Chapter 3

Besides the penalties of the Mosaic law, the sect has a formidable means of discipline in expulsion, or as it is called “separation from the Purity,” which may in some cases be inflicted even on the testimony of one witness (9 21 ff.). Josephus vividly depicts the desperate straits into which those came who, for grave offences, were expelled from the Essene order; being unable to eat food not prepared by members of the order, they were exposed to starvation. This particular consequence would not follow separation from our sect; but the lot of the excommunicated man was evidently hard enough. “When his deeds come to light he is to be expelled from the congregation, as though his lot had never fallen in the midst of the disciples of God; according to his misdeeds men shall bear him in remembrance ... until the day when he returns to take his place in the station of the men of perfect holiness. No man shall have any dealings with him in matters of property or work, for all the saints of the Most High have cursed him” (20 3 ff.); such have no part in the “house of the law”; their names are erased from the rolls of the congregation (20 10 f.). They are not only cut off from the communion of saints in this world, but are doomed to extermination by the hand of Belial (8 1 f., 19 14 f.). One who leads men astray and profanes the Sabbath and the festivals shall not be put to death, but shall be committed to the custody of men;(57) if he is cured of his error, they shall keep him for seven years, and afterwards he may come into the assembly (12 3 ff.). A member of the sect who seduces others to apostasy is more severely dealt with: “A man over whom the spirits of Belial have rule,(58) and who advocates defection (Deut. 13 6), shall be judged according to the law of the necromancer and the wizard” (12 2 f.; cf. Deut. 18 9).(59)

The sect possessed the Jewish Scriptures. The books of the law are “the hut of the King” (i.e. the congregation)—the fallen hut which God had promised to raise up; “the pillar of your images” are the books of the prophets, whose words Israel despised. The founder of the sect, the star out of Jacob, is the interpreter of the law who came to Damascus (7 14 ff.). The authority of the Pentateuch is appealed to in support of the position of the sect in the matter of marriage and divorce; their peculiar statutes and ordinances are the true interpretation and application of the law of God. The prophets are frequently cited, and allusions to passages in the prophets or reminiscences of their phraseology are much more numerous. There are similar reminiscences of the Psalms and of the Proverbs, and perhaps of other books among the Hagiographa. As regards the Old Testament scriptures, therefore, the sect stood on common ground with Palestinian orthodoxy.(60) The formula of citation is peculiar; a quotation is usually introduced by the words “as he said,” rarely “as God said”; or with the name of the sacred author, “as Moses said.” Besides the Biblical books, we have a quotation from Levi—probably the Testament of that Patriarch—introduced by the same phrase as quotations from the Bible; and the reader is referred to the Book of Jubilees by name for an exact computation of the last times. There is nothing to indicate that the authority attributed to these writings was inferior to that of the Hagiographa. The canon of the “Scriptures” was not defined, even in the rabbinical schools, until the second century of our era, and in the sects many books enjoyed high esteem which the orthodox repudiated.(61)

To a different class belong, apparently, the Book of Institutes, and the Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,(62) but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the “statutes and ordinances” of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to as _perush_; in technical phrase, a collection of sectarian _halakoth_, such as is preserved in the second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a legal manual. The objection to committing _halakah_ to writing which was long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.

The sect had houses of worship, which a man in a state of uncleanness is forbidden to enter (11 22),(63) but nothing more is said about them, except that when the trumpets of the congregation are blown, the blowing shall follow or precede the service, and not interrupt it. It is a natural surmise that they answered to the synagogues both as places of worship and of religious instruction, such, for example, as the Supervisor is required to give. The name, _Beth hishtahawōth_, literally, “house of bowing down” (in worship), is peculiar, and may have been chosen to distinguish these sectarian conventicles from the synagogues of regular Judaism, as the English nonconformists of various stripes would not call their meeting-houses churches. It is possible that the prayers of the sect may have been accompanied by genuflections and prostrations such as, though unknown in the synagogue, have formed in all ages and religions a common feature of Oriental worship; but it is also possible that “bowing down” simply stands by metonymy for worship, as is often the case with the corresponding Syriac verb, _segad_.(64)

Sacrificial worship was also maintained.(65) The City of the Sanctuary was eminently holy; sexual intercourse within its limits is forbidden, “defiling the City of the Sanctuary with their impurity” (_beniddatham_).(66) To this city, probably, the sacrifices were brought to which there is frequent reference. “No one shall send to the altar burnt offerings or oblation, frankincense or wood, by a man who is unclean with any of the forms of uncleanness; for it is written, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the righteous is an acceptable oblation” (11 18 ff.). On the Sabbath nothing is to be brought upon the altar except the Sabbath burnt offerings—that is, we may suppose, the stated daily burnt offerings with the supplementary Sabbath victims (13 17 f.; see Num. 28 1-10). Votive sacrifices are also mentioned; it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.). There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community; in its registers their names are enrolled in the first rank. Their place in the courts and in the local religious community, and their duties in the examination of lepers, have already been mentioned. Those who officiated at the sanctuary had doubtless their legal toll from private sacrifices of every kind. Lost property for which no owner appears falls to the priests; a man who has appropriated such property shall confess to the priest, and all that he pays in restitution belongs to the priest, besides the ram of the trespass offering (9 13 ff.).

A charitable fund is provided by monthly payment of certain dues by members of the community to the Supervisor. From this fund relief is given by the judges to the poor and needy, to the aged, to the wanderer (?), to such as have fallen into captivity to foreigners, and others (14 12 ff.).

The religious conceptions and beliefs of the sect present little that is peculiar. For God the name _El_ is consistently used, without any epithets. _Adonai_ is mentioned only to forbid its use in oaths. The only other name which occurs is the Most High (once, in the phrase “the saints of the Most High,” that is, the members of the sect). There is repeated reference to the holy spirit: God, through his Anointed, made men know his holy spirit (2 12); the opponents of the sect, by blasphemous speech against the statutes of God’s covenant, defiled their holy spirit (5 11);(67) its members are warned not to defile his holy spirit by failing to observe the distinctions of clean and unclean which God has ordained (7 3 f.).

The “Prince of Lights (_Urim_),” through whom Moses and Aaron arise, is perhaps, as the contrast to Belial suggests, one of the highest angels.(68) The destroying angels execute God’s inescapable judgment on those who turned out of the way and despised the statute (2 6). The fall of the Watchers, which is a favorite subject in the apocalyptic literature, is referred to in 2 18. The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is “let loose” during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.); his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.); he also exterminates the faithless in the day of God’s visitation (8 1 f.). Another name for the devil is Mastema (the commoner name in Jubilees), equivalent to Satan, “the adversary.” The angel of Mastema ceases to follow a man who resolves to return to the law of Moses (16 4 f.). According to Jubilees 10 8 f., 11 5, Mastema had permission from God to employ some of his evil spirits to corrupt men and lead them astray.

Concerning the future life we read only that those who hold firmly to the law are “for eternal life,”(69) or, as it is elsewhere expressed, “have the assurance that they shall live a thousand generations.” To a punishment of the wicked after death(70) or to a resurrection of the dead there is no allusion whatever.

The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly the _yeṣer hara’_ of the rabbis). It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.). We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. Particular emphasis is laid in several places on the commandments, “thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people,” “thou shalt reprove thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him” (Lev. 19 17, 18).(71) Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further, “any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.” It is forbidden also to exact of another an oath except in the presence of the judges; he who does so transgresses the law which forbids a man to take justice into his own hands. Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property, “in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme” (12 6 f.), that is, to prevent the profaning of God’s name (15 3), a motive frequently urged in similar connection in the rabbinical writings. On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.), He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.

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No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. Like many sects, it exhibits the separatist inclination to outdo the orthodox in zeal for the letter and in strenuousness of practice, and it is not surprising that its interpretations of the law frequently agree with those of other strict-constructionists, such as Samaritans, Sadducees, Karaites; but these coincidences illustrate a common tendency rather than prove historical connection. The relation to the Book of Jubilees is, however, such as to show that there was some affinity between our sect and the circles in which that work originated. Jubilees is cited as authority on the last times; its calendar probably contains the secrets of God’s holy sabbaths and glorious festivals about which all Israel was in error; the rules for the observance of the Sabbath in our book accord in many particulars with the injunctions in Jubilees 50 6 ff. (see also 2 26 ff.); and various other resemblances might be pointed out, such as the preference for the unornamented word God (in Jubilees, God, or the Lord), in contrast with the many mouth-filling periphrases in Enoch; the holy spirit in men; the name Mastema for the adversary instead of Satan; Belial who ensnares men, and the spirits of Belial which rule over sinners, besides others to which Dr. Schechter directs attention in his notes. The relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is less clear. The saying attributed to Levi (4 15) is not found in the Testament, and the other resemblances Dr. Schechter has noted are vague or belong to the commonplaces. The place of honor given to Judah in the Testaments, as we have them, is strikingly at variance with the attitude of our sect toward that tribe and its princes. The Levite Messiah of the Testaments is not precisely the same as the “Anointed from Aaron and Israel” in our book. In Jubilees also there are salient features, such as the more developed angelology and the form of the Messianic expectation, which hardly permit us to suppose that the book was a product of our sect, however highly it may have been esteemed by it.

The sect gives especial honor to the sons of Zadok, the ancient priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 44 15, 2 Chron. 31 10, Sirach 51 12 Heb.); they are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the latter times (4 3); it was Zadok who brought to light the Book of the Law which no one had seen since the death of Eleazar and Joshua (5 5). The context of the latter passage would suggest that Zadok the contemporary of David is meant, who after the deposition of Abiathar became Solomon’s chief priest.(72) The precedence given to the sons of Zadok may possibly have a side reference to the illegitimate high priests of Seleucid creation, such as Menelaus, though, if this were the intention, we should expect it to be emphasized.

The passages quoted are the only places in the book in which the name Zadok or the sons of Zadok appear, and they are certainly a very slender reason for describing the body which produced the book as a “Zadokite” sect, whatever meaning may be attached to the term. On the contrary, one of the outstanding things in the constitution of the sect is the predominance of the lay element. The Supervisor is a layman; laymen form the majority in every court; the Messiah is the “Anointed from Aaron _and Israel_.” Whether the external testimony upon which Dr. Schechter relies for justification of the name is more adequate will be considered below.

Zadok and the sons of Zadok suggest the Sadducees,(73) whose name, according to the most probable explanation, designates them as descendants (or followers and partisans) of Zadok. Here again it is a question whether Zadok of David’s time is meant, so that the Sadducees were the Zadokite aristocracy of the priesthood, as most modern scholars think, or whether the name of the Sadducee sect is derived from a heresiarch of much later times, as the Jewish legend represents which makes Zadok, from whom the sect descends, a recalcitrant disciple of Antigonus of Socho, about the middle of the second century B.C., contemporary, if we rightly interpret our texts, with the origin of the sect we are studying.

With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,(74) so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)(75) says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first century B.C., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.(76) The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.

In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.

The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).(77) The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (_epagomenae_). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.(78)

Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,(79) and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of only _four_ extra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.(80) We do not know whether the Dositheans of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or counted _five_ extra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.