Pliny on the Essenes
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, November 23, 1998
Abstract
Pliny on the Essenes
Why are the gospels silent about the Essenes and the Zealots, though they introduce us to the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Herodians? Could it be that the people at the centre of the story were Essenes? Neither Paul nor any of the other writers of epistles in the New Testament mentions the Essenes—they might as well have not existed. But we know they did. Three writers from the first century AD describe the Essenes—Pliny, Josephus and Philo. We now also have the evidence of the excavations at Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The clue that the Qumran might have been a home of the Essenes is in Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny was a Roman naturalist who wrote in about 70 AD, after the destruction of Judaea by the Romans putting down the four year uprising they called the Jewish War. Pliny is describing the region around the Dead Sea and says that on the western shore, where they had been for thousands of centuries, live the Essenes, a solitary people who renounce women and money. They maintain their numbers by accepting those driven by the vicissitudes of fortune and weariness of life. “Below” them are the ruins of En Gedi and “beyond” is the fortress of Masada.
By the western shores [of the Dead Sea], but away from their harmful effects, live a solitary people, the Essenes, wonderful besides all others in the world, being without any women and renouncing all sexual desire, having no money, and with only palm trees as companions. Their assembly is born again day by day from the multitudes, tired of life and the vicissitudes of fortune, that crowd thither for their manner of living. So, for thousands of ages—strange to say—a people, in which no one is born, is eternal, so fruitful for them is the repentance of others for their life! Lying below (infra) these was the town of En Gedi, once second only to Jerusalem in fertility and groves of palm trees, but now like the other, a ruin. After that (inde), Masada, a castle on a crag, itself not far from the Dead Sea, is the end of Judaea.Natural History 5:18:73
Pliny’s statement that the Essenes existed so long because they benefited from “the repentance of others for their life”, links them directly with Jesus and John the Baptist who required people’s repentance.
Pliny’s comparison of En Gedi with Jerusalem is a mistake, suggesting that he was working from sources that he either misunderstood or were not quite accurate. Steven Gorensen of Duke University suggests Pliny’s source was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a governor of Syria and a friend of Herod the Great, who described Qumran and other sites, including En Gedi, in c 15 BC while making a military survey. Recent archaeology, contrary to de Vaux, shows Qumran was occupied at the time of M Agrippa, who died in 12 BC. Jerusalem is on the top of a range of hills, and though it is not infertile, mountains are not noted for fertility. Not far from En Gedi is Jericho, a fertile oasis and the comparison of the oasis of En Gedi with that of Jericho is surely intended. However, the area was wetter then than now, as de Vaux and other excavators more recently have noted from the presence of date palm wood, palm leaves, and date pits at Qumran.
Pliny’s “thousands of ages” is an exaggeration but one which might suggest an association between this community and a much older one. Josephus, who gives us the most complete account of the Essenes, puts the rise of the community in the previous century, during the first century BC. It might also, however, come from a misunderstanding of his source. Thus, Pliny’s choice of words is noteworthy because he uses expressions typical of an Essene or proto-Christian community like “assembly”, “born again” and “repentance”, and even speaks of them being “eternal”, a likely misunderstanding by Pliny of a source which said their expectation was eternal life. This might have led to the confusion about the “thousands of ages”. Joseph Amusin thinks the reference to an eternal people comes from descriptions of themselves (CD 7:6;19:1-2;20:22) as people who “live for a thousand generations”. Joseph M Baumgarten has also noted, in 4Q502, blessings “in the midst of an eternal people.” Otherwise, most translators astonishingly do not make anything of these obvious parallels in their ignorance, their search for literary variation or their deliberate attempts to mislead.
If the words “below” and “beyond” or “after that” imply direction towards the south as they must, since it is only by looking south that Masada lies “beyond” or “after” En Gedi, then the Essenes lived at the most northerly of the three sites mentioned. There is a ruin and caves just at this spot, where the scrolls were found, and although nowhere in the Dead Sea discoveries are the curators of the scrolls called Essenes, from the content of their manuals, there is no doubt who they are. In the Dead Sea Scrolls they know themselves variously as the “the righteous”, “the elect”, “the poor”, “the holy” or “the saints”, “the keepers of the covenant”, “the new covenanters”, “the remnant of Israel”, “the perfect of the way” and “the sons of light”. If Pliny indicated relative altitude when he wrote “below”, the Essene community was in the hills behind En Gedi from the Dead Sea but there is no sign of any such community there, other than traces of about twenty simple huts dicovered early in 1998.
Yizhar Hirschfeld, an Israeli archaeologist, found in these hills, twenty small plain rectangular huts, each large enough to house one man, which had been inhabited in the first and second centuries. The huts were too small to be houses and were realy simple monk’s cells. Their situation fits Pliny’s geographical description, but Pliny’s description of the numbers of people crowding to the site prove that it is too small to be the one he is describing. This will have been one of the wilderness camps of the Essenes, alone too small to have been a community worth noting by Pliny.
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