The ancient scrolls found six years ago at Khirbet Qumran near the Dead Sea—three examples of which are at present on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the current exhibition of Biblical archaeology—and similar finds made subsequently in the same area, constitute discoveries of incalculable value for the history and archaeology of Palestine. The full significance of these finds must await the results of intensive study now going on among scholars. But enough evidence already exists to indicate in what particular area of Jewish history they may be expected to bring enlightenment. H. L. Ginsberg here summarizes the fascinating chain of evidence which indicates the value of the finds in illuminating the true historical character of the Jewish sect of the Essenes, a mooted question for centuries.

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In the summer of 1947, some Bedouins of the Wilderness of Judah (the arid eastern slope of the hill country of Judah that descends to the Dead Sea) chanced upon a grotto near a ruin by the name of Khirbet Qumran, lying south from the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. The grotto contained forty or fifty large jars, of a cylindrical shape. Most of them were broken; and it was apparent that their contents had been in part removed by men, in part gnawed and scattered by rats. But from the scattered remains, and from the contents of the few comparatively intact jars, it was evident that all or most of the jars must have served as receptacles for leather scrolls—in at least one case, it later developed, for a papyrus scroll—wrapped in linen. The jars had lids.

The Bedouins, who had no idea that the writing was Hebrew, took a number of scrolls and fragments of scrolls to Bethlehem; eventually the bulk of them were acquired by the Assyrian Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, and the rest by the Hebrew University. Copies and collotype photographs of all but one of the Assyrian-owned documents were published by the American School of Oriental Research under the editorship of Professor Millar Burrows of Yale University; the Jewish-owned ones have, unfortunately, been published only in extracts, by the late Professor E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University.

In 1947 Arab-Jewish tension had already made the site of the manuscript find inaccessible to Jews, and the following year all that part of Palestine was formally annexed to the Kingdom of Jordan. The cave and its environs, however, have been explored by trained scholars, especially by Father Roland de Vaux, the highly competent director of the French Dominican School of Bible and Archaeology in the Jordan sector of Jerusalem, and his assistants. Not only has additional material been recovered from the original cave that the Bedouins had ransacked, but five other caves containing manuscripts have been found in the same neighborhood (as well as several which had apparently been dwellings, not libraries). In addition, Khirbet Qumran itself, which evidently served as a communal center for the cave dwellers, has been excavated. (Important, even sensational manuscript finds have been made more recently still at two sites within a few miles of Khirbet Qumran.)

Every newspaper reader knows that the discovery at Khirbet Qumran was one of the most important finds of ancient documents ever made. We do not yet know all it can tell us of the few centuries around the beginning of the Christian Era. But the direction in which the find will increase our knowledge can already be perceived, for the evidence shows it will cast light on one of the most fascinating and perplexing problems of Jewish history—that of the three contending Jewish sects that existed around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.): the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, their doctrines, their literature, and their character.

The struggle of the three sects, or groups of sects, eventually resulted in the triumph of the Pharisees. All modern Judaism—from the Sotmer Rebbe’s to that of Lessing Rosenwald—derives from Pharisaism, in the triumph of which the facts about its rival sects were forgotten or distorted. Pharisaism itself was to suffer a similar fate in the triumph of Christianity. Just what the Sadducees (together with the related Boetheans) and the Essenes stood for has hitherto been difficult to determine; we have had only meager information and that from outsiders, and anyone who knows Judaism and Jewish life knows what fantastic things are sometimes written, even without malice, by non-Jews (or ignorant Jews). The newly found scrolls present a good deal of fresh data on one of these two heretical sects; more, they have cleared up for us the hints found in the Apocrypha and other literature suggesting the existence of a different form of Judaism from that which we know now. Let us follow the chain of historical and archaeological evidence that establishes the significance of the scrolls, beginning our detective story with the clues in the Apocrypha.

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I. The Apocrypha

Before the Protestant Reformation, nearly every Christian Bible included, scattered through the Old Testament, a number of elements, ranging in size from a chapter to a whole book, which are wanting in the Hebrew Scriptures. Since then, Protestant Bibles have either relegated this group to a position between the two Testaments (as in early printings of the Authorized English Version) or omitted them altogether (as do the Revised English Versions). These writings, which Protestants describe as “apocryphal”—or the Apocrypha (plural of apocryphon) —and Roman Catholics call “deuterocanonical,” include such familiar classics as Judith, Tobit, and the History of Susanna, the meaty Wisdom of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), and the invaluable chronicle known as First Maccabees. The Hebraist can tell that all these, known to us only in Greek, were translated from the Hebrew or Aramaic (rabbinical literature actually preserves the original Hebrew of a number of verses from Ben Sira), and were obviously composed in Palestine. We can usually explain why the Rabbis denied them recognition as Holy Writ (for example, Ben Sira and First Maccabees were avowedly written centuries after that time which the Rabbis regarded as the end of the age of inspiration), but it is by no means obvious why Judaism failed to preserve these writings as edifying literature. They are not heretical; and as a matter of fact they were welcomed back into Hebrew literature in medieval (as well as modern) times in the form of actual retranslations, as well as adaptations.

But in addition to the fourteen items which used to be included as Apocrypha in the Authorized Version and are revered as “deuterocanonical” by Roman Catholics, there are a large number of books regarded as extracanonical on all sides, though early Christian writers treated them with respect. These are sometimes termed Pseudepigrapha (plural of pseudepigraphon), but equally often they too are simply called Apocrypha. Among them two works in particular, First Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, strike one at once as heretical. Both date events according to a calendar with an even 52 weeks, or 364 days, to the year. It is further specified that the first days of the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth months are to be special holidays—implying, no doubt, that the immediately preceding months had each an extra day, or 31 in all, as against 30 days for each of the remaining eight months. The Book of Jubilees specifically opposes the accepted Jewish calendar,¹ on the ground that it results in the festivals being observed on the wrong days. In general, its laws are rigorous and its punishments draconic. Of interest is its polemic against the Gentiles’ (Greeks’) lack of shame about their bodies. (Perhaps it is not an accident that it omits from its account of Creation the Biblical statement that God created man in His own image.)

We know of another author who probably approved of the Enoch-Book of Jubilees calendar, namely, the man who wrote the Pseudepigrapha known as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (i.e., sons of Jacob). He at any rate drew upon the Book of Jubilees for biographical data on the twelve sons of Jacob. But what growp ever celebrated its festivals according to that odd calendar?

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II. The Genizah

In Fostat, or Old Cairo, there is a synagogue which has been in existence since the 9th century. Visitors in the 18th and 19th centuries were struck by the vast amount of material in its Genizah (repository of no longer usable writings in’ the Hebrew script, which according to law must not be deliberately destroyed). But nothing startling was found there until 1888, when, during repairs, the inner chamber containing the really old deposits was uncovered. After that, a number of American and European travelers in Egypt with scholarly interests were able to acquire some very interesting manuscripts, partly directly from the caretakers of the synagogue and partly from dealers in antiquities. And in 1896, the late Dr. Solomon Schechter (at that time Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University, in England, later president of the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York) went out to Cairo and acquired on behalf of the Cambridge University Library practically all of the manuscript material of the Genizah which had not yet been removed from it.

This is not the place for an appreciation of the lost works of Jewish literature and the lost chapters of Jewish history which have been recovered (and are still being recovered) from the jumbled, only half-legible leaves, strips, shreds, and scraps of manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah, now stored in libraries in Leningrad, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, New York, and elsewhere. We are only concerned here with the “Documents of Jewish Sectaries.” Under this title, Schechter published fragments, from the Schechter-Taylor Collection of Genizah Manuscripts at Cambridge, of two works, one of which is known as the “Zadokite Fragments” or the “Damascus Covenant.” These fragments are composed in a kind of Hebrew which until recently was not found in any other writing. It looks like an attempt to imitate the Bible as closely as possible, and yet it contains a surprising number of Tannaitic²—but early Tannaitic—terms as well as other peculiarities. The “Damascus Covenant” was found to insist upon a more rigorous interpretation than Orthodox Judaism of the laws of ritual purity and forbidden marriages (uncle-niece marriages and polygamy are forbidden), and of some of the dietary laws, and also to prescribe an organization into communes governed by overseers, with strict laws for admission and expulsion. Interestingly enough, it has unmistakable points of contact with the heretical Apocrypha referred to above. It cites one of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs by name. It refers to the angels as “Watchers of Heaven,” just like First Enoch. It employs for “evil” a special term, mastema, which is peculiar to the Book of Jubilees. It refers the reader, for a list of the times of Israel’s “blindness” to the commandments of the Torah, to the Book of the Divisions of Times, and evidently means First Enoch, since it is only in Chapters 89-90 of this book that we find Israel allegorically represented as sheep that sometimes go blind and stray (corresponding to the periods of idolatry). If we had the complete text of this remarkable screed, we should almost certainly find some rantings against opponents for using the wrong sort of calendar, and an emphatic insistence upon the observance of the festivals in their proper seasons—meaning on the days on which they fell in the calendar of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. . . .

III. The Cave Scrolls

We now come back to the scrolls that were found at Khirbet Qumran. Many are simply copies of parts of the Hebrew Bible. By now everybody has heard of the complete Isaiah scroll, and there are also fragments of two other Isaiah scrolls and of most of the other books of the Bible; and it is indeed interesting to know what the Bible copies in use in out-of-the-way places at this early date were like. (Many of them are full of mistakes, like the popular copies of Homer that have come to light in recent years.) But of far greater interest are the other manuscripts in the find. These include fragments of the lost Hebrew and Aramaic originals of the Apocrypha, fragments of the “Damascus Covenant,” and still other documents in the style and spirit of the “Covenant.” In these latter documents, by the way, we find the polemic against the celebration of the festivals on the wrong days which I surmised above must have been contained in the complete “Damascus Covenant.”

Both the “Damascus Covenant” and a document very similar to it found at Khirbet Qumran, and known as the “Manual of Discipline,” indicate further that the sect they represent lived in communities in which all pooled their possessions, and were governed by “overseers.” The members of the sect were under strict rules of etiquette—shared, for example, the prudishness of the Book of Jubilees about nudity. Their founder, or in any case their hero, is referred to in both these works as the “Teacher of Righteousness”; and still a third document refers to this hero’s persecution by the “wicked priest” in Jerusalem. Other writings indicate that they believed in immortality.

What, then, is the age of this literature? It can be determined by internal as well as external criteria. I have not mentioned all the possible features that can serve as internal indications, since some would require lengthy explanation. But two obvious indications are the “wicked priest” and the “communal” societies. Jewish priests in Jerusalem ceased to exercise authority after 70 C.E. (the date of the capture of Jerusalem by Vespasian and the burning of the Second Temple); and there never have been any Jewish religious communistic societies since about the same date. As for external criteria: (1) All competent paleographers agree that none of the Khirbet Qumran manuscripts (which are not all of the same age) can date from later than the 1st century c.E., and some even insist that the lower limit is rather the 1st century B.C.E. (2) A carbon-14 test of the linen in which the scrolls were wrapped yielded the date 33 C.E., with a margin of error of 200 years later or earlier. (The test was carried out on the linen wrappings rather than on the writing materials, since the process of burning is involved. It is based on the observation that whereas the atomic weight of ordinary carbon is 12, a fantastically tiny but fixed proportion of all the carbon component of a living organism is present in the form of the radioactive isotype carbon-14, which begins to break down into carbon-12 at a fixed rate as soon as the organism dies. Hence the proportion of carbon14 still present in any substance of organic origin—wood, linen, wool, etc.—is an index of its age.) (3) In some 70 separate manuscripts there is not a scrap of parchment (let alone paper!), but only leather, papyrus, and ostraca (potsherds used for writing on). (4) There are no codices (bundles of leaves, like our modem books), but only scrolls. (5) The pottery on the site is all early Roman (that is to say, of the 1st century C.E.). (6) The latest coin found on the site is of the year 68 C.E., so that the site must have been abandoned between that date and the calamity of 70 C.E. (or very soon after).

IV. The Essenes

I have indicated that just at this time there were two groups of sects in addition to the Pharisaic group: the Sadducees and the Essenes. We can rule the Sadducees out at once. They consisted largely of the aristocratic priests of Jerusalem, whom our documents contemn. They did not live in communes. They did not believe in immortality. And while they differed with the Pharisees regarding the date of the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot), they did not place it in the middle of Sivan, as the Book of Jubilees does, and they observed all the other festivals on the same days as the Pharisees.

There remain the Essenes. These did live in communes, according to both the Jew Philo and the Roman Pliny, and were governed by an overseer according to the former. They did believe in immortality. They were rigorists, and they were sticklers for modesty. Pliny, moreover, locates a colony of them precisely on the western shore of the Dead Sea above (that is, north of) En-gedi, at some distance back from the beach, which is insalubrious; and when we find a colony of sectarians contemporary with Pliny (he died 79 C.E.) in this very area, the burden of proof rests not upon those who assert but upon those who deny their identity with his Essenes. True, these two writers (Philo and Pliny) state that the Essenes were recruited only from the outside, and admitted no women and begot no children, whereas the literature of our group makes provision for marriage (though it roundly condemns polygamy), and as a matter of fact skeletons exhumed from the Khirbet Qumran cemetery include skeletons of women. But then, both Philo and Pliny—though they had visited Judea—were Writing largely from hearsay, whereas the well-known Jewish historian Josephus, who grew up in Palestine, knew that some of the Essenes did marry. The truth may be that celibacy was common among the Essenes either because their general puritanism led them to esteem it, ox because there was a large excess of men over women among them, or for both reasons. The excess of males was doubtless due to the fact that outsiders were admitted to the sect, but under stringent conditions fulfillable only by a man; so that whereas the group included a large number of male neophytes in addition to the males born into it, the only females were either born into the group or had already been married to their husbands at the time when these joined the group.

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V. The Karaites

But if (on the one hand) the Essene community by the Dead Sea dispersed about 70 C.E., and if no subsequent writer knows anything about the Essenes except what is to be found in Philo, Josephus, and Pliny, and if (on the other hand) the “Damascus Covenant,” of which a copy was included in the library of this community, as we have seen, is a typically Essene document—then how in the world did two copies—in typically medieval hands—of this “Damascus Covenant” find their way into the Cairo Genizah whence Schechter salvaged them, as has already been mentioned. The answer is to be found in the second of Schechter’s “Documents of Jewish Sectaries.” Among those same manuscripts salvaged from the Genizah, Schechter found fragments of the Sefer ham-Miswot (Book of Religious Precepts) of Anan ben David, the man who founded in the 8th century the still—albeit very feebly—extant sect of the Karaites. (Some leaves of the same manuscript had already reached Leningrad—then St. Petersburg—and had been published by Abraham Harkavy.) Karaism, to be sure, is not an offshoot of Essenism. It arose after the Talmud had long been completed, and as a protest against it. Not recognizing the Oral Law, it claimed to base itself solely upon the Scriptures; hence the name Karaites—“Scripturists.”

However, Father de Vaux, who has already been referred to, has called attention to the fact that Karaite and Moslem writers after 900 C.E. actually speak of an ancient sect which in the writers’ own time was referred to as the “Cave Folk,” and state that the reason for this designation is that “their writings were discovered in a cave.” One of the Moslem writers describes some features of the “Cave Folk’s” calendar—and it actually agrees with that of the Book of Jubilees. Accordingly, Professor Paul Kahle, a German Protestant now residing in England, suggested that on the occasion of the said discovery the Karaites had (by purchase?) come into possession of a number of writings from that cave, including the “Damascus Covenant.”

The Karaites were interested in earlier sects and schools because the very existence of these casts doubt upon the claim of the Orthodox Jews (whom the Karaites call Rabbanites) to possess an authentic body of oral tradition going back to Moses and therefore as old as the Written Law itself. That the Karaites made use of sectarian writings from a cave or caves is proved by testimony to which attention was recently called by Professor Saul Lieberman of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York: a certain Rabbi Moses Taku, writing in the 13th century, accuses the Karaites of claiming to have discovered in the ground heretical writings which they have themselves fabricated and buried there. It is now evident that their claims were quite truthful. Professor Lieberman attributes to the influence of this “Cave Folk” literature some striking dietary rigorisms which the Karaites share with the “Damascus Covenant,” for example, the requirement that the blood of fish be drained before they are eaten. He further suggests that the same cause may account for certain features of Karaite diction. (Thus, the epithet “Teacher of Righteousness” by which, as we have seen, the “Cave Folk” referred to the founder of their sect, is applied by Karaite writers to Elijah, the teacher of the end of the days; see Malachi 3:23-24.)

But it is evident that when all the texts from Khirbet Qumran have been published, a much larger body of “Cave Folk” literature will be available than the Karaite savants had at their disposal. A host of modern scholars will study and interpret them, and a great beam of light will be cast upon the religious and intellectual currents in Jewry at the turn of the Christian Era.

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¹ A lunisolar one in which half the months have 29 days and half 30 days, so that the total number of days in an ordinary year is 354. (An extra month of 29 days is added every leap year in order to keep up with the natural seasons, 7 years out of every 19 being leap years.)

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²“Tannaitic” means pertaining to the Tannaim, the Jewish scholars of the first two centuries of the Common Era.