Is the Bible True? by Jeffery L. Sheler

Author:Jeffery L. Sheler [Sheler, Jeffery L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-201346-0
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1999-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

KEEPERS OF THE SCROLLS

One of the most interesting and intense of the remaining debates concerns the identity of the people who wrote the documents and hid them from Roman invaders in the caves of Qumran. Even though scholars today are nearly unanimous in ruling out the early Christians, they are divided over a range of other possibilities.

Nothing in the scrolls themselves directly identifies the scroll community. But almost from the earliest days after the Qumran discoveries, the evidence seemed to point to an apocalyptic sect of ascetic Jews known as Essenes as the inhabitants of Qumran and the custodians (and probably the writers) of the ancient manuscripts. Hebrew University scholar Eleazer Sukenik, one of the first to lay eyes on the Qumran sectarian scrolls, drew that conclusion based on the match between the writings and what was known of the Essenes from other first-century-CE sources.

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, for example, writing for a Roman audience in the late 70s CE, described three “schools of philosophy” flourishing in Palestine in the years preceding the Jewish revolt that began in 66 CE—the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes.27 What Sukenik and others found persuasive were the important similarities in how Josephus depicted the Essenes in his books Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War and the image of the community that emerged from the Qumran sectarian writings, particularly the Manual of Discipline (1QS).

According to Josephus, the Essenes required newcomers to the sect to “transfer their property to the order” to be held in common (The Jewish War, 2.122). The Manual of Discipline (6:17–22) spells our that very procedure. The sect emphasized the role of Providence in all of life’s details much more than either the Pharisees or Sadducees, according to Josephus, and believed that “nothing befalls men unless it be in accordance” with divine will (Antiquities of the Jews, 13.171–173). The Qumran texts are rife with predeterminism, scholars note, as exemplified in the Manual (3:15–16): “From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before ever they existed He established their whole design, and when, as ordained for them, they come into being, it is in accord with his glorious design that they accomplish their task without change.”28

And even in some minor rules and practices, the two communities seemed to correspond. The Essenes, for example, said Josephus, “are careful not to spit into the midst of the company or to the right” (The Jewish War, 2.147). The Manual of Discipline warns that “whoever has spat in an Assembly of the Congregation shall do penance for thirty days” (7:13).29

For many scholars, all of this added up to convincing evidence that the Qumran community was, in fact, an outpost of Essenes. What sealed the verdict for many was a passage found in the writings of Pliny the Elder, a first-century Roman geographer who wrote of a “solitary tribe of the Essenes” living “on the west side of the Dead Sea” above En Gedi. That fit precisely Qumran’s location—between En Gedi to the south and Jericho to the north, near the Dead Sea’s western shore.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.