Chapter II: Part 2

The sect had houses of worship, which a man in a state of uncleanness is forbidden to enter (11 22),(63) but nothing more is said about them, except that when the trumpets of the congregation are blown, the blowing shall follow or precede the service, and not interrupt it. It is a natural surmise that they answered to the synagogues both as places of worship and of religious instruction, such, for example, as the Supervisor is required to give. The name, _Beth hishtahawōth_, literally, “house of bowing down” (in worship), is peculiar, and may have been chosen to distinguish these sectarian conventicles from the synagogues of regular Judaism, as the English nonconformists of various stripes would not call their meeting-houses churches. It is possible that the prayers of the sect may have been accompanied by genuflections and prostrations such as, though unknown in the synagogue, have formed in all ages and religions a common feature of Oriental worship; but it is also possible that “bowing down” simply stands by metonymy for worship, as is often the case with the corresponding Syriac verb, _segad_.(64)

Sacrificial worship was also maintained.(65) The City of the Sanctuary was eminently holy; sexual intercourse within its limits is forbidden, “defiling the City of the Sanctuary with their impurity” (_beniddatham_).(66) To this city, probably, the sacrifices were brought to which there is frequent reference. “No one shall send to the altar burnt offerings or oblation, frankincense or wood, by a man who is unclean with any of the forms of uncleanness; for it is written, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the righteous is an acceptable oblation” (11 18 ff.). On the Sabbath nothing is to be brought upon the altar except the Sabbath burnt offerings—that is, we may suppose, the stated daily burnt offerings with the supplementary Sabbath victims (13 17 f.; see Num. 28 1-10). Votive sacrifices are also mentioned; it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.). There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community; in its registers their names are enrolled in the first rank. Their place in the courts and in the local religious community, and their duties in the examination of lepers, have already been mentioned. Those who officiated at the sanctuary had doubtless their legal toll from private sacrifices of every kind. Lost property for which no owner appears falls to the priests; a man who has appropriated such property shall confess to the priest, and all that he pays in restitution belongs to the priest, besides the ram of the trespass offering (9 13 ff.).

A charitable fund is provided by monthly payment of certain dues by members of the community to the Supervisor. From this fund relief is given by the judges to the poor and needy, to the aged, to the wanderer (?), to such as have fallen into captivity to foreigners, and others (14 12 ff.).

The religious conceptions and beliefs of the sect present little that is peculiar. For God the name _El_ is consistently used, without any epithets. _Adonai_ is mentioned only to forbid its use in oaths. The only other name which occurs is the Most High (once, in the phrase “the saints of the Most High,” that is, the members of the sect). There is repeated reference to the holy spirit: God, through his Anointed, made men know his holy spirit (2 12); the opponents of the sect, by blasphemous speech against the statutes of God’s covenant, defiled their holy spirit (5 11);(67) its members are warned not to defile his holy spirit by failing to observe the distinctions of clean and unclean which God has ordained (7 3 f.).

The “Prince of Lights (_Urim_),” through whom Moses and Aaron arise, is perhaps, as the contrast to Belial suggests, one of the highest angels.(68) The destroying angels execute God’s inescapable judgment on those who turned out of the way and despised the statute (2 6). The fall of the Watchers, which is a favorite subject in the apocalyptic literature, is referred to in 2 18. The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is “let loose” during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.); his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.); he also exterminates the faithless in the day of God’s visitation (8 1 f.). Another name for the devil is Mastema (the commoner name in Jubilees), equivalent to Satan, “the adversary.” The angel of Mastema ceases to follow a man who resolves to return to the law of Moses (16 4 f.). According to Jubilees 10 8 f., 11 5, Mastema had permission from God to employ some of his evil spirits to corrupt men and lead them astray.

Concerning the future life we read only that those who hold firmly to the law are “for eternal life,”(69) or, as it is elsewhere expressed, “have the assurance that they shall live a thousand generations.” To a punishment of the wicked after death(70) or to a resurrection of the dead there is no allusion whatever.

The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly the _yeṣer hara’_ of the rabbis). It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.). We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. Particular emphasis is laid in several places on the commandments, “thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people,” “thou shalt reprove thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him” (Lev. 19 17, 18).(71) Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further, “any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.” It is forbidden also to exact of another an oath except in the presence of the judges; he who does so transgresses the law which forbids a man to take justice into his own hands. Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property, “in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme” (12 6 f.), that is, to prevent the profaning of God’s name (15 3), a motive frequently urged in similar connection in the rabbinical writings. On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.), He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.

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No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. Like many sects, it exhibits the separatist inclination to outdo the orthodox in zeal for the letter and in strenuousness of practice, and it is not surprising that its interpretations of the law frequently agree with those of other strict-constructionists, such as Samaritans, Sadducees, Karaites; but these coincidences illustrate a common tendency rather than prove historical connection. The relation to the Book of Jubilees is, however, such as to show that there was some affinity between our sect and the circles in which that work originated. Jubilees is cited as authority on the last times; its calendar probably contains the secrets of God’s holy sabbaths and glorious festivals about which all Israel was in error; the rules for the observance of the Sabbath in our book accord in many particulars with the injunctions in Jubilees 50 6 ff. (see also 2 26 ff.); and various other resemblances might be pointed out, such as the preference for the unornamented word God (in Jubilees, God, or the Lord), in contrast with the many mouth-filling periphrases in Enoch; the holy spirit in men; the name Mastema for the adversary instead of Satan; Belial who ensnares men, and the spirits of Belial which rule over sinners, besides others to which Dr. Schechter directs attention in his notes. The relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is less clear. The saying attributed to Levi (4 15) is not found in the Testament, and the other resemblances Dr. Schechter has noted are vague or belong to the commonplaces. The place of honor given to Judah in the Testaments, as we have them, is strikingly at variance with the attitude of our sect toward that tribe and its princes. The Levite Messiah of the Testaments is not precisely the same as the “Anointed from Aaron and Israel” in our book. In Jubilees also there are salient features, such as the more developed angelology and the form of the Messianic expectation, which hardly permit us to suppose that the book was a product of our sect, however highly it may have been esteemed by it.

The sect gives especial honor to the sons of Zadok, the ancient priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 44 15, 2 Chron. 31 10, Sirach 51 12 Heb.); they are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the latter times (4 3); it was Zadok who brought to light the Book of the Law which no one had seen since the death of Eleazar and Joshua (5 5). The context of the latter passage would suggest that Zadok the contemporary of David is meant, who after the deposition of Abiathar became Solomon’s chief priest.(72) The precedence given to the sons of Zadok may possibly have a side reference to the illegitimate high priests of Seleucid creation, such as Menelaus, though, if this were the intention, we should expect it to be emphasized.

The passages quoted are the only places in the book in which the name Zadok or the sons of Zadok appear, and they are certainly a very slender reason for describing the body which produced the book as a “Zadokite” sect, whatever meaning may be attached to the term. On the contrary, one of the outstanding things in the constitution of the sect is the predominance of the lay element. The Supervisor is a layman; laymen form the majority in every court; the Messiah is the “Anointed from Aaron _and Israel_.” Whether the external testimony upon which Dr. Schechter relies for justification of the name is more adequate will be considered below.

Zadok and the sons of Zadok suggest the Sadducees,(73) whose name, according to the most probable explanation, designates them as descendants (or followers and partisans) of Zadok. Here again it is a question whether Zadok of David’s time is meant, so that the Sadducees were the Zadokite aristocracy of the priesthood, as most modern scholars think, or whether the name of the Sadducee sect is derived from a heresiarch of much later times, as the Jewish legend represents which makes Zadok, from whom the sect descends, a recalcitrant disciple of Antigonus of Socho, about the middle of the second century B.C., contemporary, if we rightly interpret our texts, with the origin of the sect we are studying.

With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,(74) so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)(75) says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first century B.C., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.(76) The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.

In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.

The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).(77) The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (_epagomenae_). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.(78)

Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,(79) and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of only _four_ extra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.(80) We do not know whether the Dositheans of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or counted _five_ extra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.

Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius(81) on the Dositheans as saying, “some of them abstain from a second marriage, but others never marry”; and, although “the text is not quite certain on this point,”(82) is inclined to perceive in the statement “at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.” The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not, “some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,” nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon’s conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,(83) “some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.” Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.

Dr. Schechter thinks that the statement of Epiphanius quoted above that the Dositheans “abstain from eating living creatures” “may have some connection with the law in our text on p. 12, l. 11, which may perhaps be understood to imply that the sect forbade honey, regarding it as _’eber min haḥai_ (a limb cut off from a living animal), which would agree with the testimony of Abul-Fath that they forbade the eating of eggs, except those which were found in a slaughtered fowl.” Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται does not mean “abstain from eating living creatures,” but “abstain from animal food,”(84) while our sect certainly did not include vegetarianism among its eccentricities, any more than the depreciation of marriage.

Several authors describe the Dositheans as extravagant sabbatarians. Origen reports that their rule was, that in whatever place and in whatever posture the Sabbath found a man, there and thus he was to remain till its end. Abul-Fath gives a longer account of their Sabbath laws, which are much stricter than those of our texts. It was forbidden, for example, to feed domestic animals or give them drink on the Sabbath, they were to be provided on Friday with enough provender and water to last them through the Sabbath. Extreme sabbatarianism is, however, a sectarian propensity which does not have to be borrowed.

Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans “have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,” in which he thinks “we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination), and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles” (Introduction, pp. xxiii f.). What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner; for they regard it as a defilement to come in contact with any one or even to touch a man of another religion.(85) It is, therefore, not a Dosithean peculiarity, but the general Samaritan usage which Epiphanius describes, and it is useless to search for remoter affinities.

The marked hostility to the patriarch Judah with which Eulogius, the Patriarch of Alexandria (died 607 A.D.), charges Dositheus(86) is natural enough in a Samaritan heresiarch; in the same sentence Eulogius accuses him of scorning the prophets of God, which, again, is not peculiar to the Dositheans, but is the general Samaritan position. It has been remarked above (p. 353) that our sect gives especial honor to the books of the prophets “whose words Israel has despised”; and, however unfriendly the attitude of these seceders to the degenerate Judah of their time, there is no indication of animosity to the patriarch, as there is none in the Jubilees.

From a much later time Dr. Schechter has gleaned some notices of a sect of “Zadokites” in whose tenets also he recognizes resemblances to those of our sect. Kirkisani, a Karaite author of the tenth century,(87) says: “Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites and contradicted them publicly. He revealed a part of the truth, and composed books [a book] in which he frequently denounced the Rabbanites and criticised them. But he adduced no proof for anything he said, merely saying it by way of statement, except in one thing, namely, in his prohibition against marrying the daughter of the brother and the daughter of the sister. For he adduced as proof their being analogous to the paternal and maternal aunt.”(88)

This is a matter about which our sectaries are especially fierce in their denunciations of the laxity of the orthodox. The argument they employ is the same which Kirkisani attributes to Zadok. It is, however, the obvious argument, if the principle of analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.(89) Kirkisani also says that the Zadokites absolutely forbade divorce, which the Scripture permitted, agreeing in this with the Christians and with the Isawites, whose founders, Jesus and Obadiah of Ispahan,(90) had likewise forbidden it. We are not told expressly that our sect prohibited divorce, but their prohibition of remarriage during the life of the divorced wife would have the same effect. Finally, Kirkisani says that the Zadokites fixed all the months at thirty days each,(91) and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Passover and the Tabernacles, making the feast consist of seven days exclusive of the Sabbath. Substantially the same statements are made about the Zadokites by another Karaite author, Hadassi, who flourished in the middle of the twelfth century, and perhaps derived his information from Kirkisani.

What the “Zadokite” writings really were to which these authors refer is not known. It is certain, however, that both the Karaites and their opponents took them to be Sadducean works. In the passage about Zadok, part of which Dr. Schechter quotes (see above), Kirkisani says: “After the appearance of the Rabbanites (the first of whom was Simeon the Just), the Sadducees appeared; their leaders were Zadok and Boëthus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites,” etc.(92) Zadok’s disclosure of a part of truth was followed by the full discovery of the truth about the laws by Anan, the founder of the Karaites. Not only do the opponents of the Karaites stigmatize Anan and his followers as the remnants of the disciples of Zadok and Boëthus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Baṣir (first half of the eleventh century) says that, in the times of the second temple, the Rabbanites, who were then called Pharisees, had the upper hand, while the Karaites, then known as Sadducees, were less influential.(93) The Karaite author of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in manuscript in St. Petersburg(94) polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the great _Malleus Karaeorum_, about the proper way of determining the beginning of the months (and consequently the dates of the feasts), which the Rabbanites fixed by calculation of the conjunctions, while the Karaites depended on observation of the visible new moon. The ancients, he says, required evidence of the appearance of the new moon.(95) Saadia, who mistakenly assumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity—the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin(96)—asserted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boëthus that the law required the beginning of the month to be determined by actual observation; witnesses were heard only to prove that observation confirmed the calculation. To this the author replies: “The book of the Zadokites (Sadducees) is well known, and there is no such thing in it as that man (Saadia) avers. In the book of Zadok are various things in which he dissents from the Rabbanites of the second temple with regard to sacrifices and other matters, but there is not a syllable of what the Fayyumite (Saadia) says.”(97) Saadia himself appears not to have questioned the authenticity of the writings that went under the name of Zadok, with which he seems to have been acquainted, directly or indirectly, for in a passage quoted by Yefet ben ’Ali he says that Zadok had proved from the one hundred and fifty days in the story of the flood just the opposite of what the Karaites try to prove from them.(98)

Zadokite books thus meant, for all those from whom our information comes, Sadducean books; and so, in the sense that, whatever their age and origin, they contained substantially Sadducean teachings, most modern scholars, also, have understood the name.

The possibility that Sadducean writings from the beginning of the Christian era had survived to the Middle Ages cannot well be denied, especially in view of the preservation of the book of the unknown sect that forms the subject of our present study in copies as late as the tenth or eleventh century; and even if the book which the Karaites took for Sadducean was erroneously attributed to that sect, there is no sufficient ground for identifying it with the texts in our hands or for ascribing it to our sect. A thirty-day month, and the prohibition of divorce and of marriage with a niece, are much too slender a foundation to support so large an inference, and it is hardly legitimate to argue that if we had the entire book, of which only a part—or, according to Dr. Schechter, excerpts—is preserved, we might find other and more significant agreements.

Dr. Schechter has also remarked certain coincidences between the tenets of our sect and those of the Falashas, or Abyssinian Jews, whom, with Beer, he is disposed to connect in some way with the Dositheans. Their Sabbath laws resemble those in the Jubilees and in the texts before us; they also prohibit marriage with a niece; they have a tradition that the Pentateuch was brought to Abyssinia by Azariah, the son of Zadok (1 Kings 4 2); certain features of their calendar may possibly be related to that of the Zadokites as described by Kirkisani. Here, again, the correspondences are not numerous or distinctive enough to establish an historical connection.

Putting together these scattered indicia, Dr. Schechter arrives at a theory of the history and relations of the sect which must be given in his own words:—

We may, then, formulate our hypothesis that our text is
constituted of fragments forming extracts from a Zadok book, known
to us chiefly from the writings of Kirkisani. The Sect which it
represented, did not however pass for any length of time under the
name of Zadokites, but was soon in some way amalgamated with and
perhaps also absorbed by the Dosithean Sect, and made more
proselytes among the Samaritans than among the Jews, with which
former sect it had many points of similarity. In the course of
time, however, the Dosithean Sect also disappeared, and we have
only some traces left of them in the lingering sect of the
Falashas, with whom they probably came into close contact at an
early period of their (the Falashas’) existence, and to whom they
handed down a good many of their practices. The only real
difficulty in the way of this hypothesis is, that according to our
Text the Sect had its original seat in Damascus, north of
Palestine, and it is difficult to see how they reached the
Dositheans, and subsequently the Falashas, who had their main
seats in the south of Palestine, or Egypt. But this could be
explained by assuming special missionary efforts on the part of
the Zadokites by sending their emissaries to Egypt, a country
which was especially favourable to such an enterprise because of
the existence of the Onias Temple there. The severance of the
Egyptian Jews from the Palestinian influence (though they did not
entirely give up their loyalty to the Jerusalem Sanctuary),
prepared the ground for the doctrines of such a Sect as the
Zadokites in which all allegiance to Judah and Jerusalem was
rejected, and in which the descendants of the House of Zadok (of
whom indeed Onias himself was one) represented both the Priest and
the Messiah.

The evidence adduced in support of this ingenious hypothesis has already been examined in detail, and the results need only be summarized here: There is nothing in the book before us to warrant classing the men who made the new covenant in the land of Damascus as a Zadokite sect;(99) neither the external nor the internal evidence suffices to identify the work quoted by Kirkisani as Zadokite (by which he and all the rest understood Sadducean) with the book before us; the connection of the sect with the Dositheans rests in great part on misunderstanding of the testimonies about the Dositheans—misunderstandings, it is fair to say, which are not all original with Dr. Schechter,—in part upon points of resemblance which are not distinctive enough to prove anything. Of the peculiar organization of our sect, which would be conclusive, there is no trace anywhere.

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A much more sensational hypothesis was broached by Mr. G. Margoliouth in the _Athenaeum_ for November 26, 1910, under the title, “The Sadducean Christians of Damascus.” He takes “the root” which God caused to spring from Israel and Aaron (1 7) for the same person who is subsequently called the Anointed one (Messiah), and distinguishes this figure from the Teacher of Righteousness, also called the Anointed one, who appeared twenty years later. “Both these Messiahs were dead when the document was composed, but they were both expected to reappear in the latter days.”

The first of them, the Messiah descended from Aaron and Israel, in consequence of whose work “they meditated over their sin, and knew that they were guilty men,” is John the Baptist. John’s father was a priest, and though his mother also is said to have been of priestly descent, “this need not stand in the way of believing that there was a strain of non-priestly Israelite blood in the family.” The Sadducees would naturally prefer a priestly Messiah to a Davidic one, and, when John won the recognition of the people as a prophet sent by God, it would not be strange if a priestly party acclaimed him as in some sense a Messiah, or anointed leader of the nation.

The other Messiah, the Teacher of Righteousness, must then be Jesus. That he appeared twenty years after John, so far from being an argument against this identification, would relieve the difficulty of trying to crowd John’s whole history into little more than a year. “It is surely not necessary to defend the Lucan tradition on this point at all hazards, and it seems quite likely that the newly discovered document has at last given us the right perspective of events.”

If these identifications are correct, the “man of scoffing,” or Belial,(100) who is sent to pervert the nation and turn it from the law, can be no other than the Apostle Paul, and it is noted for confirmation that “the period here assigned to his activity and that of his immediate following is about forty years, a space of time not far removed from the result of recent critical computation.”

The New Covenant so often referred to in the texts is clearly to be connected with the identical conception and expression in the New Testament, nor does it seem to be accidental that the Teacher of Righteousness is several times spoken of as the “only” or “unique” one.

Mr. Margoliouth presents his complete hypothesis as follows:—

The natural and apparently inevitable conclusion of the whole
matter, therefore, is that we have here to deal with a primitive
Judaeo-Christian body of people which consisted of priests and
Levites belonging to the Boëthusian section of the Sadducean
party,(101) fortified—as the document shows—by a considerable
Israelitish lay element, besides a real or contemplated admixture
of proselytes. They acknowledged, as we have seen, John the
Baptist, as a Messiah of the family of Aaron, and they also
believed in Jesus as a kind of second (or, perhaps, as
pre-eminent) Messiah whose special function it was to be a
“Teacher of Righteousness.” Paul they abhorred; and they strove
with all their might to combine the full observance of the Mosaic
Law, as they understood it, with the principles of the “new
covenant,” again as they understood it. On the destruction of the
Temple by Titus, finding that it would not serve any good purpose
to linger in Judaea, they determined to migrate to Damascus,(102)
intending to establish their central organization in that city,
and to found communities of the sect in different parts of the
neighboring country. It was at this juncture that the manifesto,
bearing as it does unmistakable marks of personal touch, was
composed by a leader of the movement.

No scholar who has made an independent study of the texts published by Dr. Schechter can have failed to consider the question whether these schismatics, with their “unique teacher,”(103) their “new covenant,” their “Supervisor,” whose name and functions might be compared with those of a bishop ἐπίσκοπος, their loyalty to their dead leader, God’s Anointed one (Messiah), who made them know his holy spirit, and their expectation of an Anointed one in the last times, their hostility to the Pharisees, can have been a Jewish Christian sect.

The more closely the documents are examined, however, the less tenable this conjecture appears. One feature of the sectarian eschatology which, if established, would afford the most striking coincidence with early Christian belief, namely, that the Messiah who died in the early days of the sect is to “reappear” (Margoliouth), or “rise again” (Schechter), has no support whatever in the text.(104) The “new covenant” in the land of Damascus is plainly the obligation by which the members of the sect bind themselves to the organization, with its peculiar interpretations of the law and its distinctive observances. Neither in the terms of the covenant nor in the law itself is there anything that suggests Christian origin or influence. That “a man should love his neighbor as himself” is not peculiarly or even preëminently a Christian precept. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs reiterate it; by the most orthodox rabbis it was recognized as the most comprehensive commandment in the law.

The things which the sect esteems of vital importance lie wholly in the sphere of the law; polemic zeal for a code which is at every point more rigorous than that of the Pharisees is the salient characteristic of both parts of the book. The moral precepts are the commonplaces of Judaism narrowed to a sectarian horizon.(105) The judgment of God is similarly circumscribed. It is not a judgment of the world or of the Jewish people, but of those who reject and controvert the legal interpretation of the sect, and of those who have fallen away from it.

The code of law which is the constituent principle of the sect and the reason for its existence was given it by its founder, the Teacher of Righteousness. This unique teacher was not a prophetic reformer, but “the interpreter of the law who came to Damascus,” “the legislator.” The statutes he decreed are final; the sect “shall receive no others until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last times.”

Mr. Margoliouth thinks that the “teacher of righteousness” to whom the sect attributed its institutions and laws was Jesus. The statement of this conjecture is its refutation. The rôle of a legislator is the last which the character and teaching of Jesus in the Gospels would suggest even to a sect in search of a founder. That he, whose disregard for the Pharisaic rules of Sabbath observance repeatedly got him into trouble, should, within a generation after his death, have been metamorphosed into the author of the sabbatical code in our texts, which out-pharisees the Pharisees at every point, surpasses ordinary powers of imagination. The Christian Jews of the first century in Palestine, so far as we know anything about them, conformed in the matter of observance to the authority of the scribes and Pharisees, and alleged the express command of Jesus for this practice (Matt. 23 2). Early Christian heresies sometimes exhibit ascetic features reminding us of the Essenes; but none of ultra-legalistic tendency is known.

As our sect is very zealous for things which have no connection with Christianity, so on the other hand the texts disclose no trace of specific Christian beliefs or conceptions. For the Christian Jews of the first century, the belief that Jesus, who had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, was the Messiah of prophecy, that he had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, whence he was presently to come in might and majesty, according to the vision of Daniel, to usher in the new era, was the pith and substance of their faith, the “heresy” by which they were separated from their countrymen, the focus of their polemic and apologetic in controversies with those who rejected their Messiah. It is impossible to imagine a writing as long as this, and imbued as strongly as this with a controversial spirit, proceeding from any Christian sect, in which there should not be so much as an allusion to any of these things; or that a sect which put John the Baptist in so high a place should not make something of baptism in the admission of members.

Apart from these general considerations, Mr. Margoliouth’s identifications rest upon a palpable misinterpretation. On page 1 we read: “But because God remembered the covenant with the forefathers, he left Israel a remnant, and did not suffer them to be exterminated. And at the end of wrath ... he visited them and caused to spring up from Israel and Aaron a root of his planting _to inherit his land and to prosper on the good things of his earth_.” The italicized clauses prove beyond question that the “root” is not an individual, but is a collective designation for the first generation of the sect.(106) The parallel passage on p. 5 says explicitly: “God remembered the covenant with the forefathers, and he raised up from Aaron men of insight and from Israel wise men, and he heard them, and they dug the well.” “The well is the law, and they who dug it are the exiles of Israel who migrated to Judah and sojourned in the land of Damascus.” In the face of this perfectly plain meaning of the passage Mr. Margoliouth takes “the root” for the person designated in other places as “the Anointed from Aaron and Israel,” who led the people “to recognize their wickedness and know that they were guilty men.”(107) In this first Messiah he recognizes John the Baptist, and, consequently, in the Teacher of Righteousness who came after him, Jesus. The point of correspondence is the relation between the forerunner and his successor. The text, however, as I have just showed, says nothing of a precursor of the teacher of righteousness; on the contrary, it was this teacher who first brought light to the generation which in the consciousness of its sin was groping like the blind, and guided them in the way of God’s heart.(108)

That by the “man of scoffing” the Apostle Paul is meant is for Mr. Margoliouth a corollary of the preceding identifications, and falls with them. The enemies of Paul were doubtless capable of calling him all sorts of hard names, but there is nothing in the epithets “scorner” and “liar,” or in the doings attributed to this figure, which fits Paul better than any other false teacher and sower of discord, while the reference to the fate of the men of war who followed the “man of lies” seems quite inapplicable to Paul.(109)

That we should be unable to identify the Covenanters of Damascus with any sect previously known is not surprising. The three or four centuries in the middle of which the Christian era falls were prolific in sects and heresies of many complexions, as were the centuries following the rise of Islam. Through Philo, Josephus, the church Fathers, and the Talmud, we are acquainted with some of them; but it is probable that there were many others of which no reports have reached us. If we cannot, out of the collection at our disposal, put a label on our Covenanters, we may console ourselves with the reflection that here we know one Jewish sect from its own monuments, and that the texts in our hands, mutilated as they are, suffice to give us a much clearer notion of its peculiarities than we get of most of the other sects from the descriptions which have come down to us.

Its affinities with various antipharisaic or antirabbinical parties, such as the Samaritans, the Sadducees, and, in later times, the Karaites, is obvious. It shared with all these a zeal for the letter and the literal interpretation, and a disposition to extend the law by analogy of principle, as a result of which their rules were in general much stricter than those of the Rabbis, who possessed in the theory of tradition and in their methods of exegesis the means of adapting the law to changed conditions, and who were also more disposed to give the precedence to the great principles of humanity in the law over its particular prescriptions when the two seemed to conflict. The organization of the sect, on the other hand, has no parallel within our knowledge. In view of the use of the name “camps” for the local communities, and the references to the “mustering” of the members, the “trumpets of the congregation,” and the like, it may be surmised that the organization of Israel in the wilderness suggested the plan, and that the Supervisors were meant to correspond to the chiefs of the tribes (for instance, Num. 1 10), each having authority over a separate camp.

The sect seems to have perpetuated itself for a considerable time, otherwise this book would hardly have been preserved. It may perhaps be conjectured that it survived long enough to be gathered, along with numerous younger sects, into the capacious bosom of Karaism, of which it was in various points a precursor. Such an hypothesis would explain how it came about that copies of the book were made in the tenth century and later, we should then suppose by Karaite scribes.(110)

Dr. Schechter has laid all students of Judaism under new obligations by the discovery and publication of these texts. They will join with their congratulations the hope that he may find yet other treasures among the accumulations of the Genizah.

FOOTNOTES

1 Documents of Jewish Sectaries. Volume I. Fragments of a Zadokite
Work. Edited, with Translation, Introduction, and Notes, by S.
Schechter. Cambridge University Press. 1910.

2 It may be added that the quotations are singularly inexact.

3 In my translation I have sometimes thought it possible to adhere to
the text where Dr. Schechter has preferred a conjectural emendation.

4 That is, probably, against the legitimate high priest of the time
(perhaps Onias).—The rendering “_by_ his Anointed” is grammatically
admissible, but would be unintelligible in this context.

5 It would be possible to render “the penitents of Israel.”

6 The four or five words which follow are unintelligible.

7 The references are to page and line of the Hebrew text.

8 Others sought refuge in Egypt; the temple of Onias at Leontopolis
had its origin in the same circumstances.

9 So they understood the words translated in the English version “the
cruel venom of asps.”

10 See 2 Macc. 4 16: “By reason of which (sc. their predilection for
Greek ways) a dire calamity befel them, and those for whose customs
they displayed such zeal and whom they wanted to imitate in
everything became their enemies and avengers.” Assumption of Moses,
5 1: “When the times of retribution shall draw near, and vengeance
arises through kings who share their guilt and punish them,” etc.,
describes the same situation.

11 Cf. “the whole race of the elect root,” Enoch 93 8.

12 See Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes (3 ed.), vol. iii. p.
189.

13 A comparison with the Apocalypse of the Ten Weeks in Enoch (93 + 91
12-17) is in point here. The sixth “week” (period of 490 years) ends
with the destruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar; in the seventh
a rebellious generation arises, all whose works are apostasy (the
hellenizers of the Seleucid time); at its end the “chosen righteous
men of the eternal plantation of righteousness” are chosen to
receive the sevenfold instruction about God’s whole creation
(apparently the cosmological revelations of Enoch); the historical
retrospect closes before the robbery and desecration of the temple
by Antiochus Epiphanes (170, 168 B.C.), of which the seer knows
nothing. The chronological error here amounts to sixty or seventy
years.

In the Introduction, p. xii, by a typographical error which is
repeated on p. xxii, Dr. Schechter says that the 390 years of the
text would bring us “to within a generation of Simon the Just, who
flourished about 290 B.C.,” and twenty years more would bring us
into the midst of the hellenistic persecutions preceding the
Maccabaean revolt (about 170 B.C.). Margoliouth, whose hypothesis
490 does not suit any better than 390, takes courage from
Schechter’s doubts to disregard the numbers altogether. Gressmann
(Internationale Wochenschrift, March 4, 1911) is led by metrical
considerations to treat all the chronological notices as
interpolations, and gives them no further consideration. But even if
the figures were introduced by a later hand, they may still
represent the tradition of the sect.

14 Perhaps we should emend _ma’mādō_, “station,” i.e. sect.

15 See below, p. 350, 354 f.

16 Cf. Isa. 30 20 f.

17 The Septuagint renders _yāḥīd_ most frequently by ἀγαπητός, less
often by μονογενής.

18 The same prophecy which was applied by Akiba to Bar Cocheba and by
the Dositheans to their founder (see below, p. 362).

19 The sect rejects the temple in Jerusalem and its worship. Cf. 20 21
f., in the last crisis, “they will lean upon God ... and will
declare the sanctuary unclean and will return to God.”

20 Perhaps better, keep aloof, by vow and ban, from unrighteous,
unclean gain.

21 See below, p. 353.

22 The name comes from Isa. 28 14, where the scorners are the rulers in
Jerusalem, who boast of their covenant with death and their compact
with hell, who have made lies their refuge and hidden themselves in
falsehood. See also Isa. 29 20.

23 It might be surmised that the false prophet had headed an
insurrection—perhaps a Messianic rising—which ended in disaster.

24 See above, p. 333.

25 Or, as Schechter elsewhere expresses it, “disappeared.” Among the
synonyms for death, Aaron ben Eliahu names “gather in” (Isa. 58 8).

26 Introduction, p. xiii.

27 P. xiii. “We gather from another passage that the Only Teacher found
his death in Damascus, but is expected to rise again (p. 19, l. 35;
p. 20, l. 1; cf. also p. 6, l. 11).” The verb _’āmad_ means, as
frequently in the later books of the Old Testament, “appear upon the
scene.” In this sense it occurs repeatedly in the book before us,
and there is nothing in the context here to suggest a different
interpretation.

28 Cf. Acts 1 11.

29 See Isa. 59 20.

30 The quotation is to be thus restored; see Exod. 20 6 and Deut. 7 9.
The next two or three lines are very obscure: “From the house of
Peleg, who went out (or, will go out) from the city of the
sanctuary, and they will rely on God (cf. Isa. 10 20) when the
transgression of Israel is at an end, and will declare the sanctuary
unclean, and will return to God. The prince (?) of the people with
few words (??).” The house of Peleg may be an etymological allegory
for the seceders; the city of the sanctuary is probably Jerusalem
(cf. 6 11 ff., above, p. 338); but neither the connection with the
preceding nor the meaning of the sequel is clear.

31 Text, “and confessed,” which leaves the sentence without a
predicate.

32 See also 7 20: “The sceptre” (Num. 24 17) “is the prince of all the
congregation; and when he arises he will destroy all the children of
Seth.”

33 It is not improbable that the author thought also of the other
meaning of the word _tāphēl_, here rendered “stucco,” viz. something
insipid, stupid; cf. Lam. 2 14, in a passage which, like Ezek. 13
10, refers to the false prophets. I see nothing to indicate that
“the wall” is the fence or hedge which the Pharisaean rabbis drew
around the law to protect it from infraction, as Dr. Schechter
thinks.

34 The text explains, “this is the prater of whom it says, they prate
unceasingly” (4 19 f.; cf. Mic. 2 11). Dr. Schechter regards this
explanation as “a disturbing parenthesis.”

35 The Jannes and Jambres of 2 Tim. 3 8.

36 Such marriages, especially with a sister’s daughter, are not only
permitted, but especially commended in the Talmud (Yebamoth 62b-63a;
see Maimonides, Issure Biah 2 14), and are still common in countries
where the Jews are free to follow the rabbinical law. On the Karaite
prohibition of marriage with a niece, see below, p. 366.

37 On the pollution of the sanctuary, cf. Assumption of Moses 5 3;
Testament of Levi 14 5 ff.; Psalms of Solomon 2 3.

38 On the portals of the sun, see Enoch 72, etc.

39 Perhaps an error of the text for 2000; see below, § 8.

40 Cf. Jubilees 50 8.

41 This holds on week-days as well as on the Sabbath.

42 Perhaps we should read, “make an ‘_erūb_’ ” (a legal fiction by
which dwellings or limits were treated as one). The Sadducees and
Samaritans rejected this evasion of the law.

43 See 12 12 ff.

44 Similarly the Essenes, at their reception into the order, bound
themselves by the “tremendous oaths” which Josephus describes, B. J.
ii, 8 7.

45 The oath by the Tetragrammaton included _a fortiori_.