Questions from Last Week. The scrolls were written on parchment, with some on papyrus. Habbakkuk commentary: or 111 BCE-2 CE

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1 Questions from Last Week The scrolls were written on parchment, with some on papyrus. Carbon-14 dating of some of the scrolls Isaiah scroll: or BCE Habbakkuk commentary: or 111 BCE-2 CE Community Rule: or 203 BCE-122 CE Damascus Document: 44 BCE-129 CE Linen wrappers: 197 BCE-46 CE and 167 BCE-233 CE Historical Events Alexander the Great: 330 BCE Selucid takeover of Judea: 198 BCE Maccabees: 167 BCE Roman destruction of Jerusalem: 67 CE Roman annihilation of Judea: 135 CE The Damascus Document has admonitions and laws. It was found in Cairo in the late 19 th Century, made in the 10 th to 12 th Century, of a document found earlier, perhaps one of the texts that had been found in a cave near Jericho around 800 CE, as reported by Timothea of Seleucia. Based on analysis of the text and its relationship to fragments found at Qumran, this is considered to be one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1

2 Whose were the Scrolls? The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves in the Desert to the north-west of the Dead Sea. There were no attributions found with them, so the question arose as to who put them there. There are reports in Classical literature of a group of Jews called Essenes, who according to Pliny the Elder, lived near the Dead Sea, north of a place called Ein Gedi. This, together with the fact that one of the scrolls, The Community Rule, prescribed practices similar to the Classical descriptions of the Essenes, led to the idea that the Essenes were the owners of the scrolls. 2

3 The Essenes According to Philo and Josephus, who both wrote in the first century CE, the Essenes lived without private property, but owned all goods in common. had common meals avoided cities had no implements of war, but could defend themselves if attacked in travel rejected slavery rejected philosophy studied the ancestral law, especially on the seventh day, when they met in synagogues were celibate, so had no women among them had no children or young men, but were generally of advanced years (some did have families, but used sex only for procreation) had elaborate bathing rituals, especially before meals 3

4 Traditional Views of the Essenes Early Christians identified the Essenes as proto- Christians. Jesus was thought to have been an Essene. There was a group of Jews called the Therapeutae, who were contemporary with and had similar practices to the Essenes, but had families and lived in Egypt, that were identified with the Essenes and were thought to be precursors of Christian monasticism. Jewish scholars related the Essenes to the Hasadeans, extremely pious Jews mentioned in Maccabees. They thought that both Essenes and Pharisees were descended from them. They followed the same teachings as normal Jews, but were much stricter in their interpretation of the Law. Others, particularly in the 19 th Century, thought that the Essenes were Greek-speaking Jews strongly influenced by Pythagoreanism, founded in the 6 th Century BCE, and which influenced Plato, so was a persistent movement in the Classical world. There has also been suggestions that the group was influenced by Zoroastrianism, because the key idea of that religion is the opposition between good and evil, or more properly, between order and disorder, or truth and lie. 4

5 Qumran Ruins The ruins of Qumran are 14 km south of Jericho and 21 km east of Jerusalem, both a solid day s walk. They had been noticed in the 19 th Century, and thought to have been a fortress. There were an aqueduct, stepped pool and graveyard. After having found jars at the site similar to those in which the scrolls were buried, and coins dated 10 CE, the association with the scrolls and therefore the Essenes was made. 5

6 Aerial view, looking south. The original fort predated the Babylonian exile. It was rebuilt as a fort after the Maccabean revolution In the early CE it was redeveloped as a communal residence, with the graveyard showing an occupation of about 200 people. Nearly all the bodies buried were men. An earthquake in about 114 CE rendered it uninhabitable. So a communal residence with ties to the scrolls, in the area where a communal society was known to exist, is very likely to have been an Essene settlement. 6

7 The Qumran Community and the Scrolls The consensus is that the Qumran complex was the home of an Essene community. The scrolls were found in the immediate neighbourhood of Qumran, so the assumption is that the community had a lot to do with the scrolls. What, then, were the scrolls? An obvious conclusion is that the scrolls were the library of the community, and that the library was hidden when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 67 CE, in the campaign that ended with the siege of Masada. But the scrolls number more than 900 volumes, many in multiple copies, and the community is estimated to have been at most 200 people. The largest recorded temple library in the region at the time is a Mesopotamian temple, which had 800 titles. A Hellenistic temple in Egypt had a catalog of 35 titles. It was suggested that the collection might have been the library of the Jerusalem Temple. But all available evidence is that the Jerusalem Temple library was quite modest in size. Moreover, many of the documents in the library were highly critical of the Temple priests, making it less likely that the Temple was the source. Collins thinks that the collection is the combined library of many Essene communities, gathered and hidden just before the Roman invasion. Later in these sessions, a different but related hypothesis is argued. 7

8 The Scrolls and Christianity Because the Scrolls date from about the time of Christ, and because most of the scholars in the first two decades of study of the scrolls were Christian, there was great interest on the possible light that the scrolls cast on early Christianity. Some analogies between the Essenes and Christianity are obvious: Both were associations, with provision for admission and expulsion of members. Both practiced ritual washing in some form. Both had common meals and in some cases common possessions. Both had strong beliefs that the end of history was at hand. Both expected the coming of a messiah. An important character in some of the sectarian texts is a Teacher of Righteousness John the Baptist worked near Qumran There are parallels between some of the texts regarding the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead and the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. 8

9 Aside: Luke s Gospel has an interesting and important example of scribes altering a text to correspond to their theology. In the present version of the Gospel, when John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, God is reported as saying: This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. (3:22) The earliest manuscripts (3 rd Century) have God saying: "This day I have begotten you." (Luke has taken the words of God from Psalm 2, an ancient royal adoption formula in which the king of Israel was recognised as God's elect). This reading is theologically difficult. By this time the accepted notion was, as it is now, that Jesus was born the Son of God. But the original statement is conferring a status on Jesus that he did not previously have. The revised statement affirms Jesus already existing status. -Wikipedia 9

10 Structural Comparisons The Teacher s movement and the Jesus movement can both be described as Jewish sects. The two movements overlapped in time They used the same scriptures, and often used them in similar ways Both expected the coming or second coming of a messiah. The scenario of the War Scroll is similar in many ways to Revelations. Both envisage a violent struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, with the former winning. The War Scroll contains an apocalyptic prophecy of a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. The war is described in two distinct parts, first (the War against the Kittim) described as a battle between the Sons of Light, against people referred to collectively as the army of Belial, and those who assist them from among the wicked, who "violate the covenant." The second part of the war (the War of Divisions) is described as the Sons of Light, conquering the "nations of vanity. In the end, all of Darkness is to be destroyed and Light will live in peace for all eternity. Wikipedia But for the Essenes, salvation lay in scrupulous observance of the rituals of purity, whereas Christianity downplayed the Jewish rituals. Essenism and Christianity were different movements, arising in the same cultural environment. 10

11 The Scrolls and Judaism Second Temple Judaism was annihilated by the Romans in 135 BC. Present-day (Rabbinic) Judaism was developed from the Jewish community in Babylon, ruled at that time by the Parthians, descendants of the Persian Empire. Scholars were therefore struck between the differences in world-view between the scrolls and the Rabbinic tradition. In particular, the Community Rule scroll says that God divided the world into Good and Evil at creation. Further, many of the scrolls refer to apocalyptic conflict between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. There are remnants of an apocalyptic tradition in modern Judaism, in the Book of Daniel (not in the Torah). Daniel dreams of four beasts that come out of the sea: a lion with eagles wings, a bear with three tusks, a leopard with four wings and four heads, and a beast with iron teeth, ten horns and one little horn and human eyes.(7:4-8) These beasts are all present at a convening of the divine counsel. The Ancient One proceeds to put to death the beast with the one little horn. (7:9-11) Daniel also describes the fates of the other beasts saying that while their dominion was taken away, their lives were prolonged. (7:12) This leads into a series of dreams and visions where these events are expressed in greater detail. Scholars argue that each of these beasts represent an emperor or kingdom that ruled over the Israelites. The final message of the second half of Daniel is that God will deliver the people from oppression, the latest of which is Antiochus IV, from whom the Maccabees revolted. Wikipedia 11

12 So there was a strand of apocalyptic thinking in Second Temple Judaism that was largely lost in the Rabbinic tradition. This included the Book of Enoch, which has several apocalyptic sections. Also, there was a strand of Judaism that used a solar calendar of 364 days instead of the traditional lunar calendar of 354 days, whose use continues to the present. This difference seems to have been one of the points on which the Essenes partially separated themselves from the main body of Judaism. Most of the texts in the scrolls are not sectarian, so can be taken to be broadly representative of the Judaism of their day. It is evident that there was considerable diversity in the Judaism of the era, and that the differences were taken seriously, but there were no schisms on points of doctrine. All groups shared the same revelations. The debates of the time were the same kind of debates that took place in the development of Rabbinic Judaism, only with many of the participants eliminated. Rabbinic Judaism has been the mainstream form of Judaism since the 6th century CE, after the codification of the Babylonian Talmud. Growing out of Pharisaic Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism became the predominant stream within the Jewish diaspora between the 2nd and 6th centuries, with the redaction of the oral law and the Talmud as the authoritative interpretation of Jewish scripture and to encourage the practice of Judaism in the absence of Temple sacrifice and other practices no longer possible. Wikipedia 12

13 The Scrolls and the Bible The Hebrew Bible, known as the Torah, or in Christianity as the Pentateuch, was codified in the 7 th to 11 th centuries. The earliest texts before the Scrolls dated from the 9 th and 10 th Centuries. The Samaritans have also a Torah, which is slightly different, and was thought to be an inferior variant. (The Samaritans were not affected by the Roman genocide, though were nearly exterminated by the Byzantines in the 6 th Century, and many of the survivors converted to Islam in the 7 th Century. The community now numbers fewer than They claim to be descended from Jews who escaped the Babylonian captivity, so were isolated from mainstream Judaism for several generations.) The Christian Bible is based on a 3 rd Century BCE Greek translation from Alexandria called the Septuagint, of which manuscripts exist from the 4 th and 5 th Centuries. Differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible were thought to be deficiencies in the original translations. All the books of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) were among the Scrolls, mostly in multiple copies. It turns out that the variations among the Hebrew, Samaritan and Septuagint texts are all represented in the Scrolls. A consensus is emerging that there was little attempt at standardization in the biblical texts until very late in the Second Temple period. The differences between present-day traditions are the more or less chance survival of texts from the Roman annihilation of Second Temple Judaism. 13

14 This brings us to the end of the general consensus according to Collins. But there are several mysteries: Were did the scrolls come from, and why were they buried? What part did the Essenes play in the society of Second Temple Judaism? How did the Essenes come to be at Qumran, and how did they support themselves? An answer to these questions comes from Joan E. Taylor s The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea, to which we will turn next week. 14

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