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 (Part I).
The revival of Israel like a dead plant coming back to life of CD 1.5-8 is usually understood in terms of some sectarian phenomenon, which may not be entirely inaccurate, but another possibility, not necessarily in contradiction, is that the dead plant returning to life could allude to the conquests and expansions of Alexander Jannaeus viewed favorably by the authors of the Qumran texts—a reversal of the conquest of Nebuchadnezzar, Israel at last come ‘back to life’ as a serious and formidable entity on the map as it once had been in a golden age long ago.
See Also: D. Stacey and G. Doudna, Qumran Revisited: A Reassessment of the Archaeology of the Site and its Texts (Archaeopress, 2013)
The Sect of the Qumran Texts and its Leading Role in the Temple in Jerusalem During Much of the First Century BCE (Part II).
The Sect of the Qumran Texts and its Leading Role in the Temple in Jerusalem During Much of the First Century BCE (Part III).
By Greg Doudna
Roland de Vaux, the excavator of the site in the 1950s, argued that Qumran was the remains of a sect which was opposed to the Hasmonean high priests in control of the temple in Jerusalem. De Vaux never claimed he had an archaeological argument that the people at Qumran were opposed to the Hasmonean temple or its priests. He got that (so he supposed) from the texts in the caves associated with the site:
“[T]he Rule of the Community … Its members have separated themselves from Israel and its priesthood … They have withdrawn to the desert and there lead a common life of work, prayer, and study of the sacred Law … the Teacher of Righteousness was the founder, or at least the organizer of the community … he had cut himself off from Judaism in its official forms, and had led his adherents into the desert …” (de Vaux 1973: 110, 115)
The archaeologists who advance de Vaux’s interpretation today follow a similar template of logic:
(a) the scrolls are associated with the site;
(b) the scrolls depict a sect;
(c) the sect at Qumran was opposed to those in control of the temple in Jerusalem
But what if the sect of the scrolls was not alienated from the temple or its rulers in Jerusalem throughout the Hasmonean era as de Vaux assumed? How would that have affected the archaeological interpretation of Qumran?
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The Community Rule (1QS and eleven other copies from Caves 4 and 5) is regarded as the classic text evoking sectarians separated from the temple in Jerusalem, forming a sectarian alternative to the priests in power in Jerusalem. But however deeply entrenched that reading of the Community Rule may be, it may all along have been fundamentally mistaken. In this essay I propose a different reading and a new framework for understanding the Qumran texts.
The best known of the Community Rule texts is 1QS (1Q Serekh). There is nothing in 1QS concerning the sobriquet-bearing figures of the Qumran pesharim. Nor is there anything in 1QS which is opposed to the temple. 1QS reads as rules of a religious order, a communally structured association of lay people ruled over by priests.
1QS might reflect in its origins something like a ruling regime sponsoring local party organizations in the countryside. The yachad groups of 1QS are subject to the control of priests at every turn. The priests get to eat first, decide things, they have the highest status, and so on. There is no reason internal to the Serekh texts to assume the priests of those texts to be other than priests of the temple in Jerusalem. The yachad groups of 1QS are not portrayed as a grassroots movement. Lay people are forbidden in 1QS from having meetings of over ten people unless a priest or party officer or commissar is present. That sounds like a rule that priests wrote, not lay people.
The formation of the 1QS yachad groups may correspond with what the Damascus Document calls the revival of Israel, likened to a dead plant coming back to life (CD 1.5-8; 1QS 8.5; 1