In my previous post I talked about two of the known Jewish sects from the days of Jesus in Palestine.  The idea that there are specifically four sects comes to us from the late-first-century Jewish historian Josephus, whose many volumes of writings (e.g., on the Jewish War and on Jewish Antiquities – the latter a history of the Jewish people from biblical times up to his own day) are our principal source of information about Judaism at the time.  In addition to the Pharisees and Sadducees, Josephus mentions the “Essenes” and a “Fourth Philosophy.”  Here is a summary of what these groups stood for, again taken from my introductory textbook on the New Testament.

 

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The Essenes are the one Jewish sect not mentioned in the New Testament. Ironically, they are also the group about which we are best informed. This is because the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were evidently produced by a group of Essenes who lived in a community east of Jerusalem in the wilderness area near the western shore of the Dead Sea, in a place that is today called Qumran. Although the term “Essene” never occurs in the scrolls, we know from at least one ancient authority, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, that a community of Essenes was located in this area; moreover, the social arrangements and theological views described in the Dead Sea Scrolls correspond to what we know about the Essenes from these other accounts. Most scholars are reasonably certain, therefore, that the scrolls represent a library used by this sect, or at least by the part of it living near Qumran.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was completely serendipitous. In 1947, a shepherd boy searching for a lost goat in the barren wilderness near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea happened to toss a stone into a cave and heard it strike something. Entering the cave, he discovered an ancient earthenware jar that contained a number of old scrolls. The books were recovered by bedouin shepherds. When news of the discovery reached antiquities dealers, biblical scholars learned of the find, and a search was conducted both to find more scrolls in the surrounding caves and to retrieve those that had already been found by the bedouin, who cut some of them up to sell one piece at a time.

Some of the caves in the region yielded entire scrolls; others contained thousands of tiny scraps that are virtually impossible to piece back together, since so many of the pieces are missing. Imagine trying to do an immense jigsaw puzzle, or rather dozens of immense jigsaw puzzles, not knowing what the end product of any of them should look like, when most of the pieces are lost and those that remain are all mixed together! All in all hundreds of documents are represented, many of them only in fragments the size of postage stamps, others, perhaps a couple of dozen, in scrolls of sufficient length to give us a full idea of their contents.

Most of the scrolls are written in Hebrew, but some are in Aramaic. Different kinds of literature are represented here.  There are at least partial copies of every book of the Jewish Bible, with the exception of the book of Esther, and some of them are fairly complete. These are extremely valuable because of their age; they are nearly a thousand years older than the oldest copies of the Hebrew Scriptures that we previously had. We can therefore check to see whether Jewish scribes over the intervening centuries reliably copied their texts. The short answer is that, for the most part, they did. There are also commentaries on some of the biblical books, written principally to show that the predictions of the ancient prophets had come to be fulfilled in the experiences of the Essene believers and in the history of their community. In addition, there are books that contain psalms and hymns composed by members of the community, prophecies that indicate future events that were believed to be ready to transpire in the authors’ own day, and rules for the members of the community to follow in their lives together.

Sifting through all of these books, scholars have been able to reconstruct the life and beliefs of the Essenes in considerable detail. It appears that their community at Qumran was started during the early Maccabean period, perhaps around 150 B.C.E., by pious Jews who were convinced that the Hasmoneans had usurped their authority by appointing a non-Zadokite as high priest. Believing that the Jews of Jerusalem had gone astray, this group of Essenes chose to start their own community in which they could keep the Mosaic law rigorously and maintain their own ritual purity in the wilderness. They did so fully expecting the apocalypse of the end of time to be imminent. When it came, there would be a final battle between the forces of good and evil, between the children of light and the children of darkness. The battle would climax with the triumph of God and the entry of his children into the blessed kingdom.

Some of the scrolls indicate that this kingdom would be ruled by two messiahs, one a king and the other a priest. The priestly messiah would lead the faithful in their worship of God in a purified temple, where sacrifices could again be made in accordance with God’s will. In the meantime, the true people of God needed to be removed from the impurities of this world, including the impurities prevalent in the Jewish Temple and among the rest of the Jewish people. These Essenes therefore started their own monastic-like community, with strict rules for admission and membership. A two-year initiation was required, after which, if approved, a member was to donate all of his possessions to the community fund and share the common meal with all the other members. Rigorous guidelines dictated the life of the community. Members had fixed hours for work and rest and for their meals, there were required times of fasting, and strict penalties were imposed for unseemly behavior such as interrupting one another, talking at meals, and laughing at inappropriate times.

It appears that when the Jewish war of 66–73 C.E. began the Essenes at Qumran hid some of their sacred writings before joining in the struggle. It may well be that they saw this as the final battle, preliminary to the end of time when God would establish his kingdom and send its messiahs.

The “Fourth Philosophy”

When Josephus writes about Judaism for a Roman audience, he describes each of the sects that we have discussed as a “philosophy,” by which he means a group with a distinctive and rational outlook on the world. He never gives a name to the fourth sect that he discusses but simply calls it the “fourth philosophy.” The tenets of this philosophy, however, are clear, and they were manifested in several different groups that we know about from various ancient sources. Each of these groups in its own way supported active resistance to Israel’s foreign domination.

The view that characterized these sundry groups was that Israel had a right to its own land, a right that had been granted by God himself. Anyone who usurped that right, and anyone who backed the usurper, was to be opposed, by violent means if necessary. Among those who took this line in the middle of first century were the Sicarii, a group whose name comes from the Latin word for “dagger.” These “daggermen” planned and carried out assassinations and kidnappings of high-ranking Jewish officials who were thought to be in league with the Roman authorities. Another group that subscribed to this philosophy, somewhat later in the century, were the Zealots. These were Jews who were “zealous” for the Law and who urged armed rebellion to take back the land God had promised his people. More specifically, based on what we find in Josephus, Zealots were Galilean Jews who fled to Jerusalem during the Jewish revolt around the year 67 C.E., overthrew the priestly aristocracy in the city in a bloody coup, and urged the violent opposition to the Roman legions that ultimately led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple in 70 C.E.