994 survey Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls.11 Undeterred by any undue modesty, Schiffman asked: “Is this book revolutionary?” and answered: “In light of the present scrolls mania, especially when it comes to exaggerated claims regarding Christianity, it is indeed revolutionary to propose that the scrolls can be understood only in the context of Jewish history” (p. xxiv). Where the Scrolls had been understood as the product of an apocalyptic movement, a precursor of Christianity, they were now increasingly seen as a record of the debates about the meaning of the Torah that would eventually give rise to rabbinic Judaism.

These two views of the Scrolls, however, should not be seen as antithetical. In fact, both have a good measure of truth. The old emphasis on the apocalyptic aspects of the Scrolls was admittedly one-sided. It can no longer be said with confidence, as it often was, that the dualism of light and darkness was the heart of the sectarian theology. The Instruction on the Two Spirits is not even found in all copies of the Community Rule. Only a few other texts, besides the Community Rule and the War Scroll, reflect this dualistic worldview at all. Moreover, there was a tendency in some Christian scholarship to see apocalypticism as anti-nomian, concerned with cosmic judgment rather than with the details of the Law. We now see that this antithesis is false. It was perfectly possible to live in anticipation of a coming judgment and at the same time immerse oneself in the details of the Law. In fact, it was the conviction that a great judgment was at hand that gave urgency to the need to get the interpretation of the Law right.

The sect described in the Scrolls did not come into being because it believed in the coming of the messiah or the final battle between the sons of Light and the sons of Darkness. It came into being because of disagreements with other Jews on the exact interpretation of the Law, the proper cultic calendar, and the state of the Temple cult. The fact that it had so many irreconcilable differences with other Jews, however, called for explanation. One way of explaining the situation was to suppose that God had hardened the hearts of their opponents, for his own mysterious purposes, and assigned them to the lot of the Spirit of Darkness. It could not be, however, that God would allow error to triumph indefinitely. He must bring an end to it, and soon. Not only must the other Jews who were children of darkness be overthrown, but also the Romans, the Kittim, who were desecrating the land. Hence the need for a final battle in which God would eliminate the forces of evil. It would not be enough that truth and justice prevail in the public order. Individuals must also be punished or rewarded for their deeds. The fact that a judgment is expected, however, does not in itself tell one what conduct is approved. In the case of the Scrolls, right conduct depended on right interpretation of the Law. Early Christianity would have a view of the world that was largely similar, insofar as this world was passing away and would be subject to judgment, but the criteria for the judgment would be quite different, and reflect a different evaluation of the Law, especially its ritual aspects.

Apocalypticism and Torah observance, then, are complementary in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Apocalypticism provides a supporting framework that enables people to endure and persist when the world seems to be against them. True reality is hidden, but it will soon be revealed, and vindicated in a judgment. The criteria for that judgment, however, can vary. In the case of the Scrolls, they were provided by the Torah of Moses, properly interpreted.