rists’ (Goodman 2010: 86).
Goodman and Haber distinguished participation in the temple from the distinct issue of criticism of priests and practices of priests of the temple.
Goodman acknowledged there was criticism of the way the temple was run. Not every party could get its way at the same time on specific points of practice in the temple. But ‘the notion that the Dead Sea sectarians cut themselves off from the Temple would seem to us bizarre if we only had the pagan evidence and archaeology as the background to our understanding of the scrolls … such a reading [of separation] is not required by a simple reading of the texts’ (ibid: 88).
And yet in 1QS there is not even criticism of priests or priestly practices in the temple. There is nothing in 1QS which distinguishes its priests from the ones running the temple.
~ ~ 3 ~ ~
It has long been recognized that there seems to be a 490-year chronological scheme, so basic to other Qumran texts, underlying the Damascus Document as well: 390 plus 20 to the rise of the Teacher (CD 1.3-11), 40 for the Teacher, and then a final 40 after the death of the Teacher until the new age (CD 19.35-20.1; 20.13-15), giving 490 in total (e.g. Collins 2010: 92-94). This 490-year scheme (390 + 20 + 40 + 40 = 490), every element of which is attested in the Damascus Document except for the third one (the forty of the Teacher’s career which is reconstructed), is based on the famous ‘seventy weeks’/490-year prophecy found in Daniel 9, which was so pivotal to ancient calculations of the end of the age and the expected eschatological culmination.
The first number, the 390 years, is described in CD 1.5-8 as being the period from when God ‘delivered them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon’ to when God ‘visited them and caused to sprout from Israel and from Aaron a plant root, in order to possess his land and to become fat with the good things of his soil’. It is widely acknowledged that this number, the 390 years, is of no historical usefulness since there is no reason to suppose the authors either knew or were constrained by what they might previously have supposed concerning the date of Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem (which we know to have been 587 BCE) or the dating of the Persian period (which we know to have been 538-323 BCE). This was well summarized by Michael Wise:
“The year 587 [for Nebuchadnezzar] is a date modern scholars have deduced only because they have cuneiform writings to combine with the biblical clues. Ancient Jewish chronographers were less fortunate. Indeed, no one in the time of the scrolls was quite sure how long the Persian period had been … Second Temple Jews calculated the length of the Persian period using the 490 years of Dan 9:24-27. Standard practice was first to decide when those 490 years had ended or shortly would end (i.e. when Daniel’s prophecies would be fulfilled). Then one reckoned backwards from that very debatable standpoint … Since, therefore, the author of the Damascus Document cannot be presumed to have posited the year 587 BCE for Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem, the only proper methodology for understanding CD 1:3-11 is to turn the usual approach on its head. One must first determine when the Teacher lived, then work backwards from that point to calculate when the author believed Nebuchadnezzar was on the scene.” (Wise 2003: 63-4)
/p. 77/ In other words, the eschatologically-minded authors of the Damascus Document regarded counts which ended before their time as erroneous by definition and in need of updating or recalculation (Adler 1996 [‘updating and reinterpreting Daniel’s vision of 70 weeks persisted in Judaism up to and even after the destruction of the temple in 70’]; Collins 2010: 93-94 [‘there is no reason to believe that the 390 years of CD 1 is any more reliable as a chronological indicator than Daniel’s 490 years ... the number cannot be pressed to yield even an approximate date’]).
Instead of assuming there was a single fixed chronological system in use in ancient texts such as those found at Qumran which was adhered t