Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gabriele Boccaccini is professor of Second Temple Judaism and early rabbinic literature at the University of Michigan. He is also the founding director of the Enoch Seminar, a forum of international specialists in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam affiliated with the Society of Biblical Literature. In 2019, he was awarded knighthood by the president of Italy in recognition of his contributions to Italian culture in the world.

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Beyond the Essene Hypothesis

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface..........................................................................xAbbreviations and Sigla..........................................................xvii1. Introduction: Beyond the Essene Hypothesis....................................1PART I HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS...............................................192. The Essenes in Ancient Historiography.........................................21PART II SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS.......................................................513. The Prehistory of the Sect....................................................534. The Formative Age.............................................................815. The Schism between Qumran and Enochic Judaism.................................119PART III COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS...................................................1636. Conclusion: The Enochic/Essene Hypothesis.....................................165Bibliography: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism.....................197Indexes..........................................................................219

Chapter One

1. The Calm after the Storm

Fifty years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the sky looks unusually clear and calm, now that the clouds and thunder that came in the early 1990s with the fight for free access to the yet unpublished manuscripts have dispersed. With the release in fall 1991 of the complete set of photographs of the scrolls and the subsequent publication of the microfiche edition, there is no more room for pretended surprises or only-announced-and-never-fulfilled revelations. At last, the era of big expectations and big suspicions is over.

The stormy weather so recently passed has not prevented many remarkable results from being accomplished on the philological and technological levels. Looking back at the frontier environment in which the first editors began the process of piecing together the fragmentary texts, one cannot help being amazed by the progress that has been made concerning the restoration of the manuscripts. The first, timid attempts at applying computer science to the study of the scrolls have blossomed into a new generation of philological studies, based on the most advanced technologies. The discussion about the ideological identification of the community who owned the scrolls and wrote some of them, however, has remained basically stalled at the Essene hypothesis, which since the discovery of the first manuscripts immediately presented itself to scholars as the most likely. According to this hypothesis, the Dead Sea Scrolls would be the main library of an Essene community led by Zadokite priests who in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt retired into the wilderness in a settlement known today as Qumran.

Recent years have seen a revival and proliferation of revisionistic hypotheses, in particular about the archaeology of Qumran. Some scholars have once again challenged the identification of Khirbet Qumran as the ruins of a sectarian communal center, although none of the alternative hypotheses (a fortress, a villa rustica, a trading center) has gained scholarly consensus.

Other scholars have taken a less radical approach. They do not question that Qumran was a religious communal center related directly to the scrolls. They argue, however, that the site should be understood as a facility center for the larger Essene movement, not the headquarters of an autonomous Essene community. According to Hartmut Stegemann, Qumran was a place for temporary retreat, "a study center for all members," a combination book factory and library intended for the use of the entire Essene sect. Edward M. Cook has a similar but slightly different theory about what Qumran was in relationship to the larger Essene movement. He speaks of Qumran as a ritual purification center, "an outpost or annex for the Jerusalem branch of [Essene] sectarians, ... housing a small permanent staff as well as providing for a constant stream of incoming unclean members and outgoing clean ones."

Although not compelling enough to revolutionize the course of mainstream research, these revisionistic arguments have been sufficiently documented to open new horizons of possibilities and to force scholars to reassess the archaeology of Qumran with an open mind. At the very least, this revisionism serves as a healthy reminder that many crucial questions remain unanswered and the final archaeological report is still to be written.

Recent years have also seen the development of alternative theories about the origins and ideological roots of the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Both Ben Zion Wacholder and Shemaryahu Talmon locate the origins of the community in anti-Zadokite circles of the second temple before the Maccabean uprising. Wacholder contends that "the roots of Qumran ... are ... the invisible turbulence hidden behind the seeming serenity of the third century BCE" in a movement that directly challenged mainstream Zadokite Judaism and the centrality of the Mosaic torah. "Authors of texts like the Heavenly Jerusalem, the Aramaic Testament of Levi, the book of Jubilees, 11QTorah, and CD refused to recognize the legitimacy of the second temple." Similarly, Talmon views "the community of the renewed covenant," which he does not identify with the Essene movement, "as the third- or second-century[-BCE] crystallization of a major socio-religious movement which arose in early post-exilic Judaism. The movement, ... prophetically inspired and inclined to apocalypticism, ... runs parallel to that of the competing rationalist stream which ... will ultimately crystallize in Rabbinic or normative Judaism."

Whereas Wacholder and Talmon see Qumran as the ultimate result of an opposition party, Lawrence H. Schiffman describes a schism that gradually turned the once normative Zadokite tradition into a sectarian phenomenon. That the Temple Scroll (11QT) and the Halakhic Letter (4QMMT) show striking similarities to the halakhah which rabbinic literature attributes to the Sadducees is for Schiffman evidence that "the origins and roots of the halakhic tradition [of the Dead Sea sect] lie in the Sadducean Zadokite priesthood."Only when it became clear that the Hasmonean succession was permanent, "the Qumran Zadokites gradually developed the sectarian mentality of the despised, rejected, and abandoned outcast."

These studies on Qumran origins have played an important role in shifting the emphasis from the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the broader context of second temple Jewish thought and convincing even the staunchest champions of the Essene hypothesis that, in order to be maintained, it needs some radical reorientation. By contrast, the success of fanciful theories about the Christian origins of the scrolls displayed in the media has resulted in an unfortunate waste of time and energy.

The Essene hypothesis can be overcome only by moving forward and not backward, beyond and not against the accomplishments of fifty years of scholarship. This goal cannot be reached without a comprehensive reassessment of the pluralistic development of Judaic thought in the second temple period, particularly in the transitional age of "middle Judaism."...