ans were only one, and possibly not the largest; now it was almost entirely ‘Jewish’ …” (Schwartz 1991: 16-17)
The rise of the Teacher twenty years after Israel revived back to life (CD 1.8-11) might then allude to the rise of a high priest who at some later stage was deposed from power and driven into exile and died.
In this picture, schematized according to the skeletal framework of the Damascus Document, the Teacher when he first emerges takes office as the lawgiver, the divinely inspired exegete, looked to for leadership by the already existing yachad groups scattered throughout the countryside and throughout the region. The total span or career of the Teacher lasts some forty years in the schematic reconstruction of the Damascus Document. This period—the schematic forty years of the Teacher—ends with the Teacher’s death.
~ ~ 4 ~ ~
To repeat, in this picture the Teacher of Righteousness of the Damascus Document rises to prominence at a time when the 1QS yachad groups are already in existence. That is, these groups recognize the leadership of the Teacher when he arose twenty years after Israel had /p. 78/ revived back to life again (CD 1.7-10). Was the Teacher of the Damascus Document originally a priest in the temple as most Qumran scholars today think, perhaps a high priest as Louis Ginzberg argued long ago in his landmark 1922 study of the Damascus Document, an idea which a number of scholars today also have regarded favorably? Again, there is no sound basis internal to the texts for the common notion that the Serekh or Community Rule texts are opposed to the temple or its priests. Instead, the yachad groups read well as an extension or projection of the sect of priests in control of the temple, and this precedes the rise of the Teacher of Righteousness.
When the Teacher, who is widely thought to have originally been a priest in the temple, who is spoken of in the texts in language and titles evocative of a high priest, who perhaps was a high priest—when this figure, this Teacher, arises he is revered and honored, his words regarded as inspired. If the yachad groups indeed reflect activity sponsored by priests of the temple the Teacher as high priest would account for the yachad groups’ acceptance of the Teacher’s authority. The mystery as to how the Teacher attained prominence in the yachad groups which he did not himself found would receive a trivially simple answer: it is because the Teacher was the high priest, by acclamation the leading priest of the priests who controlled the yachad groups. Although this explanation of how the Teacher came to authority in the precursor groups alluded to at CD 1.7-10 draws on notions already current in Qumran scholarship, it appears not to have received scholarly consideration due to the blocking effect of the prior assumption that the Serekh texts reflect an adversarial stance toward the temple and its priests, even though there is no evidence whatsoever of such an adversarial stance in the 1QS and 4QS texts themselves.
[The above is excerpted from G. Doudna “The Sect of the Qumran Texts and its Leading Role in the Temple in Jerusalem During Much of the First Century BCE: Toward a New Framework for Understanding”, in D. Stacey and G. Doudna, Qumran Revisited: A Reassessment of the Archaeology of the Site and its Texts (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), pp. 75-124, at 75-78.]
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Ginzberg, L. (1922), Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte. Published in English in 1976 as An Unknown Jewish Sect. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
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