Canonbury Masonic Research Centre
Lecture texts
Presented at CMRC by Philip R Davies on 13 Dec 2000
It is well known that in the first century of our era, two major religions were born. Both started in the Roman province of Judea, the home of the Jewish people. Both religions, however, developed elsewhere. Christianity was essentially formed in the eastern Mediterranean provinces of the Roman empire, while the great centres of rabbinic Judaism were briefly at Yavneh near Joppa, then Galilee, and finally in ancient Iraq, where the Babylonian Talmud was committed to writing.
As the two religions developed and increasingly confronted each other, philosophically, theologically and politically, they grew more and more distinct, each aware that they had a common matrix and each therefore concerned to distinguish itself from the other. Both religions finally established some kind of orthodoxy through the production of canonical texts and, in the case of Christianity, through creeds. Each orthodoxy claimed direct descent from antiquity, from Moses or Ezra, from Jesus or Paul. This is how orthodoxies work of course. But at least in the case of Christianity, the doctrinal struggles involved in converting a form of Judaism into the taxonomies of Greek philosophy produced a copious literature in which the doctrines that were defeated and so came to be called heresies were expounded in the process of being refuted. And in a rare glimpse of such alternatives, the papyri from Nag Hammadi in Egypt have revealed a type of Christianity that we call ‘gnostic’. This is a contentious term, embracing a number of systems, all sharing a basis in the doctrines of salvation through esoteric knowledge. Often they distinguished between the gods of the Jews and of Christianity, and presented a dualistic view of the universe, as between good and evil or spirit and matter. The roots of this gnosticism are still a subject for debate. It is also hotly debated whether such systems also existed in Judaism.
For Jewish evidence of alternative systems we also have some direct evidence in, for example, the texts known as Hekhalot literature. The term hekal means temple or palace, and such texts focus on descriptions of mystical ascents to the throne of God, situated in the centre of the heavenly temple courts. While the rabbis were suspicious of such tendencies, they did not formally condemn it as heretical; indeed, some of the famous practitioners of this mysticism were notable rabbis themselves. Nevertheless, it can be argued that we have here a kind of religion that is formally quite different from the rabbinic, in which knowledge of God is mediated through torah, the law and the goal of religion is obedience to God and not direct knowledge of him.
So much for the two religions. These other systems, the gnostic and the mystical, are not religions in the same sense as rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, having a defined canon, agreed set of public and private practices, and a social organization. Indeed, most historians do not wish to call them ‘religions’ at all. The sources we have make it difficult to establish with much precision where they really originated, what their practices were, and what happened to them. They do not seem to have cohered into any fixed system with any significant body of followers for very long. Some writers nevertheless have suggested something like a perennial philosophy, an ancient religion, underlying some of these marginalized systems of belief. Mysticism is a phenomenon that manifests itself in nearly every major religion. Where it does so, it usually appears in a form adapted to that religion. Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism can usually be distinguished, at least by the vocabulary in which it is expressed. Yet there is a great similarity between the forms that mysticism takes both within and outside formal religions. Hence an ongoing and probably insoluble debate as to whether we should treat mysticism as a coherent religious system that often adopts the forms of an established religion, or rather as a manifestation within specific religions that happens to share some similarities with its manifestations elsewhere.
This is not a debate I want to get into, not at least in broad terms. I want to contribute something very specific, an analysis of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The analysis, which in a short lecture can only be rather superficial, will, I hope, demonstrate a specific instance of a movement from what we might call orthodox Jewish categories, a Judaism at first regarded as mainstream, through a sectarian Judaism, to something that is hardly Jewish at all. I think we can see, at l;east in outline, the formation of a new religion, though one that apparently did not persist, though we cannot be sure. I think we can see in these scrolls the social and religious factors at work in this process. I am calling the process the Essene revolution, perhaps rather dramatically. But taken from a disinterested point of view, this movement deserves to be considered alongside those other great movements out of early Judaism that became rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as a third religion, even one that did not survive as they did.
Am I right to call the Dead Sea Scrolls and their authors ‘Essenes’? Yes, but the arguments would take too long. Basically, the Essenes are described by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus as one of main parties of Judaism. They lived in villages and cities of their own, had slight dealings with the Jerusalem temple, had a stringent initiation system, communal meals, and a strict view of marriage as for the purpose of procreation. Indeed, they were divided into marrying and non-marrying kinds. Each of these items can be precisely paralleled in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The statement of the Roman traveller Pliny, who located an Essene colony at the shores of the Dead Sea, possibly at the spot where the scrolls were found, is helpful but not decisive. I see no reason to call these scrolls anything other than Essene. Where the Essenes came from is another question and I have no answer. Indeed, it does not greatly matter what we call this Jewish group. What is interesting is their religious system and how it evolved.
The way in which I am going to tackle the complex question of untangling the Scrolls into a history of religious and social evolution is as follows. I start with an important distinction between two kinds of community described in these documents. One is presented fairly fully in what we call the “Damascus Document” or sometimes the “Zadokite Fragments”. This text was in fact first discovered in two mediaeval manuscripts in a synagogue in Cairo at the end of the 19th century. But with the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s these manuscripts were quickly identified as from the same source, and copies of editions of the work in caves 4, 5 and 6 have confirmed that conclusion. (The name ‘Damascus’ comes from a reference to a New Covenant in the land of Damascus.) The other kind of community apparently called itself the yahad or ‘Union’ and is dealt with especially in what we call the ‘Community Rule’ or ‘Manual of Discipline’. The relationship between the two communities remains disputed. The earliest view was that the Essenes started out as a single small group, as described in the Community Rule, then expanded and formed other colonies, described in the Damascus Document. Others, of whom I am probably the most vociferous, argue the opposite: that the yahad of the Community Rule is a splinter group of a wider movement. We all agree that there is a close relationship between the two communities, but obviously for the purposes of describing the evolution of these movements we have to take a view, and since I have the best arguments I am going to stick to mine. You will see, I hope, that while the Damascus Document describes a recognisable form of Judaism, the Community Rule contains something much more radical. This is just one reason why I think the Damascus Document describes a sect, while the Community Rule describes a sect of that sect.
Now, how am I going to analyze the two documents and their contents in a clear and simple way to illustrate my theory? I shall do it by treating topics that define Judaism. These are Israel, Torah, Temple and Messiah. I’ll briefly describe how each text understands these categories, then try and account for the differences in a systematic way. And finally I hope I will have given you a portrait of how one religion gradually emerges from another, how from a Judaism comes something that is really not a Judaism at all.
The Damascus Document (‘D’) represents the community for which it speaks as “Israel”, but specifically in the sense of the true remnant of Israel, an Israel historically speaking within an Israel. This is one reason why I choose to regard it as a sect; the other reason is that this Israel segregated itself socially. So it speaks of the historical ‘Israel’ that has gone astray in the past and continues to be in error. The document reviews Israel’s history and shows it to have come to grief through disobedience, as a result of which it was punished at the time of the exile under Nebuchadnezzar, after which its remnant was reconstituted by a new covenant, a new law, and a new lawgiver who is called “The Interpreter of the Law”. So these Essenes claimed to be the true Israel that is directly the successor of the scriptural Israel, living under its renewed covenant “in the land of Damascus” (which I think is a code for Babylonia).
So here is a true Israel, situated within an historical ‘Israel’ that is bound for imminent divine destruction. The present time is an “age of wrath” extending from the time of the Babylonian exile onwards. During that long period, the historical Israel has been led astray by Belial and by its leaders, while the true Israel has been preserved to be rewarded in the coming judgment.
‘Belial’ is the most common name given in the Dead Sea Scrolls to the devil, Satan. But his role in the D literature is not very prominent and he is not a counterpart to God. He is simple the one who, with his host of spirits, tempts Israel to stray. But there is a passage in which God is said to have chosen some and rejected others “from eternity” and to foreknow their existence, so that in each generation a chosen remnant has been left. So there is no dualism here, but there is some predestination. Predestination and the existence of a tempter are both common mechanisms whereby members of a minority group explain to themselves why the are in a minority and why the majority reject them.
The Israel of the ‘Damascus’ Essenes is constituted by scrupulous obedience to the torah, the law of Moses, though of course, according to its own interpretation. Here the claim is that this law was, like the original one, revealed, but in fact it is undoubtedly not a new law but a set of interpretations, a proper understanding, of the old law. Part of the Damascus Document consists of sets of laws of this kind, which show that the Damascus Essenes were among the first Jews to try and create a society based on the law of Moses. There is a rule that the law of Moses must be learnt by every member before his entrance examination.
So while there is a theoretical distinction between the old and new laws revealed by God, in practice we have only a particular understanding of the biblical laws. There are no instances of new non- biblical laws assigned to Moses or anyone else. Examples of differences between the Essene Israel and the old sinful Israel are given, and they are all cases of interpretation of biblical law, not of different laws. One key issue in regard to fulfilment of the law is the calendar, which for the Essenes was different from that which became and still is normal, namely one of 12 lunar months and a thirteenth every now and then to catch up with the solar year. The Essene calendar had 12 months of 30 days each, giving a total of 364, divisible exactly by seven, and meaning that festivals and sabbaths occurred on the same dates every year. The calendar is undoubtedly a major concern of this Judaism, and it is something to which historical Israel is said to be “blind”. Other legal differences involve the banning of a second marriage, and laws about the highly technical business of transmission of impurity and removal of impurity. The understanding of sexual relations is particularly crucial. Josephus says the Essenes did not trust women, and ensured that they were fertile by refraining from marriage until after menstruation had begun. This is consistent with the view expressed in D that one man one woman was the law of creation, citing among other texts the two by two that Noah took into the ark. D also makes it possible to commit fornication with one’s wife (i.e. if sex is not for the purpose of procreation—suggesting a celibate old age) and stipulates that sexual intercourse may not take place in the “city of the sanctuary”, i.e. Jerusalem. These may appear as if they are new laws, but actually they are only logical implications of biblical laws that regard sex as defiling holy places and objects. Sex is inherently a source of uncleanness, therefore, and permitted only for the necessary purpose. This attitude, it can be seen, could easily lead to some abandoning marriage entirely, and even to the formation of a celibate male society. If there was an Essene settlement in Jerusalem, it must, then, have been a celibate one.
Another important feature of the law of D is that it is valid during a specific period of time, running from the exile and subsequent revelation of true law to the appearance of a future teacher who will “teach righteousness at the end of the period”. I will say more about this figure under the heading of ‘Messiah’. But it is interesting to note that the law functions within an epoch characterized by human wickedness and divine anger. It is called the “era of wrath” or “era of wickedness”. The implication remains that the validity of this law will be terminated by the arrival of this ‘teacher’, and there is additionally some evidence of a calculation of this ‘era of wickedness/wrath’ and thus of the appearance of the messiah-teacher. The total figure may well have been 490 or 500 years, ten jubilees or seventy weeks of years, a favourite total for such calculations in ancient Judaism.
Several laws in D reveal the extent of participation in the Temple cult by the Damascus Essenes. These include sending offerings to be given at the altar: burnt-offerings, incense, wood and sin-offerings). Participation in the major festivals may be included, but presumably according to the Essene calendar, while vows extend participation in the Temple cult to private and even voluntary acts. So the Essenes did not reject the Temple. Quite the opposite. They respected its sanctity but regarded its cult as invalid because of the wickedness of the priests there. So it says:
All who have entered the covenant are not to enter the sanctuary “to light my altar in vain” unless they follow the observances of the law prescribed for the period of wickedness (Damascus Document 6:12-14)
If this translation is correct (the passage reads awkwardly and may have been emended), we are faced with a link between participation in the Temple cult and the “law for the period of wickedness”. The Temple lies at the centre of the ‘wickedness’, for there is an allusion (20:22-23) to a “period when Israel sinned and made the sanctuary unclean”. But that did not mean that those who possessed the (true) law should totally abandon it. Israel (specifically its priests) might “light the altar in vain”, but it could still be lit in some way by those who observed the law exactly.
Yet the Damascus Essenes partly replaced the function of the temple
by its own institutions. The saying of Amos: I will exile the booth
of your king and the pedestal of your images from my tent to
Damascus
is taken to mean that the law resides not in the temple
but in the assemblies of the sect. This is an important move, for it
anticipates the replacement of the Temple entirely by a holy community
as we shall see by the ‘Union’.
The word ‘messiah’ appears only a few times in the Damascus Document. The Essenes expected only one, in opposition to those contemporary Jews who thought of two messiahs, one priestly, one lay. He is not a specifically named as a priest, though he is said to arise “from Aaron and from Israel”. He is not linked with David nor is he a royal figure or a warrior. He is a teacher and his function is to restore the true and full law so that righteousness will be complete. (This in fact implies that he was to be priestly). This is an unusual profile, but one that in fact we find echoed in the gospel of Matthew, where Jesus is more than hinted at as a second Moses. The Messiah will appear when the period God has preordained for his anger comes to an end and will, presumably, also arise within the sect. Perhaps he is to be the high priest of a restored temple; we don;t know. But his main function was restoring the law and, by his arrival, announcing the return of divine favour.
So let me summarise: The Damascus Essenes comprised a Jewish sect living in camps and in quarters of cities, believing they were the true Israel, only partly in touch with the Temple, some of them practising celibacy, and all following the law of Moses as they interpreted it, following their own calendar and their own regime of holiness. They calculated an imminent end to the time of divine anger, a time to be announced by a messianic teacher. This is a sect in which all the main categories of Jewish religion are observable, defined on the whole by a different understanding of the law of Moses which for some reasons, I suspect, had been outlawed by the authorities, forcing the adherents to live separately. There us some evidence that these Essenes were happy to accept new recruits and Josephus, at any rate, like Philo of Alexandria who also mentions them, suggests that they were even respected by other Jews. Philo also gives their number as 4,000.
The group described in the Community Rule is different. What complicates the picture is that the texts we have of the Damascus Document have all be edited by this group. As a result, however, we can clearly see why and how it broke away from the parent Essene movement, and in the process began to abandon or redefine the major categories of Judaism. We know that it was edited because the beginning of one manuscript and the end of another talk about the messianic teacher as having arrived, and indeed, of having died as well. Rather like Christianity, in fact. The animosity displayed by the Damascus Essenes to wards the fallen Israel outside is now directed by his followers again the Essenes themselves. What is more, at least to begin with, they believed, since the messiah was here, that the end of history was upon them.
The new group finds itself as a sect of a sect, and with its boundaries redefined, its structures revised and its worldview refocussed, it moves sharply away from even the redefined Judaism of its parent. But also, as time goes on and the messiah dies and the end of history does not materialise, we find the development of new ideologies to cope, again as in early Christianity. The technical term for the trauma of unfulfilled expectations is ‘cognitive dissonance’, and many millenarian sects have to face it. Thus, in other Dead Sea Scrolls from this Union, the Teacher is presented as a victim of persecution, whom others, led by one called a Liar, deserted; the truth is probably that he and his group were rejected by the majority of Essenes.
So the Union transformed the already modified Judaism of the Essenes. Let’s see how by looking again at the four categories of Israel, law, temple and messiah. As for ‘Israel’, the term ceases to have much meaning, because the traditional opposition of Israel and gentiles is abandoned in favour of a strengthened and more formal dualism coupled with a predestinarianism. The Community Rule defines its members as ‘children of light’ or ‘children of truth’, with (apparently) the remainder of the human race (whether Jew or non-Jew) as children of darkness or falsehood. This dualism also offers simultaneously a cosmic and a psychological version, in which at first two ‘spirits’ of good and evil appear as subordinate deities to the ‘god of knowledge’. This version looks rather close to Zoroastrianism. The other version sees the two forces as internalized dispositions similar to the rabbinic inclinations of good and evil. Thus, the category ‘Israel’, maintained and intensified among the Essenes, has much less of a role in this breakaway group: the Jewish perspective is universalised both cosmically and psychologically. And now, the predestination that plays on the fringes of CD occupies a central place, while the interim ‘period of wrath’ of the Damascus Document, which lay between the revelation of God’s true law and the final revelation by the messiah of true righteousness is now an interim period of ‘dominion of Belial’, lying between the creation of two spirits at the very beginning of time, and the final destruction of Belial and his heavenly and earthly followers. Again, reminiscent of Zoroastrianism, and presenting a starkly universalised anthropology. The notion of a chosen people has been greatly transformed.
While the importance of the ‘torah of Moses’ is retained in the
Community Rule, much less importance is attached to obedience to the
New Covenant of the Damascus Essenes. Obedience is replaced by
‘knowledge’ as the instrument of salvation. In the Damascus Document,
‘torah’ connotes a single body of revealed law as the basis for
communal living. In the Community Rule, although the will of God and
the law of Moses are invoked, the language is overwhelmingly of
esoteric ‘knowledge’ (1: 1 1-2 etc.;), ‘insight’ (2:3 etc.), ‘counsel’
(3:6 etc.) and ‘truth’ (1:5,1 1, etc.) There is a decisive movement
beyond the notion of a specially revealed torah to a true remnant of
Israel. Rather, secret teachings are imparted by a sectarian leader:
The Master shall instruct all the children of light and teach them
the nature of all humans according to the kind of spirit they
possess…
Evidence that the Union was a more rigorously regimented
society is apparent in the emphasis on the allotted status of each
member , on the repetition of the word ‘authority’, on the practice of
sharing goods in common (not practised among the Damascus Essenes).
This is commensurate with a small group founded on the teachings of a
charismatic leader and especially one threatened by a larger parent
movement . And thus in the section of the Damascus Document edited by
the Union, we find the “voice of the Teacher” set alongside the “law
of Moses” with equal authority. In the Community Rule disciplinary
rules acquire much more prominence than appeals to the scriptural law.
The hostile attitude of CD towards the defiled temple cult, which was a product of high reverence for the sanctuary, is replaced in 1QS by a more thorough rejection of the Temple: a group of men constituting a ‘council of the community’ are described in terms that present them as a human sanctuary:
… the community council shall be built on truth, like an eternal plantation, a holy house for Israel and the foundation of the Holy of Holies for Aaron … to atone for the world … the tested rampart, the prized cornerstone … the most holy dwelling for Aaron … a house of perfection and truth (Community Rule 8:5-9)
Similarly, the temple cult will be superseded:
… to atone for guilt of rebellion and for sin of unfaithfulness so as to win [divine] favour for the land without the flesh of burnt offerings and the fat of sacrifices … rightly-offered prayer shall be the fragrance of righteousness and perfection of way a delightful freewill offering … the men of the Union shall set apart a house of holiness for Aaron (Community Rule 9:4-6)
In an even more radical manner, the function of water as a
cleansing agent is downplayed: it is by the holy spirit of the
Union in [God’s] truth that [a man] can be cleansed from all his
iniquities
. Even circumcision is downplayed, for he shall
rather circumcise in the Union the foreskin of his inclination, his
spirit
. The conclusion to be drawn is not that these basic
institutions of every form of Judaism were abandoned, but that their
efficacy was confined to the Union. Every Jewish symbol is strictly
disciplined into a single ideological and social construction: the
Union itself.
Here we have to bear in mind a process of development. At first. the Union believe its true messiah had come and, as the Essenes expected, he had the full authority of God to lay down the law, literally. But he died. What do you do with a dead Messiah? Well, there seem to have been several options, and it is possible tat the Union itself went in different ways — some members may even have gone back to the parent movement. There is some sign of a revival of a belief in two messiahs, or even that the present leaders of the sect were to be regarded as the messiahs, rather like some forms of Shi’ite Islam. Or they abandoned such hopes and looked to God himself. The Scrolls do not allow us a clear picture anymore. But it also seems to me that in its dualistic teaching the Union had already prepared itself to do without a messiah at all; everything was the outcome of divine planning, every event preordained. The chosen were chosen and would get their determined reward. I suspect, in fact, that this dualism was itself not part of the initial ideology of the Union but something that developed in response to the loss of the messiah.
The Union, while no doubt formally continuing to regard itself as a sort of Judaism, in fact developed a system that abandoned or overturned the categories of Jewish religion. Israel, law and temple at least, were overcome in a new system. The two elements of the system were fanatical devotion to a tightly-bound group practising an ideology of communion with angels and a belief in a universe in which everything was divided into light or darkness and so had been preordained. If this part of the Community Rule had not been found by the Dead Sea and written in Hebrew, there is very little that would have led us to identify it as the product of a Jewish sect.
It seems to me that we have indeed found in the theology of the Union the elements of a system of a third religion to partner rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, one that did not survive as well, perhaps, but which, as seen at the beginning of this paper, is well attested in ancient Jewish and Christian sources and posed a major threat to the two orthodoxies. In these gnostic systems, whether or not coupled with mystical tendencies, we may have the continuation of the religion that here, in the Scrolls, we can see emerging from within Judaism itself and becoming, under the pressure of exclusion, a fanatical belief its own rightness and tight sectarian discipline, a new religion. Whatever happened to the Essenes, the theological system of the Community Rule seems to have had a long and influential afterlife, and, as many listeners will know, elements of this system can be traced well into the Middle Ages.
I have not been able to answer the question of whether we have in such a system something that is perennial or rather something with a discrete origin. Perhaps the truth is that perennial tendencies usually require discrete historical circumstances in order to emerge. All I have been able to show is the manner in which an apparently orthodox Judaism can become its ‘Other’ with remarkable ease. This is a useful lesson, perhaps, for all students of religion to ponder.
© Philip R Davies, 2000
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