Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To
every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed
in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests
a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties
of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the
other hand, is obscure,(62) but the fact that a knowledge of it is
demanded of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained
the “statutes and ordinances” of the sect, its peculiar definitions and
interpretations of the law, often referred to as _perush_; in technical
phrase, a collection of sectarian _halakoth_, such as is preserved in the
second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a
legal manual. The objection to committing _halakah_ to writing which was
long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and
would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a
traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to
an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.
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.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
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.