Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism
252
Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism
252Paperback
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Overview
Building his case on what the ancient records tell us about the Essenes and on a systematic analysis of the documents found at Qumran, Boccaccini argues that the literature betrays the core of an ancient and distinct variety of Second Temple Judaism. Tracing the development of this tradition, Boccaccini shows that the Essene community at Qumran was really the offspring of the Enochic party, which in turn contributed to the birth of parties led by John the Baptist and Jesus. Convincingly argued, this work will surely spark fresh debate in the discussion on the Qumran community and their famous writings.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802843609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 03/30/1998 |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Beyond the Essene Hypothesis
The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic JudaismBy GABRIELE BOCCACCINI
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 1998 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-4360-9
Chapter One
Introduction: Beyond the Essene Hypothesis
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clear and calm, now that the clouds and thunder that came in the early 1990s with the fight for free access to the yet unpublished manuscripts have dispersed.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."
In this perspective, the most promising scholarly works are those of Philip R. Davies, who sees Essenism as the parent movement of the Dead Sea sect, and Florentino García Martínez, whose "Groningen hypothesis" also implies "a split within the actual Essene movement" and locates "the ideological roots of the Qumran community ... within the Palestinian apocalyptic tradition." Johann Maier also agrees and describes the Qumran community as a group that gradually parted from its original Essene setting and turned out to be, in the first century CE, a rather insignificant clique.
Davies and García Martínez do not question the existence of an autonomous religious community at Qumran, nor its connection with the Essene movement, but point to the need of fully exploring the complexity of Judaic thought, which Flavius Josephus simplified in his threefold description of Jewish sectarianism. As Qumran specialists widely recognize, the major shortcoming of the Essene hypothesis is its tendency to equate Qumran with the Essenes, though Qumran represented only one part of a larger and complex Essene movement. "The question of the relations of the Qumran group with [the Essenes] is inescapable. Every theory which reduces the whole to one of its parts, even if it is the best known part, is flawed and deficient."
Even today, for many scholars, and certainly for the general public of nonspecialists, the people of Qumran are not only members of an Essene community — they are the Essenes. The indistinctiveness of the Essene movement and the absence of a recognized Essene literature lead scholars to use Qumranic texts to describe Essene attitudes. As a result, the terms "Essene" and "Qumranic" have become virtually interchangeable.
In addition, the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus has delimited a field for itself, with its own research tools, journals, bibliographies, professional societies, and audience. The consequence has been one of isolating the Qumran specialist from the other specialists in second temple Judaism, exactly as has happened to New Testament scholars. While the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls certainly requires a specific training and expertise, the boundaries set around the newly born field of specialization may have generated an illusion of self-sufficiency; the research would greatly benefit from interdisciplinary approaches. James H. Charlesworth's call for overcoming the fragmentation of modern studies in second temple Judaism has never been so topical: "We scholars together must seek ways to move beyond the isolation that tends to characterize the study of the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Qumran scrolls."
Davies and García Martínez have made a move in the right direction, out of the cage of Josephus's precious yet so cumbersome testimony and out of the boundaries set by modern scholarship. Their approach has the great merit of having introduced a fundamental distinction between Essene origins and Qumran origins, a distinction that allows scholars to make more sense of the often conflicting evidence. The history of the Qumran community may not coincide with the history of the Essene movement. The goal of giving a satisfactory answer to the identity of the Essene movement and its relationship with the Qumran community is, however, far from being accomplished. "While some excellent work has been done on the individual documents, as yet the opportunity to perceive a history of [the Essene] movement in these texts has not been taken. This may be partly because it was not suspected that such a history was there.... It is about time we put [the Essenes] back on the centre of the Jewish stage." Davies's words are echoed by García Martínez and Adam S. van der Woude at the end of their presentation of the Groningen hypothesis. "The history of the ideas of the religious movement that ultimately gave birth to the Qumran group and their relation with the rest of post-exilic Judaism still need to be written, as well as the development of those ideas once the group settled at Qumran. The texts are there, writings belonging to the apocalyptic tradition, to the Essene movement and to the Qumran sect, and ... this intellectual history can indeed be written from these sources." While the agenda is clearly set, the problem of contemporary research is exactly its apparent inability to develop a methodology capable of identifying, from the extant documents, the diverse varieties of middle Judaism. This methodological weakness makes it difficult to write such an "intellectual history" and makes us waver between the extremes of complete skepticism about or total confidence in the Essene hypothesis. In the face of the uncertainties inherent in any other alternative hypothesis, we are continuously pushed back toward Josephus's threefold taxonomy and the comfortable self-sufficiency of Qumran studies.
2. Historiographical Analysis and Systemic Analysis
The method of systemic analysis of middle Judaic documents may give us the means to overcome this vicious circle. It enables us to compare and group documents, regardless of their traditional corpora, exclusively on the basis of their ideological structure. By forming chains of ideologically and chronologically connected documents, systemic analysis gives us the way to identify and describe Judaisms autonomously from what ancient historians, such as Josephus and others, have recorded about the plurality of middle Judaic thought.
Contrary to the recent past, contemporary scholars are extremely cautious about ascribing a document to any of the groups recorded in ancient historiography. We are aware that the trends of middle Jewish thought are much more complex than those presented by ancient sources. Many documents simply do not fit in the framework provided by ancient historiography.
Although the discrepancy between what ancient historiography says and what extant documents let us say about the nature, history, and ideology of middle Judaisms is a well-known phenomenon, not all the implications have been articulated. Documents are not only pieces of evidence that help us assess the validity of ideological structures offered by ancient historiography, but are also in themselves evidence of ideological structures. They are scattered elements of a puzzle that we have to reconstruct patiently.
Historiographical analysis and systemic analysis do not lead necessarily to the same picture, and one must be careful not to mix the results of these two methods of analysis prematurely. It is like an archaeologist who is asked to reconstruct the structure of an ancient building, of which significant ruins remain. Before starting the work of reconstruction on the basis of the description, no matter how detailed, given by ancient historiography, it is wise to assess the ruins and the structure that the ruins themselves suggest. Sometimes there is a perfect correspondence; sometimes archaeological evidence does not fit the data of ancient historiography. In any case, archaeological analysis and historiographical analysis can help one another only if each science works iuxta propria principia, keeping its autonomous rules and methods.
In the archaeology of ideas, as well as in the archaeology of buildings and manufactured products, one must keep the two sets of information distinct in order to compare them successfully. As archaeological analysis and historiographical analysis are complementary, so are systemic analysis and historiographical analysis; they need each other. Both historiographical analysis and systemic analysis search for ideological lines of thought characteristic of diverse Judaisms. Historiographical analysis verifies the historical reliability of ancient and subsequent records on middle Judaisms. Systemic analysis studies, groups, and maps out the ideological remains of middle Judaisms: the documents.
Historiographical analysis is limited by the quantity of surviving records, by their state of preservation, and by the historical probability or accident of their survival. Through historiographical analysis, we have the description and names of a certain number of middle Judaisms, notably the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Christians; but a precise framework of relationships between them and the extant documents is not given in ancient historiography. In addition, ancient sources may have misrepresented, neglected, or even failed to record some Judaisms whose documents have survived. Conversely, ancient historiography may reveal the existence of Judaisms that time has deprived of any literary evidence.
Systemic analysis also is limited by the quantity of surviving documents, by their state of preservation, and by the historical probability or accident of their survival. Through systemic analysis, we group the documents according to their different systems of thought, thus identifying and describing a certain number of middle Judaisms. But documents are often silent about the historical and sociological context of the group behind the author(s). Sometimes we do not even know what these systems of thought called themselves or what outsiders called them during ancient times. In addition, a large quantity of documents surviving from one group may make the ideological system of that group seem more prevalent than actually was the case, and therefore modern interpreters may overestimate it, while they underestimate other systems because of the lack or loss of their documents.
In brief: historiographical analysis leads to the identification of a certain number of named, but often not source-supported, Judaisms; systemic analysis leads to the identification of a certain number of source-supported, but often unnamed, Judaisms. Both methodologies have the means and legitimacy to identify and describe Judaisms apart from one another. The results may not finally lead to the same conclusion. Often, the status of research does not allow us to harmonize the data, and we are tantalized by the discrepancy between what ancient historiography says and what the extant documents let us say. But sometimes the critical analysis of ideological documents corresponds to the critical analysis of the records of ancient historiography. Then, on the one hand, we have an ideological system identified throughout its documents and, on the other hand, a certain amount of critically assessed historiographical data referring to it. When such a correspondence occurs, systemic analysis and historiographical analysis converge to give a comprehensive view of that specific Judaism. In some cases, we may even be lucky enough to put together an ancient name and a certain number of unlabeled documents, and say with some confidence whether they are Sadducean, Pharisaic, Essene, Christian, or belong to yet another variety of middle Judaism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond the Essene Hypothesis by GABRIELE BOCCACCINI Copyright © 1998 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface....................xAbbreviations and Sigla....................xvii
1. Introduction: Beyond the Essene Hypothesis....................1
PART I HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS....................19
2. The Essenes in Ancient Historiography....................21
PART II SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS....................51
3. The Prehistory of the Sect....................53
4. The Formative Age....................81
5. The Schism between Qumran and Enochic Judaism....................119
PART III COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS....................163
6. Conclusion: The Enochic/Essene Hypothesis....................165
Bibliography: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism....................197
Indexes....................219