Chapter 2

So much may be gathered from the book about the origin and history of the sect. We turn now to its expectation. As a teacher of righteousness, an anointed one (priest), was the founder of the sect, so in the last times a teacher of righteousness, an anointed one, shall appear (6 10 f.). Those who proved faithless to the covenant are cut off from the community, “from the time when the unique teacher was taken away until the anointed one from Aaron and Israel shall arise” (19 35-20 1), that is, during the whole of the present dispensation. Dr. Schechter regards the anointed one who is to appear in the future as the founder of the sect _redivivus:_ the present dispensation “seems to be the period intervening between the _first_ appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness (p. 1, l. 11) (the founder of the Sect), who was gathered in or died,(25) and the second appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness who is to rise in ‘the end of the days’ (p. 6, l. 11). Moreover, the Only Teacher, or Teacher of Righteousness, is identical with the Messiah, or the Anointed one from Aaron and Israel, whose advent is expected by the Sect.”(26) The texts, however, say nothing of the disappearance, or a second appearance, or reappearance, or return of the founder; nor do the words “until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last days,” “until the anointed shall arise from Aaron and Israel,” mean that he shall rise from the dead, as Dr. Schechter interprets them.(27) The Messiah whose advent the sect expects at the end of the present period of history is, as in the older parts of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a priest; and the function of the priest-messiah is not, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to mediate between man and God, but to instruct men in righteousness, to guide them in the way of God’s heart. That the founder of the sect also was both priest and teacher is by no means sufficient to establish the identity of the two figures. It was the office of the priest to teach Israel the law, “all the statutes which the Lord hath spoken unto them through Moses” (Lev. 10 11; cf. Deut. 33 10); “the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts” (Mal. 2 7). Ezra is the type of a priest who had not only prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it, but to teach in Israel statutes and judgments (Ezra 7 10); he was, according to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the restorer of Judaism. It was a departure from the ideal of the law itself that, when the priesthood showed itself unworthy of its calling, the teaching function was assumed by lay scribes, and even in later times there were many priestly teachers among the Scribes and among the Doctors. That our sect looks back to one such as its founder, and forward to another as the great teacher of the Messianic age, is in no way surprising. If the author had meant what Dr. Schechter thinks, it is fair to assume that he would have said it unmistakably; for the identity of the expected Messiah with the dead founder, if it was part of the belief of the sect, would of necessity be a singular and significant part of it.(28)

The coming judgment of God is represented rather as a judgment on the faithless members of the sect, including those who have seceded from it or been expelled, than in its more general aspects. The long eschatological passage in B (20 15 to the end) is illegible in spots near the beginning, but the general tenor is clear:

In that consummation the anger of God will be inflamed against Israel, as he said, “There is no king and no prince, and no judge and none that reproves in righteousness” (cf. Hos. 3 4). Those who turn from the transgression [of Jacob](29) and keep the covenant of God will then confer with one another; their footsteps will be firm in the way of God (and the prophecy will be fulfilled which says), “And God hearkened to their words and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him for those that fear God and think on his name” (Mal. 3 16), until deliverance and righteousness emerge for those that fear God, “and ye shall return and see the difference between righteous and wicked, and between a servant of God and one who serves him not” (Mal. 3 18). And he shows favor to those that love him and keep his commandments, for a thousand generations....(30)

Each man according to his spirit, shall they be judged by his holy counsel, and all who have broken through the bounds of the law, of those who entered into the covenant, when the glory of God shines out on Israel, shall be cut off from the midst of the camp, and with them all the evil-doers of Judah, in the days when it is tried in the fire. But all who held firmly by these precepts, going out and coming in in conformity with the law, and listened to the voice of the teacher, will confess(31) before God.... “We have done evil, we, and our fathers also, when they went contrary to the statutes of the covenant, and faithful are thy judgments upon us.” And they will not act presumptuously against his holy statutes and his righteous judgment and his faithful testimonies. They will be instructed in the ancient judgments by which the followers of the unique one were judged, and will hearken to the words of the teacher of righteousness. And they will not controvert the righteous statutes when they hear them; they will rejoice and be glad, and their heart will be strong, and they will show themselves mighty against all the people of the world.(32) And God will atone for them, and they will see his salvation with joy, because they trusted in his holy name.

Here the fragment ends. The destruction of those who fall away from the sect is threatened in other places; it will suffice to quote the most important (19 5 ff.):

Upon all those who reject the commandments and the statutes, the deserts of the wicked shall be requited when God visits the earth, when the word comes to pass which was written by Zechariah the prophet, “Sword, awake against my shepherd and against the man that is my fellow, saith God; smite the shepherd, and let the sheep be scattered, and I will turn my hand against the little ones” (Zech. 13 7). But those who observe it (sc. the obligations of the covenant) are “the poor of the flock” (Zech. 11 7). These shall escape at the end of the visitation, but the former (sc. those who reject the commandments) shall be given over to the sword when the Anointed of Aaron and Israel comes, as it was at the end of the first visitation, of which God said by Ezekiel that a mark should be made on the foreheads of them that sigh and cry, and the rest were delivered to the sword that executes the judgment of the covenant. And so shall the judgment be of all who enter into his covenant and do not hold firmly by these statutes, they shall be visited even with extermination by the hand of Belial. This is the day in which God will visit, as he spoke, “The princes of Judah are become like men who remove the boundary; on them will I pour out my fury like water” (Hos. 5 10). For they entered into the covenant of repentance, but did not turn aside from the way of faithless men, and wallowed in ways of fornication and in unrighteous gain, and avenging themselves and bearing a grudge against one another.

It is possible, of course, that the judgment of the heathen world, which looms so large in most of the apocalypses, may have had a place in parts of the book now lost, but if it had been a very important feature in the expectation of the sect we should hardly fail to find at least allusions to it in the pages in our hands. The author is almost exclusively interested in the sect itself, in the division which had rent it, and in polemics against laxer interpretations of the law. This limitation of the horizon is characteristically sectarian, and may suggest, moreover, as has been said above, that the writer is not far removed in time from the split in the new organization.

The polemic is especially pointed against certain opponents who are described as “those who build a wall and plaster it with stucco” (4 19; 8 12).(33) They follow a commandment (_ṣau_); probably connoting, as in Hosea 5 11, from which the phrase is taken, an arbitrary rule of their own, a commandment of men.(34) God hates them, his anger is kindled against them (8 18). These “builders” are false teachers; Biblical denunciations of the false prophets are applied to them. (See especially 8 12 f.) Points in which their teaching is particularly assailed are that they allow polygamy and the remarriage of divorced persons during the life of the other party, and hold it lawful for a man to marry his niece; that they defile the sanctuary by the laxity of some of their rules and practice about sexual uncleanness; they presume blasphemously to impugn the “statutes of the covenant of God” (the legislation of the sect), declaring that they are not right, and saying abominable things about them (4 20-5 14). The positions so hotly denounced, especially in the matter of marriage and divorce, are those of the Palestinian rabbis as we know them in the Mishna and kindred works, and in so far as the Pharisees had a dominating influence in the schools of the law they may be regarded as in a peculiar sense the object of this invective, which is, however, sweeping enough to include all rabbinical Judaism. Such verses as Isaiah 50 11 and 59 4 ff. are hurled at them; they are compared to Johanneh and his brother, whom Belial raised up against Moses (5 17 ff.).(35)

The sect prohibited polygamy, which they stigmatized as fornication, arguing from the creation—“a male and a female created he them” (cf. Matt. 19 4), and from the story of the flood—“by pairs they went into the ark,” and from the law which forbade the prince to multiply wives unto himself (Deut. 17 17), that is, as they understood it, to take more than one wife. To forestall an objection, it is added: “But David had not read in the sealed book of the law which was in the ark, for it was not opened in Israel from the time of the death of Eleazar and Joshua and the elders who worshipped the Astartes, but was hidden and not brought to light until Zadok arose” (5 2-5; see below, p. 359).

Marriage with another woman while a man had a divorced wife living was apparently put in the same category with having two wives at the same time (4 20 f.; cf. Matt. 5 31 f.). Marriage with a niece (brother’s or sister’s daughter) they treated as incest, reasoning that marriage between a woman and her uncle stood on all fours with marriage between a man and his aunt, which was expressly forbidden as within the prohibited degrees of kinship.(36) The three snares of Belial by which he ensnared Israel are fornication (that is, plural or incestuous unions), wealth (that is, unrighteous gain), and the pollution of the sanctuary (4 15 f.; cf. 5 6 f.).(37)

The same rigorous tendency which appears in the attitude of the sect in regard to marriage pervades the whole legal part of the work before us. The rules for the observance of the Sabbath (10 14-11 21) will make this clear.

Concerning the Sabbath, to keep it as it is prescribed.

1. On the sixth day no man shall do any work from the time when the disk of the sun is distant from the western portal(38) by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.

2. On the Sabbath a man shall not engage in any foolish conversation; and he shall not exact repayment from his neighbor; nor shall he give judgment in matters of property; he shall not talk about matters of work and labor to be done on the next day.

3. A man shall not walk in the country to do the work of his business on the Sabbath. He shall not walk outside of his town above one thousand(39) cubits.

4. No man shall eat on the Sabbath anything except what was previously prepared or what is spoiling in the field. He shall not eat or drink anything but what was in the camp. If he be on the way and descend to bathe, he may drink as he stands, but must not draw water in any vessel.(40)

5. He must not send a foreigner to do his business on the Sabbath day.

6. A man must not put on soiled garments or such as are brought by a gentile, without washing them in water or rubbing them with frankincense.(41)

7. A man shall not exchange pledges(42) of his own accord on the Sabbath.

8. A man shall not follow his cattle, to pasture them outside his town, except within 2000 cubits. He shall not lift his arm to strike them with his fist; if the animal is breachy, let him not take her out of the house.

9. A man shall not take anything out of a house into the street, nor bring anything from the street into the house; and if he be in the entry, he shall not pass anything out of it or bring anything into it.

10. He shall not open on the Sabbath a vessel the cover of which has been luted on.

11. A man shall not carry on his person spices, going out or coming in on the Sabbath.

12. Within a house he shall not lift stone nor earth on the Sabbath day.

13. The nurse shall not carry an infant in arms, going out or coming in with it on the Sabbath.

14. A man shall not deal harshly with his slave or his maid or his hired servant on the Sabbath.

15. A man shall not deliver cattle of their young on the Sabbath day.

16. If a beast fall into a cistern or trap, a man shall not lift it out on the Sabbath.

17. A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.

18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.

19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.

20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written, “aside from your Sabbaths.”

The dietary laws afford other examples of the strict rules of the sect.(43) Fish may be eaten only if, while still alive, they have been split open and drained of their blood; grasshoppers and locusts must be put alive into the water or the fire (in which they are to be cooked); honey in the comb is apparently prohibited. So, again, in a house in which a death has occurred, fixtures, such as nails and pegs in the walls, are unclean; and wood, stone, and dust are capable of contracting and communicating various kinds of uncleanness (12 15-18). The sect sees in these stricter distinctions between clean and unclean the superiority of its ordinances over those of other Jews, whom they regard as sinfully lax. The Pharisees are to them gross latitudinarians!

Oaths are to be taken only by the covenant and the curses of the covenant, that is, the vows by which the members of the sect bind themselves, on their admission to it, to live in conformity with its rule and submit to the authority of those set over them, and the curses invoked on such as violate these obligations.(44) Oaths by God, whether under the name _Aleph Lamed_ (_El_ or _Elohim_) or _Aleph Daleth (Adonai)_ are prohibited;(45) nor is it permissible to mention in the oath the law of Moses; the formula of the oath is strictly sectarian (15 1 ff.).(46) But, though the name of God is not used, “if a man swear and transgress the oath, he profanes the name” (15 3). Obligations voluntarily assumed under oath (vows) are to be fulfilled to the letter; neither redemption nor annulment seems to be allowed, unless to carry out the vow would be a transgression of the covenant.

Another point in which the sect is at variance with the great body of the Jews is the calendar. They represent the faithful remnant to whom God revealed the mysteries about which all Israel went astray, his holy sabbaths and his glorious festivals, and his righteous testimonies, and his true ways (3 12 ff.). The point of this appears when it is compared with Jubilees 1 14: “They will forget my law and all my commandments and all my judgments, and will go astray as to new moons and sabbaths and festivals and jubilees and ordinances” (cf. 6 34 ff., 23 19). The texts before us do not explain what the peculiarities of the sectarian calendar were, but inasmuch as the Book of Jubilees, under the title “The Book of the Division of the Times by their Jubilees and their Sabbatical Years,” is cited as an authority for the exact determination of “their ends” (the coming crisis of history), it may be inferred with much probability that our sect had a calendar constructed on principles similar to that of the Jubilees,(47) in which the seasons and festivals were not determined by lunar observations or astronomical tables, as among the Jews generally, but had a fixed place in a solar year. Such upsetting of the calendar is branded as heresy in Midrash Tehillim on Ps. 28 5: “They do not regard the work of the Lord, nor the operation of his hands.... ‘The operation of his hands’ means the new moons; as it is said, ‘God made the two great lights,’ and it is written, ‘He made the moon for festival seasons.’(48) These are the heretics who do not calculate (by the moon) the festival seasons and the equinoxes. ‘He will tear them down and not build them up.’ He will tear them down, in this world, and not build them up, in the world to come.” Perhaps the Boëthusians, who hired false witnesses to deceive the authorities about the appearance of the new moon, were not merely animated by a desire to harass the rabbis, but were partisans of some such calendar reform.

The organization of the sect furnished it an effective means of enforcing its rules by discipline. This organization is so peculiar that it must be described in some detail. Like the normal Jewish community, it consists of three classes, priests, levites, and Israelites, to whom as a fourth class may be added proselytes. In this order they are mustered and inscribed in the rolls of the camp. In some sense all the members of the sect are priests. Ezekiel 44 15 is quoted and explained: “ ‘The priests and the levites and the sons of Zadok who kept the charge of his sanctuary’ [_sic_]. The priests are the exiles of Israel who migrated from the land of Judah and [the levites are](49) those who attached themselves to them; and the sons of Zadok are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the last days.” Allegory apart, it appears that the priests were of the Zadokite line, but this legitimacy is assumed, not emphasized. Priests and levites formed part of every court of ten judges (see below, p. 351); and in every company of ten Israelites (the quorum of a religious assembly), a priest, well versed in the Book of Institutes,(50) must be present, to whose words all must conform. If the priest does not possess the requisite qualifications, and a competent levite is at hand, it shall be ordained that all who enter the camp shall go out and come in at his orders. In a case of leprosy the priest shall come and stand in the midst of the camp and the Supervisor shall instruct him in the interpretation of the law; even if the priest be an ignoramus, it is he who must shut up the leper, for the decision belongs to them (13 1 ff.). To a priest is assigned also the duty of taking the census of the commonalty; he who fills this office must be between thirty and sixty years old, versed in the Book of [Institutes and] in all the prescriptions of the law, to pronounce them according to their prescriptions (14 3 ff.).

A much more important place in the organization is filled by an officer whose title (_mebaḳḳer_) signifies “examiner,” “inspector,” and may perhaps best be rendered “Supervisor.”(51) Every “camp,” or settlement, of the sect had a Supervisor, and over these stood a “Supervisor of all the camps,” who must be a man in the prime of life, between thirty and fifty years of age. To the Supervisor of the individual camp it belonged to instruct the community “in the works of God, and make them familiar with his wonderful deeds of might, and recount before them the things that happened long ago...; and he shall have compassion on them as a father toward his children (13 7 ff.).”(52) We have seen that he has even to instruct the priest in the rules for the diagnosis of leprosy.(53) The admission of new members to the sect is also in his hands; no one is permitted to introduce a man into the congregation without his consent. He examines the candidates in regard to their character and intelligence, their physical strength and courage, and their possessions, and enrolls each in his proper place in the lot(54) of the camp (13 11 ff.). From the following badly defaced lines so much at least can be made out, that the Supervisor had extensive powers of control over the dealings of members of the sect with outsiders in the way of trade. He evidently had also a leading part in the administration of justice and the enforcement of the discipline of the sect, but the state of the text here denies us insight into the particulars.

Courts were constituted of ten members,(55) chosen _ad hoc_ from the congregation, four of the tribe of Levi and Aaron and six Israelites, all well versed in the Book of Institutes and in the Foundations of the Covenant, between twenty-five and sixty years of age. No man of more than sixty shall be a judge, “for on account of the unfaithfulness of mankind his days were shortened, and through the wrath of God on the inhabitants of the earth he bade to remove their understanding before they completed their days (10 4 ff.).” The rules relating to the competence of witnesses are strict. No one may testify against the accused in a capital case who is not a god-fearing man old enough to be included in the census (that is, at least twenty years of age, Exod. 30 14); nor shall a man’s testimony be credited against his neighbor who is himself a wilful transgressor of any of the commandments, until he has come to repentance (9 23-10 3). A peculiar provision is made for the case that a single witness (on whose testimony therefore conviction could not be had) sees a capital offence committed. He is to make known the facts to the Supervisor, who records the testimony in writing. If subsequently the offence is committed again in the presence of another witness, the same process is repeated; on a second repetition, the testimony of the three single witnesses combined suffices for conviction (9 16 ff.).(56)