Essene Life and Beliefs 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, November 30, 1998
Abstract
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Shortly after the second World War ancient scrolls were found in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea. Even in the dry climate of the Judaean wilderness the scrolls had mainly crumbled to powder. But, amazingly, several were found essentially complete, and there were thousands of fragments, mainly small, some of which could be pieced together. Every book of the Jewish scriptures except for Esther and Nehemiah have been found at the caves of Qumran, often in multiple copies. Is it merely coincidence that the three most popular books in the Qumran collection (Psalms, Deuteronomy and Isaiah) were also the three books of the Jewish scriptures most often cited in the New Testament?
Parts of eleven copies of the Book of Enoch, known before 1947 as five linked booklets by different authors, were found at Qumran, but no fragments of the Parables or Similitudes (Book II, En 37-71). The likely explanation is that this part of Enoch was a later work. Its importance is that it features a “Son of Man” and seemed to be confirmation of a “Son of Man” figure in Jewish mythology. Now, it looks likely to be a first century Christian substitute for the book that appears in its stead among the scrolls, the Book of Giants, which previously was known in a revised form as part of the Manichaean bible. Even more popular was the Book of Jubilees, an account of the exodus up to the meeting of Moses with God at Sinai, present in about 15 copies.
Complete scrolls—the Community Rule, known in the USA as the Manual of Discipline, the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Congregation, the Habakkuk Commentary, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll—have been translated but scholars’ comparative work has been hindered by restrictions on access to the fragments. Only John Marco Allegro had published his full quota by 1968. Allegro was the only one of the international team who was an independent scholar, if indeed the others can be called scholars, for scholarship is more than erudition, being also a moral responsibility for truth. The other members were Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. Allegro thought they were deliberately withholding publication until public interest waned. The scandal of such restrictions on scholarship has forced more openness and now two US scholars, Eisenman and Wise, have published translations of 50 Qumran fragmentary texts not previously open to public scrutiny. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we have, according to Eisenman and Wise, “nothing less than a picture of the movement from which Christianity sprang in Palestine”.
Allegro published a text in 1956 which showed that the Essenes had a “Teacher of Righteousness” who was crucified, c 88 BC, one of eight hundred revolutionary conspirators crucified by Alexander Jannaeus, a Jewish king of the Maccabean family, after he had suppressed an attempted revolt, and also showed that the Teacher of Righteousness had the name “Jesus”. The international team accused Allegro of “recklessness” in publishing such a text. They ostracized him and they denied him access to other scrolls. Christianity was never interested in contrary opinion, let alone truth.
Ruins near the caves of the scrolls, and in just the place described by Pliny as the home of the Essenes, apparently were the headquarters of the community that had hidden the scrolls. Excavations seemed to confirm that the ruins had housed a monastic religious order similar to that of the Essenes described by Pliny, Philo and Josephus. The Damascus Document however refers to marriage and children—showing that Essenes in general were not celibate monks—and to other affiliated communities in Palestine, showing that the Qumran Community was not the only Essene settlement.
US professor, Norman Golb, thinks the scrolls had nothing to do with any sectarian community, yet to dismiss them as typically Jewish is nonsense, unless Judaism then was more Essene than Pharisaic. Many of them indeed are merely versions of the Jewish scriptures, and others are paraphrases of them, but the sectarian documents were unimagined and match nothing that anyone previously expected of Jewish literature of the time. Even if the nearby site of Khirbit Qumran had nothing to do with the “sectarian documents”, they prove that aspects of the Jewish religion of the time were stranger than imagined, and that these Jews, sectarian or mainstream, were extremely anti-gentile.
The Damascus Document, copies of which had amazingly already been found in 1897 in a Cairo synagogue, was plainly important to the sect because portions of as many as nine copies were found in the caves. In part it tells the story of a group of Jews who with their “Teacher of Righteousness” went to a place in the wilderness—which they seemed to call Damascus—to uphold the Law. They became barjonim—outsiders. Lawrence Schiffman, a respected Jewish scholar writes:
We know that the sectarians, especially in the Zadokite Fragments, often spoke in code words. We find all kinds of pseudonyms for actual personages, yet almost never a personal name that would allow a definite identification. The Jewish sects of the day are never mentioned by name even though we see numerous references to them designated with code words in the sectarian texts. Why then should we fall into the trap of taking place names literally? Rather it is more likely that “Damascus” is a code word for Qumran.
The sectarians had entered into a New Covenant with God. “Damascus” seems to be Qumran, the name of Qumran at that time being otherwise unknown to us. With this knowledge Paul’s trip to Damascus in the New Testament takes on a new meaning and several problems can be explained. The New Covenanters called it Damascus after a staging post of the Jews “returning” from “exile” in Harran in Mesopotamia.
Cyrus the Persian allowed the Jews to “return” to Palestine. The “returners” painted the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC, when Jews were deported to Babylon, as a divine punishment for laxity in observing the proper worship of Yehouah. The people settling in Palestine resolved to follow the Law to the letter. Since the Jewish religion was based on the Persian worship of Ahuramazda and the Babylonian worship of Marduk, many Jews never had anything to do with Yehud and saw Babylonia as their main home even after Yehud had a high Jewish population.
The Damascus Document tells us of those who had returned from exile in “the land of Damascus” having gone “out of the land of Judah” and with whom…
God established his Covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them the hidden things in which all Israel had strayed,
where “all Israel” means the whole nation whereas “Israel” means the select few who are pure enough and observant enough—the sectarians themselves. Here the reference to the “Land of Damascus” cannot be to Qumran because the Damascus Document clearly says it was “out of the land of Judah” whereas Qumran is only a few miles from Jerusalem. The Damascus Document explicitly quotes, apparently by way of explanation, Amos 5:26-27 which describes the place of exile as beyond Damascus. Babylon is, of course, beyond Damascus, but Babylon had been destroyed 300 years earlier by the Persian King, Xerxes. Perhaps some Jews, heading to Israel, had found Damascus comfortable. It seems quite likely, that having settled at Qumran the former exiles nick-named it Damascus after their place of origin. The exilic origin of the group is supported by many rules which pertain to life among the gentiles, a situation that scarcely applied in Judaea despite it being under foreign rule, but obviously would apply to Jews living in a foreign country.
This interpretation is confirmed from an unusual source. The Damascus Document implies that not all the New Covenanters in the land of Damascus returned when the Jewish free state was set up. What happened to them? There was always a large Jewish population in Mesopotamia, and among them evidently were some of the New Covenanters.
Around 800 AD a Mesopotamian Jewish reformer, Anan ben David, called for a return to the basics of Judaism and a rejection of the Talmud. He wanted, like the Essenes, a literal interpretation of the Mosaic Law, and he founded a sect called the Karaites. Scholars had noticed the astonishing similarities of the Karaites and the Essenes, separated as they were by almost a millennium. However, the discovery of the Cairo Damascus Document in 1897 seemed to them the source of Karaite beliefs. Evidently the Cairo Damascus Document was a holy book of the mediaeval Karaites who were strong in Egypt around 1000 AD when that version was transcribed. The Karaites opposed Rabbinic Judaism and proved to be very successful in the near and Middle East in mediaeval times. Now, only a few thousand remain. The New Covenanters must have maintained their identity for over a thousand years in Mesopotamia before emerging as the Karaites.
History of the Essenes
The history of the Essenes is not properly known. If Pliny’s guess that the name Essene derives from hesed then they probably evolved from the Judaean Hasidim of pre-Hasmonean times who aligned with Judas Maccabbee against Antiochus Epiphanes IV about 160 BC. Some might have been part of the priesthood who broke away from the Sadducees. Their relationship with the temple is plainly hostile, yet the village Essenes continued to sacrifice there unlike the monastic members. They continued through the Herodian age and were not mentioned again much after the Jewish War.
The New Covenant evidently was founded by Jews in exile. According to the first ten lines of the Damascus Document, a remnant (Isa 37:31, 46:3, Ezra 14:22, Zech 8:12, etc) who were righteous were visited by God, 390 years after the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadrezzar and He…
…caused them to sprout from Israel and from Aaron a shoot of the planting, in order to possess his land (Isa 60:21) and to become fat with the good things of the soil.
While the interval of 390 years is unlikely to be precise, it seems to be meant to be historic and not just symbolic, so corresponds to a date of about 196 BC. Another 20 years of uncertainty follows before the remnant is led back to the land. The year is about 176 BC. God has raised a Teacher of Righteousness but he is opposed by a Scoffer.
The High Priest at this time was Onias III, a saintly man who was deposed by his brother, Jason, through the support of the new Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes whom he had bribed with the promise of a mass of money. Were these brothers kinfolk or were they brothers in an order? Was Onias the Righteous Teacher and Jason the Scoffer, or Wicked Priest? We seem to have here a split in the Zadokite priesthood into Sadducees and Hasidim. Onias seems to have been the priest for the traditionalists, the Persian faction of Hasids, nicknamed the Pharisees for supporting the Persian religion.
The time of priestly power and particularly that of the High Priest had been in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods from about 500—170 BC. To limit opposition, the Persians exercised control through the priesthood which enjoyed political as well as religious power as agents or collaborators.
Under the Ptolemies, the traditional priesthood had been supported by the kings even though they were Greeks. The Ptolemies had accepted Egyptian ceremonial and seemed disinclined to interefere with traditional religion. The northern Greeks, the Seleucids, who took the Levant from the Ptolemies in 200 BC, were much more inclined to allow Hellenization to proceed apace. Antiochus Epiphanes was opposed to the Jewish religion and wanted to Hellenize it. So he had his own reasons for supporting Jason, the leader of the Hellenistic faction of the Jerusalem priesthood.
Jason will have been the founder of the Sadducees who were intent on adapting the temple to the Greek model. That was an abomination to the traditionalists. The conservative Hasids had to withdraw leaving the temple to the unclean Sadducees, but a few decades later they split yet again into progressives and conservatives, the progressive conservatives retaining the name Pharisees, the conservative conservatives being the Essenes. The Pharisees claimed to be just as traditional as the Essenes, but a whole lot more pragmatic.
The Maccabees in the second century BC were to regain power for the Jews and become priest-kings bolstered by the political doctrine that the Levites had assumed the mantle of David. The Essenes had expected the purity of the Temple to be restored by the Maccabees. When it was not they decided to withdraw into the wilderness, to set up a pure people ready for the Judgement of God.
The earliest reported date for the Essenes is in Josephus, writing about the death of Antigonus in 103 BC. Josephus tells us that Essenes were noted for predicting the future. An Essene prophet called Judas, never known to be mistaken, foresees the murder of Antigonus by his brother, Aristobulus, king of Judaea. The point about Josephus’s tale is that at first Judas seems to get the prophecy wrong but actually has merely mixed up two places of the same name. Judas was teaching his scholars one afternoon near the temple when the victim, Aristobulus, passes by, though Judas had just explained to his students that he would die that very day 600 furlongs away—an impossible distance to travel before night, thus apparently rendering the prediction false. Judas felt humiliated since it was his first mistake but soon the news comes that Aristobulus had indeed just been murdered in some subterranean chambers beneath the temple, having the same name as the predicted murder spot by the sea. If Josephus is to be believed then, the leading Essenes were respectable and acceptable citizens of the city of Jerusalem at this time. They were not apparently monks living in the wilderness at Qumran by the Dead Sea.
In the following 30 years another Jewish party that struggled in Jerusalem against Alexander Jannaeus, grew into great power with the ascendency of his widow, Alexandra in 76 BC. This, of course was the Pharisees, whom Josephus indicates at that time was “a Jewish sect that appeared more pious than the rest and stricter in the interpretation of the Law”.
One fragment is a short poem dedicated to a King Jonathan. The brother of Judas Maccabee (155 BC) was called Jonathan but he was never recognised as a true king. However Alexander Jannaeus (d 76 BC) was known as King Jonathan. Alexander Jannaeus spent time in the wilderness in guerrilla warfare against the Syrian Hellenistic King, Demetrius, who had been invited into the country by the Pharisees. In 88 BC Alexander Jannaeus crucified 800 Pharisees. The Essenes seemed to admire him for this and the Pharisees and Essenes were no longer fond of each other.
From this time on the Essenes seemed to have been living often at their wilderness retreat. It is possible that Herod called them back into respectability for awhile but then offended them again. Thereafter Qumran does not seem to have been abandoned until the Jewish War of 66-70 AD.
Moses and Exodus
