It all fits together. We know from the
Damascus Document
that among the secrets hidden from Israel was the proper understanding of the law. In that document the metaphor for the law, drawn from the book of Numbers, was a well of abundant water. Here, as he pictures the members of his community studying the law in the wilderness of the shore of the Dead Sea, the writer thinks of them as fulfilling the injunction of Isaiah to prepare for the coming of God.
The Providence of God
I will conclude this chapter with some consideration of a particularly important motif that runs through many of the manuscripts salvaged from Qumran. This is the motif of the providence of God, which we may sum up as the divine plan for humankind. Faith in the providence of God, of course, far from being confined to Qumran, pervades the entire Jewish tradition. At Qumran, however, what is particularly underlined is their belief that God has planned out the whole of human history from the outset, including the course that would be taken by individual human lives, and that insight into this plan comes through a special revelation.
I start with some reflections on an important corpus of manuscripts known as the
Hodayot
—songs of praise with a peculiar twist not found anywhere else in Jewish writings.
[19]
Many of these hymns oscillate between exultation and despairing self-loathing, except that what looks like despair turns out to be grounds for hope, since total self-abandonment results in an unquestioning faith in the providence of God, which is what I want to focus on. Here are a few typical passages:
I know that the inclination of every spirit is in your hand [and all] its [activity] you established before you created it. . . . You alone created the righteous, and from the womb you prepared him for the time of favor, to be protected in your covenant and to walk in all [your ways]. . . . But the wicked you created for the [time of] your wrath; and from the womb you dedicated them for the day of slaughter. (1QH 7:16-20)
And these are the ones whom [you] pre[pared from ages] of old to judge through them all your creatures before you created them—together with the host of your spirits and the congregation of [the heavenly beings wi]th your holy firmament and [al]l its hosts, together with the earth and all that springs from it in the sea and in the depths—[according to]all that was planned for them for all the everlasting epochs and the eternal visitation.
For you yourself prepared them from ages of old and the work of [. . .] among them so that they might make known your glory in all your dominion. . . .
And in the mysteries of your knowledge you apportioned all these things, in order to make known your glory. (1QH 5:13-19)
In your wisdom [you] es[tablished the generations of] eternity, and before you created them, you knew their deeds for everlasting ages. For without you nothing] is done, and nothing is known without your will . . .
. . . and in the wisdom of your knowledge you established their destiny before they existed. According to your will everything [comes] into being: and without you nothing is done. . . . These things I know because of the insight that comes from you, for you have opened my ears to wondrous mysteries. (1QH 9:19-21)
Underlying all the hymns from which these passages are drawn is a firm belief in the Creator God. But in addition to this belief is the conviction that everything was planned out by God beforehand. In a certain sense the providence of God
precedes
creation. This is even clearer in the famous Two Spirits section of the
Community Rule
, 1QS 3:15—4:26: Commenting on this text, Carol Newsom points to its peculiar relationship to the opening chapter of the book of Genesis, a relationship especially evident from the number of words common to both (kinds, signs, hosts, create, rule, fill, darkness, light, generations): “what 1QS 3–4 manages to do is to open up a space behind Genesis 1 and to insert itself into that space. It establishes itself as the pre-text for Genesis 1. Where Genesis 1 is concerned with creation, 1QS 3–4 is concerned with the מחשבה [i.e. the plan, literally
thought
, of God] that grounds creation.” (“From the God of knowledge comes everything that is and will be. Before they existed he fixed all their plans [מחשבתם] and when they come into existence they complete their work according to their instructions in accordance with his glorious plan
[מחשבת כבודו] and without changing anything” [1QS 3:15-16].) “It is not just that 1QS 3–4 is to be read in the light of Genesis 1 but that henceforth Genesis 1 must be read in the light of 1QS 3–4.”
[20]
The great hymn that concludes the
Community Rule
(it takes up nearly two whole columns of this eleven-column manuscript) states the message of God’s plan for humankind with particular clarity: “all things come to pass
[כול הווה] by his knowledge; he establishes all things by his design [במחשבתו] and without him nothing is done” (1QS 11:11). This hymn follows the same pattern as many of the other
Hodayot
, with their combination of exaltation and self-loathing. (Certain of these we have just looked at.) But it is alone in summing up the nature of God’s providence in two words, רז נהיה,
raz nihyeh
, “the mystery of what is coming to pass.”
[21]
Here is the relevant passage:
For my light has sprung from the source of his knowledge; my eyes have beheld his marvelous deeds, and the light of my heart, the mystery that is coming to pass [
raz nihyeh
]. He that is everlasting is the support of my right hand; the way of my steps is over stout rock which nothing shall shake; for the rock of my steps is the truth of God, and his might is the support of my right hand. From the source of his righteousness is my justification, and from his marvelous mysteries is the light in my heart. My eyes have gazed on what is eternal, and wisdom concealed [
nist
ā
r
âh
] from men, on knowledge and wise design (hidden) from the sons of man; on a fountain of righteousness and a storehouse of strength, on a spring of glory (hidden) from the assembly of flesh. (1QS 11:3-7)
The writer emphasizes repeatedly in this passage how extraordinarily privileged he feels to have been granted access to truths hitherto concealed from all humankind, a design of God stretching back into eternity which he sums up in the phrase
raz nihyeh
, the mystery of what is coming to pass. This is the source of his assurance that in the path he has chosen he is walking on solid rock: “the rock of my steps is the truth of God.” For the vast majority of humankind this truth is unavailable; “marvelous mysteries”—for the term also occurs in the plural—involve “a wisdom concealed [
nistārâh
] from men.” This hidden wisdom extends further and deeper than the mysteries regarding the law, which themselves require a special revelation if they are to be properly understood: it is probably an allusion to the great hymn of Job 28, which also speaks of a wisdom that is in principle inaccessible to humankind, “hidden from the eyes of every living thing and concealed [
nistārâh
] from the birds of the sky” (28:21).
The term
raz niyeh
occurs frequently in a manuscript known as 4QInstruction, not properly published until 1999.
[22]
There
raz nihyeh
appears, like the Johannine Logos (“we have gazed on his glory”), as
an object of contemplation
: “By day and night meditate upon the mystery that is coming to pass and study it always. . . . For the God of knowledge is the foundation of truth, and by the mystery that is coming to pass he has laid out its foundation, and its deeds he has prepared with . . . wisdom. . . . Gaze on the mystery that is coming to pass, and know the paths of everything that lives and the manner of his walking that is appointed over his deeds” (4Q417 frag. 2, lines 6-19; cf. 1 i 9, where it is stated that God “has laid out the foundation of truth [i.e., creation] and its works [i.e., history]”).
[23]
Conclusion
In reflecting on the similarities between certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls and some early Christian texts, one must be careful not to exaggerate them. Both the
Damascus Document
and a number of other texts from Qumran (
hodayot
and
pesharim
) emphasize the need for a special revelation from God when interpreting Scripture and exhibit an awareness that for this reason the leaders of the sect are especially privileged to know the real meaning of the law and the prophets: they are the men of truth. What is more, there is evidence that they particularly prized another revelatory source, the
raz nihyeh
, also reserved to the members of the sect. The new sect is clearly veering away from the insistence on the definitive nature of the revelation to Moses that already characterized the dominant party in Israel (which, I have suggested, was later identified by the fourth evangelist as the ’Ιουδαῖοι). Yet they remained fervent adherents of the law, and criticized their opponents for being less so.
- Geza Vermes,
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English
(London: Penguin, 1997), 7. In a later book,
The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls
(London: Penguin, 2010), after remarking that “the miserable handling by de Vaux [a Dominican priest who was the first person to be given general charge of the publication of the scrolls] and his successors of the archaeological finds has stretched the scandal well into the third millennium” (p. 172), he goes on to defend the Essene hypothesis outlined below against various alternative theories.
↵
- Vermes,
Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
, 1.
↵
- Since the secondary sources, Pliny, Philo, and Josephus, are all clearly wrong about some things, how can we be sure when they are right? Pliny, for instance, says that the Essenes do not use money: the plentiful supply of coins discovered at Qumran proves him to be mistaken. And he is equally wrong to maintain that they survived for thousands of centuries (though he does remark at the same time how difficult this is to believe, since no children are ever born to them!) (
Natural History
5.15.73). Josephus, who distinguishes between two orders of Essenes, the first celibate, the second not, is more interested in the first group, which he numbers at rather more than four thousand (
Ant
. 18.20-21). The
Community Rule
at Qumran makes no provision for women, and the great majority of skeletons found in the cemetery were male; so if the community also included members of the second (married) order of Essenes, they will have been much in the minority. Philo’s account is distorted by his philosophical preoccupations, and whereas Josephus says that Essenes were to be found in every city of Judea, Philo says that they avoided cities, which they regarded as dens of vice. Yet although, given these discrepancies, it is scarcely surprising that historians come to different conclusions, especially with regard to place and numbers, much of what Philo and Josephus say about the nature of Essene communities has in fact been confirmed by archaeological and, more especially, by the extensive manuscript discoveries at Qumran and elsewhere. (The classical sources—Philo, Pliny, Josephus—are conveniently gathered together, with translations, in
The Essenes
according to the Classical Sources
, ed. Geza Vermes and Martin Goodman, Oxford Centre Textbooks 1 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989).
↵
- Introducing a collection of essays published in 2013 based on my suggestion (in
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
) that the Gospel of John was “an apocalypse in reverse,” I argued that John (as an Essene) had carefully read the Book of Daniel and that he had also studied the parts of
1 Enoch
available at Qumran (“Intimations of Apocalyptic: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in
John’s Gospel and Intimations of Apocalyptic
, ed. Christopher Rowland and Catrin H. Williams [London: T & T Clark, 2013]: 1–33). Since 2010, when this essay was written, I have radically revised my opinion: I now think that it is only a mere rather than a near possibility that the evangelist was an Essene before he came to follow Jesus.
↵
- Brian J. Capper, “John. Qumran, and Virtuoso Religion,” in
John,
Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate
, ed. Mary L. Coloe and Tom Thatcher, Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature 32 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 107–8.
↵
- See John J. Collins,
The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature,
Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 6.
↵
- See Vermes,
Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
, 21.
↵
- Carol A. Newsom,
The Self as Symbolic Space:
Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran,
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 52 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 4.
↵
- Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Interpretation and the Tendency to Sectarianism: An Aspect of Second Temple History,” in
Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period
, ed. E. P. Sanders et al., 3 vols. (London: SCM, 1981), 1:1–26.
↵
- Perhaps the most impressive attempt, drawing upon the work of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Hartmut Stegemann, and others, is that of Philip R. Davies,
The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the Damascus Document,
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series 25 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982). Davies criticizes both Murphy-O’Connor and Stegemann for their excessive reliance on the scriptural interpretations found at Qumran known as
pesharim
(on which I have more to say later). But it may be that he makes the opposite mistake of failing to give them sufficient attention.
↵
- Two examples from the Scrolls: (1) The phrase “the city of blood” in Nah. 3:1 is interpreted as “the city of Ephraim,
those who seek smooth things
during the last days, who walk in lies and falsehood” (4QpNah 3-4 ii 2); (2) In two of the hymns called the
Hodayot
, the leader of the community sees himself an object of attack by “the interpreters of error” and “those who seek
smooth things
” (1QH 10:14-15) and again by “lying interpreters and deceitful seers,” who “have concocted base schemes against me, to exchange your law, which you impressed upon my heart for
smooth things
for your people” (1QH 12:10-11).
↵
- An elaborate pun makes it impossible to translate this passage effectively. The verb
ḥāqaq
means “to cut or inscribe (on a tablet)” and hence “to decree,” and the participial form of the verb,
ḥōqēq
, can mean either a commander’s staff (which explains the translation “scepter” in the RSV) or else something decreed—a statute. The document exploits this ambiguity: במחוקקות אשד חקק חמחוקק—
bimmĕḥôqĕqôt ’ăšer ḥāqaq hammĕḥôqēq,
“with the statutes (staves) that were decreed by the ruler (staff)” (CD 6:9)
.
↵
- Most scholars think that the 390 years should be calculated from the destruction of the First Temple in 586
bce
By adding twenty (the number given for the years of searching), we arrive at the date of 176
bce
. for the beginning of the sect and the appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness. Three hundred and ninety years looks like a precise figure, but it may well have been borrowed from a prophecy of the prophet Ezekiel relating to Israel’s punitively long exile. In the relevant passage, after commanding the prophet to lie on his left side, God declares: “I will lay the punishment of the house of Israel upon you; for the number of days that you lie upon it, you shall bear their punishment. For I assign to you a number of days, three hundred and ninety days, equal to the number of years of their punishment” (Ezek. 4:4-5). In a note on this number, one editor of the document (Daniel Schwartz) comments that although it is canonical (insofar as is taken from Ezekiel), “it may, nevertheless, be approximately correct.” Clearly he might just as well have said, “being canonical, this number is unreliable.” But the author evidently believed that the sect to which he belonged was no more than a few decades old.
↵
- “Teacher of Righteousness” is the literal translation of a Hebrew expression,
mōrēh haṣṣedeq
, which could be rendered in more idiomatic English as “Righteous Teacher.” But I will continue to employ the more literal rendering, the one generally used by commentators.
↵
- Somewhat further on the document speaks of “the penitents of Israel and those who depart from the land of Judah and dwell in Damascus” (CD 6:5) and of “those who entered the new covenant in the land of Damascus” (6:19). Hence its name: the
Damascus Document
. The C in the abbreviation CD is for Cairo—where it was found—and the D for Damascus. The location of Damascus is disputed.
↵
- The word generally used to refer to these commentaries is
pēšer
, a Hebrew word (borrowed from the Aramaic
pišrah
) designating a continuous commentary on a biblical text: the corresponding verb
pāšar
was used of the act of interpretation. Several pesharim, as they are now called, have been found at Qumran—and nowhere else! The word is found only once in the Hebrew Bible (Qoh. 8:1), in the sense of explanation, but the cognate noun
pōtēr
and the corresponding verb
pātar
occur in Genesis in the context of Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of “the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt,” and of Pharaoh himself (Genesis 40–41). This being so, it seems likely that the author of Daniel, who uses the Aramaic word
pišrah
repeatedly of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams (Daniel 2), was borrowing the word, and with it the idea of dream interpretation, from the story of Joseph. It is equally likely, I believe, that the author of the Qumran pesharim was similarly borrowing from the story of Daniel, for just as Daniel could not interpret dreams without divine assistance, the
pesharim
show that the words of Scripture, like Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, are mysteries (
rāzîm
), and consequently cannot be properly understood except by an interpreter inspired by God. (The word
rāz
, “mystery,” rare in the Hebrew Bible, is quite common in the scrolls in the sense of a deep secret that human beings are unable to penetrate without God’s special aid.) So here, though in a very different context, we come across once more the now familiar theme of the essential element in the interpretation of Scripture.
↵
- With a single exception, a pesher on one of the Psalms, all the pesharim are interpretations of prophetic texts—Isaiah and some of the minor prophets. No doubt the community thought of David, to whom they ascribed the authorship of the Psalms, as yet another prophet.
↵
- Vermes,
Complete Dead Sea Scrolls
, 97.
↵
- In what follows and for the translation I am indebted to a long chapter of Carol Newsom entitled “What Do Hodayot Do?” in eadem,
Self as Symbolic Space
, 204–86.
↵
- Newsom,
Self as Symbolic Space
, 86.
↵
- At first this term was translated as a future—“the future mystery.” I have argued, however, that a present tense is more appropriate—“the mystery that is coming to pass.” See John Ashton, “‘Mystery’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Fourth Gospel,” in Coloe and Thatcher,
John, Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
53-58. See also
Qumran Cave 4.XV: Sapiential Texts, Part 1,
ed. T. Elgvin et al., in consultation with J. A. Fitzmyer, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 20 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 105, where the editors say of the term רז נהיה: “This refers to the secret of that which is coming into being,” and they point to Sir. 43:19 and 48:25, “where נהיות is parallel to נסתרות, secrets.”
↵
- See
Qumran Cave 4.XXIV: 4QInstruction (Musar leMevin): 4Q415 ff.,
ed. J. Strugnell, D. J. Harrington, and T. Elgvin, in consultation with J. A. Fitzmyer, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 34 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
↵
- In chapter 8 I will give further reasons for stressing the similarity between the Logos and the
raz nihyeh
.
↵