The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (10 page)

In the course of the opening admonition (1:1—2:1) we learn of the misdeeds of the Scoffer, or man of mockery, who “sprinkled upon Israel waters of falsehood and led them astray in a chaos without a way” (1:14-15), with the result that “they sought smooth things [
ḥălāqôt
] and chose delusions and sought out loopholes” (1:18-19). The accusation of looking for easy interpretations and loopholes in the law, substituting overly simple readings for what the writer knows to be the truth, is encapsulated in the phrase “the Seekers of Smooth Things,” which appears more than once in the Qumran manuscripts and is generally taken to refer to the Pharisees.
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Those whose knowledge of the Pharisees has been hitherto restricted either to the works of the historian Josephus or to the Christian Gospels (or both), and who therefore think of the Pharisees as rigorous sticklers for the law, are likely to be surprised to learn that they are scornfully referred to by the Essenes as “the Seekers of Smooth Things.”

The
Damascus Document
proposes a startlingly new model of interpretation. “Of those who held fast to God’s ordinances,” the writer declares, “God established his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them hidden things [
nistārôt
] in which all Israel had strayed. . . . (These) he opened before them and they dug a well of abundant water” (3:12-16). We learn from this text (1) that the people with whom God has established his new covenant lay claim to the same proud name, Israel, that belonged to those who had strayed, one of the characteristics of any breakaway sect being an assured conviction that it is the only true representative of what the parent body formerly claimed to be. In the second place (2) we learn that Israel’s grievous offenses, far from being obvious, are the object of a special revelation, so that even those who committed them could not have been aware of this at the time. Their faults, where they had strayed, are called “hidden things”: knowledge of their own wrongdoing was unavailable to them because the special revelation required to recognize these misdeeds for what they were was reserved for others. (3) This revelation is somehow connected with the digging of “a well of abundant water.” The explanation of this well is given somewhat later:

The men of knowledge and the wise men, of course, are the leaders of the community. The first biblical passage quoted here, from the book of Numbers, alludes to an episode during Israel’s forty-year sojourn in the wilderness:

This well, which, with an exercise of a brilliantly imaginative midrashic exegesis, they interpreted as referring to the law, was at the center of the life of the community, and it had to be dug by people qualified to do so. In the interpretation of the biblical passage the word
staff
is employed first in the singular (
scepter
) to indicate the Interpreter of the Law and, second, in the plural, to refer to the nobles, who are told how to dig by the Interpreter. The proper interpretation of the law demanded not only competence but effort. The choice of metaphor is interesting and significant. Understanding the Scriptures is not simply a matter of seeing a light or hearing a voice (and indeed, as we have observed, it had already been made plain to them the outset that they could not even open their eyes or their ears without help). Correct interpretation involves hard digging. Seeing it in this way, the writer expresses his contempt for people who failed to realize the need for effort, his own predecessors, who “sought out smooth things, chose delusion and sought out loopholes” (1:18-19).

To sum up, then, what I want to emphasize most particularly is that all the deviations of the author’s adversaries, which justified him and his new sect in splitting away from the parent body, are attributed ultimately to a single cause—their failure to read Scripture correctly. And the reason for this failure is that they were not favored with the new revelation that was granted to the Interpreter of the Law and the members of his community. These two reasons, on the face of it, are contradictory. How could the “Seekers of Smooth Things” be blamed for wrong interpretations when, with the key withheld from them, it was impossible for them to find the correct ones? A good question, but this is simply one example of a deep conceptual faultline that runs throughout the teaching of the Essenes, and indeed throughout the teaching of any religion (Calvinism is the best known example) that proclaims at the same time both divine predestination and human guilt.

Most of our information concerning the history of the Essenes comes from the document we have just been considering, the
Damascus Document
. Besides a program of the sect’s principles and intentions, the text also includes some account of the group’s history and the nature of its organization. The document opens with an account of the origins of a sect that seems to have broken away much earlier from what is loosely called mainstream Judaism, stating that 390 years after delivering Israel into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, God “left a remnant of Israel and did not deliver them up to destruction,”
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but “caused to grow out of Israel and Aaron a root of planting, to inherit his land and grow fat in the goodness of his soil.” But this was not the end of Israel’s disobedience, and the document now switches to speak of people who “discerned their iniquity.” For twenty years these people blindly groped for a way. Nevertheless, the writer asserts, they sought God wholeheartedly, and so he “raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in the way of his heart” (CD 1:5-12).
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So the members of the sect were convinced from the outset of their own sinfulness and of the need to repent, and yet at the same time they were convinced that in the Teacher of Righteousness they had found a leader who could direct them in the right path, enabling them to remain true to God by faithful adherence to the law of Moses. Then there was yet another breakaway, or at least a temporary lapse, led by a villainous personage called “the Scoffer” (or a man of mockery), who “sprinkled upon Israel waters of falsehood and led them astray in a chaos without a way,” with the result that they “sought smooth things and chose delusions and sought out loopholes . . . and caused the covenant to be broken.” This provoked the wrath of God, who set “the angels of destruction” upon “those who willfully depart from the way and despise the statute,” so as to leave not a single survivor (2:6-7). Nevertheless, “out of those who held fast to God’s ordinances, with those who remained of them, God established his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them hidden things in which all Israel had gone astray” (3:12-14). So the document represents the views of those who remained faithful. Confident that their strict interpretation of the law was the correct one, they all took a solemn oath to adhere, or rather “return” to it (CD 15:5—16:2).
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In the last sentence of this passage the name
Israel
refers both to the sinful people and also to the new covenanters, who now see themselves as the true Israel.

I now turn to a very different document. Under the heading “Bible Interpretation” Vermes lists a number of commentaries on biblical prophets.
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The commentary on the first two chapters of the prophet Habakkuk, the best preserved of these, was an early find. In a reflection on Hab. 1:5, we are told of “a priest” in whose heart God set understanding (the word
bînâh
is conjecturally restored at this point) “that he might interpret the words of his servants the prophets, through whom he foretold all that would happen to his people and [his land]” (1QpHab 2:8-9). So we know already of the writer’s conviction that what Habakkuk foretold relates to a distant generation, the generation of the writer himself and the community; and indeed the same conviction underlies all the other pesharim as well. Each verse is assumed to have a direct bearing on the situation of the writer, the Teacher of Righteousness (“to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets” [1QpHab 7:4-5]). The Teacher of Righteousness,
mōrēh haṣṣedeq
, is, as we have noticed, the name given to the leader of the sect in the
Damascus Document
, where it is said of him that God raised him up to guide his people in the way of his heart (CD 1:11); and we have seen that he was also a priest (1QpHab 2:8; cf. 4Q171 2:18, 3:15—a pesher on Psalm 37). Other characters too are named in these commentaries, especially enemies of the community, the Wicked Priest, the Spouter of Lies, the Scoffer in Jerusalem, also people called the Kittim (a term now generally agreed to refer to the Romans) whose future destruction is assured. We have already remarked that the name of one of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim, is associated with the Seekers or Searchers of Smooth Things (the Pharisees). The descendants of Ephraim and of Manasseh, another of Joseph’s sons, founded the northern, breakaway kingdom, and most scholars, Vermes among them, now agree that Manasseh refers to the Sadducees. If this is correct, the Qumran community was asserting that both the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the two main branches of Judaism at the time, were actually illegitimate, and that the members of the Qumran community alone were the true Israel.

Let us take a closer look at this pesher:

This passage concerns the community’s perception of Scripture. We have already seen from the
Damascus Document
that they regarded the law as their own special preserve: a well requiring excavation. Now we see that they think the same about the prophets,
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whose utterances have come to be thought of as mysteries that cannot be understood without a special revelation, a conviction that entails the surprising belief that the prophets themselves did not really understand what they were saying. Moreover, we now learn that this divinely inspired insight into the meaning of Scripture is the prerogative of the Teacher of Righteousness.

The passage from the
Damascus Document
that we have already discussed sheds light on another document, perhaps the most important of all the manuscripts found at Qumran. This document, which soon came to be called the
Community Rule
, was one of the first to be found, and was published as early as 1951 under the title of
The Manual of Discipline
. (Subsequently a number of smaller fragments of ten other manuscripts of the Rule were found in Caves 4 and 5.) This is how Vermes describes its contents: it “contains extracts from liturgical ceremonies, an outline of a tractate on the spirits of truth and falsehood, statutes concerned with initiation into the sect and with its common life, organization and discipline, a penal code, and finally a poetic dissertation on the fundamental religious duties of the Master and his disciples, and on the sacred seasons proper to the community.”
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 Here is part of a section that deals with the formal acceptance of aspirants into the community:

The clear implication here is that the law cannot be properly understood without some additional revelation reserved for the priests, the sons of Zadok, who are those who keep the covenant. A little further on, still in the context of the solemn admission into the community, the Interpreter is enjoined not to conceal from those “set apart as holy . . . any of those things hidden from Israel which have been discovered by him” (8:11), secrets, that is to say, disclosed to the Interpreter but hidden from Israel as a whole. At this point the new members are urged to “separate from the habitation of the unjust and go into the wilderness to prepare there the way of him,” that is to say, the path spoken of by Isaiah, which the writer understands to mean “the study of Law which he commanded by the hand of Moses” (1QS 8:16-17; 4Q259 frag. 3, lines 4-5).