mplate 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; 11.8). If that is the sense of that allusion, then according to the Damascus Document’s chronological scheme the 1QS yachad groups started ‘twenty years’ before the Teacher of Righteousness arose.
So let us imagine that the 1QS yachad groups began before the Teacher of Righteousness and were sponsored by priests in power in Jerusalem—perhaps in the time of John Hyrcanus I (135-104 BCE) or Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE), perhaps associated with John Hyrcanus’s or Alexander Jannaeus’s conquests and expansions of the Jerusalem state to areas which they turned into ‘Israel’ again, reviving Israel to its former status of old, as at least a possible context. The yachad groups might represent a means by which a ruling elite in Jerusalem, a priestly sect in power, extended its influence and control, and projected its practices and ideology, into the countryside and outlying areas.
And so by this reconstruction 1QS does describe a sect, but it would be an extension of the ruling sect in Jerusalem.
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It has been presupposed in many scholarly discussions that the Serekh texts understand the yachad groups as a replacement for the temple. This has been assumed because in 1QS the yachad groups apply language and imagery of the temple to themselves. The idea is that the temple was regarded as replaced by the people of 1QS who, separated from the temple, saw their own community as a substitution for the physical temple and its priests. This interpretation was dismantled in a posthumously published article by Susan Haber of McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Here is Haber:
“[Some scholars] argue that the yahad—as the community refers to itself in 1QS—regarded itself as a /p. 76/ temple, and perhaps even as a permanent replacement for the Jerusalem temple. Based on texts such as 1QS V, 5-7; VIII, 4-11; IX, 3-6; and CD IIII, 18-IV, 12, scholars point to the description of the community in terms of temple language, the references to the yahad as a ‘priestly’ community, the importance of atonement, and the use of cultic 