The Covenanters Of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect

Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary, in the first volume of his Documents of Jewish Sectaries.1 The longer and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor, probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth.

What remains of the book may be divided into two parts. Pages 1-8 of A, and the single leaf of B, contain exhortations and warnings addressed to members of the sect, for which a ground and motive are often sought in the history of the Jewish people or of the sect itself, together with severe strictures upon such as have lapsed from the sound teaching, and polemics against the doctrine and practice of other bodies of Jews. The second part, pages 9-16, sets forth the constitution and government of the community, and its distinctive interpretation and application of the law,—what may be called sectarian halakah.

Neither part is complete; the manuscript is mutilated and defective at the end, there is apparently a gap between the first and second parts, and it may be questioned whether the original beginning of the work is preserved. The lack of methodical arrangement in the contents leads Dr. Schechter to surmise that [pg 331] what we have in our hands is only a compilation of extracts from a larger work, put together with little regard for completeness or order. An orderly disposition, according to our notions of order, is not, however, so constant a characteristic of Jewish literature as to make this inference very convincing.

Manuscript A was evidently written by a negligent scribe, perhaps after a poor or badly preserved copy; B, which represents a somewhat different recension of the work, exhibits, so far as it goes, a superior text. When it is added that both manuscripts are in many places defaced or torn, it may be imagined that the decipherment and interpretation present serious difficulties, and that, after all the pains which Dr. Schechter has spent upon the task, many uncertainties remain. Facsimiles of a page of each manuscript are given; but in view of the condition of the text a photographic reproduction of the whole is indispensable.

The legal part of the book, so far as the text is fairly well preserved, is not exceptionally difficult; the rules are in general clearly defined, and if in the peculiar institutions of the sect there are many things we do not fully understand, this is due more to the brevity with which its organization is described and to the mutilation of the text than to lack of clearness in the description itself. The attempt to make out something of the history and relations of the sect from the first part of the book is, on the other hand, beset by many difficulties. What history is found there is not told for the sake of history, but used to point admonitions or emphasize warnings; and, after the manner of the apocalyptic literature, historical persons and events are referred to in roundabout phrases which envelop them in an affected mystery. Even when such references are to chapters of the national history with which we are moderately well acquainted, as in the Assumption of Moses, c. 5, ff., for example, they may be to us baffling enigmas; much more when they have to do, as is in large part the case in our texts, with the wholly unknown internal or external history of a sect. The obscurity is increased by the fact that the allusions are often a tissue of fragmentary quotations or reminiscences out of the Old Testament, chosen and combined, it seems, by purely verbal association, or taken in an occult allegorical sense.2 The [pg 332] allegories of which an interpretation is given, as when Amos 5 26 f. is applied to the emigration to Damascus and the institutions and laws of the sect, and Ezekiel 44 15 to the classes of the community, do not encourage us to think that we should be able to divine the meaning by our unaided intelligence. It is a fortunate circumstance that the writer comes back more than once to the salient events in the sect's history, for these repetitions of the same thing in different forms afford considerable help to the interpreter, so that the main facts may be made out with at least a considerable degree of probability.

The principal seat of the sect was in the region of Damascus, where its adherents formed numerous communities. It was composed of Israelites who had migrated thither from Judaea; thither also had come “the interpreter of the law,” the founder of the sect; there it had been organized by a covenant repeatedly referred to as “the new covenant in the land of Damascus.” Many who entered into this new covenant at the beginning did not long remain true to it; the writer inveighs vehemently against those who fell away, accusing them not only of grave error, but of gross violations of the law; but this crisis had been passed, and when the book was written the community was apparently flourishing.

The most coherent account of the origin of the sect is found on pages 5-6:3

The migration is referred to in several other places: “The captivity of Israel, who migrated from the land of Judah” (4 2 f.);7 “those who held firm made their escape to the northern land,” by which the region of Damascus is meant (7 13 f.; cf. 7 15, 18 f.). The time of the migration is plainly indicated in the passage quoted above (5 20 ff.). The men who, after the end of the devastation of the land, “removed the boundary,” and led Israel astray, speaking rebelliously against the commandments of God by Moses and against his holy Anointed, prophesying falsely to turn Israel away from following God, in consequence of which the land was laid waste, are most naturally taken for the hellenizing leaders of the Seleucid time. In this period, it seems that a number of Jews, including priests and levites, withdrew to the region of Damascus,8 and there they subsequently bound themselves by covenant to live strictly in accordance with the law as defined by their legislator.

With this the other allusions agree. Thus in A, p. 8 (= B, p. 19), at the end of a violent invective against the sinners, of whom it is said, “The princes of Judah are like those who remove the boundary,” we read that “they separated not from the people [and their sins, B], but presumptuously broke through all restraints, walking in the way of the wicked (heathen), of whom God said, ‘The venom of dragons is their wine, and the head of asps is cruel’9 (Deut. 32 33). The dragons are the kings of the nations, and their wine means their ways, and the head of asps is the head of the Greek kings who came to inflict vengeance upon them.” This again is most naturally understood of Antiochus [pg 334] Epiphanes; the calamities he brought on the Jews were a direct consequence of the course of the hellenizing party.10

A definite date for these occurrences is given in 1 5 ff.: “When God's wrath was over, three hundred and ninety years after he gave them into the power of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, he visited them, and caused to spring up from Israel and Aaron a root of his planting to inherit his land and to thrive on the good things of his earth. And they recognized their wickedness and knew that they were guilty men, and they were like blind men and like men groping their way for twenty years. And God took note of their deeds, that with perfect heart they sought him, and he raised up for them a teacher of righteousness to guide them in the way of his heart.”

The “root” which God, mindful of his covenant, caused to spring up from Aaron and Israel is the men with whom the religious revival, or reformation, began, the forefathers of the sect (see 6 2 f., and below, p. 375);11 the “teacher of righteousness” is the “interpreter of the law who came to Damascus” (6 7 f., 7 18 f.). The dates refer therefore to the origin of the sect. Three hundred and ninety years from the taking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (597 or 586 b.c.) would bring us, by our chronology, to 207 or 196 b.c. The Jewish chronology of the Persian period is, however, always too long by from forty to seventy years,12 and assuming, as it is fair to do, that our author made the same error, the three hundred ninety years would run out in the middle of the third century. Dr. Schechter suspects, with much probability, that the original reading was “four hundred and ninety years,” the common apocalyptic cycle (Dan. 9 2, 24; Enoch 89-90; 93, etc.). Making the same allowance for error, we should be brought again to a time not far removed from the punishment [pg 335] inflicted on the people by Antiochus Epiphanes (see above, p. 333 f.).13

There is nothing in the texts which demands a later date for the origin of the sect. The last event in the national history to which reference is made is the vengeance inflicted on the heathenizing rulers of the people by “the head of the Greek kings.” To the misfortunes of the people in the following centuries, such as the taking of Jerusalem by Pompey or its destruction by Titus, there is no allusion. It may perhaps be inferred not only that the schism antedated these calamities, but that the book was written before them. In the author's frame of mind toward the religious leaders of Palestinian Jewry, he would have been likely to record such conspicuous judgments upon them. A comparison with the Assumption of Moses is instructive on this point. There the sweeping denunciation of the priesthood and the scribes, “their teachers in those times,” and of the godless Asmonaean priest-kings, is followed by the well-deserved judgment inflicted on them by Herod, and after him comes Varus, burning part of the temple, crucifying, and carrying off into slavery. The second of the Psalms of Solomon may also be compared.

The schismatic character of the sect would also be explained [pg 336] if it arose in an age when the character of the political and religious heads of the Jewish people was such as to move God-fearing and law-abiding men to repudiate them with all their ways and works. For it is not merely with a sect, differing from the mass of their fellows in certain opinions and practices, that we have to do, but with a schism. The Covenanters of Damascus are radical come-outers, seceders not only from the land of Judaea, but from established Judaism, on which they look much as the Puritan Separatists in the seventeenth century looked on the English Church; they might have taken to themselves the prophetic word so often in the mouth of the Puritan, “Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord” (Isa. 52 11), as they do apply to the religious teachers of the Jewish church the most violent invectives of the same prophet (50 11, 59 4 ff.; see below, p. 344 f.). They will not even call themselves Jews, they are Israelites who went forth from the land of Judaea; their Messiah is to spring from Aaron and Israel, not from Judah; when the final judgment comes in its appointed time, it will no longer be permitted to make compact with the house of Judah, but every man must stand in his own stronghold;14 when the glory of God shines out on Israel, all the wicked of Judah shall be cut off, in the day of its trial by fire. They reject the temple in Jerusalem, and will not offer on its altar. If we consider that the Essenes, notwithstanding their wider divergence from the common type of Judaism, seem to have regarded themselves as within the pale of the church, and to have been so regarded by others—enjoying, indeed, with the people the reputation of peculiar sanctity—the schismatic character of our sect appears in a still stronger light.

The language of the book is not inconsistent with the age to which the contents would seem to assign it. The vocabulary is in the main Biblical, but there are a number of words which otherwise occur only in the writings of the Mishnic age or later. Some of these belong to the technical terminology of the law schools, some of them appear to be peculiar to the sect. A few of the Biblical words also are used in later senses and applications. [pg 337] It is proper to bear in mind, however, that the Hebrew originals of the works with which it would be most natural to compare our text, such as Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Gospel, are not preserved; in fact, between the last books of the Old Testament and the rabbinical literature of the second Christian century there is a hiatus in the history of the Hebrew language, so that words which appear for the first time in the Mishna and kindred works may have been, and in many cases probably were, in use much earlier. It is unnecessary therefore to suppose that such words were introduced into our texts by later scribes, though the possibility of such changes must of course be admitted. The particular instances in which Dr. Schechter thinks that late and foreign influences are most clearly to be recognized—the title of the “censor” and the peculiar name for a house of worship—are discussed elsewhere.15 More remarkable than the vocabulary of the book is its syntax. The consecutive constructions of the perfect and the imperfect are regularly employed, not only in imitation of Biblical models in narrative and prophetic passages, but in the legal part of the book; and in spite of some irregularities, which may in part at least be laid to the charge of scribes, the use of these tenses is generally correct. In this respect the Hebrew of the book differs entirely from that of the Mishna and the contemporary and later Midrashim, in which the characteristic features of classical tense-syntax have entirely disappeared, under the influence, it is generally supposed, of the Aramaic vernacular. In comparison with these writings the vocabulary also is notably free from foreign admixture. There are no words borrowed from Greek and Latin, and only one or two instances where an Aramaic term seems to have been adopted. The orthography also, in its more sparing use of the semivowels to indicate the vowels u and i, resembles that of the Bible.

The founder of the sect is called the “teacher of righteousness” (1 11),16 “the only, or beloved, teacher” (20 14);17 “the only [pg 338] one” (20 32); he is “the legislator,” that is, “the interpreter of the law” (6 7); and this interpreter of the law, who came to Damascus, is the star who, according to Balaam's prophecy, was to issue from Jacob (7 18 f.).18 He showed them how to walk in the way of God's heart (1 11); as interpreter of the law he ordained them statutes to walk in till the end of wickedness—statutes which shall not be superseded by any others “until there arise the teacher of righteousness in the last days” (6 11 f.). To him, therefore, are attributed the distinctive principles and observances of the sect as they are set forth in this book. “His anointed,” through whom God made known to men his holy spirit, and who is true (2 12 f.), is in all probability the same person with the teacher, the star, just as the anointed from Aaron and Israel who is to arise in the future (20 1) is the same as the teacher of righteousness to whose voice they will then listen (20 32; see below, p. 343).

Those of the emigrants who accepted the guidance of the teacher of righteousness, the interpreter of the law, entered into the “new covenant in the land of Damascus” (6 19, 8 21, 19 33 f., 20 12). The idea of the “new covenant” was doubtless suggested by Jer. 31 31 ff. (cf. 32 36 ff.; Ezek. 37 26, etc.), where the establishment of the new covenant, in the stead of the old covenant which their fathers broke, marks the restoration of God's favor, the beginning of a new and better time. The same use of the passage in Jeremiah is made at length by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (8 6 ff.), The substance of the covenant may be gathered from 6 11-7 5:

Early in the history of the sect a serious defection occurred. Men who entered among the first into the covenant incurred guilt, like their forefathers, by following their sinful inclinations; they forsook the covenant of God and preferred their own will, and went about after the stubbornness of their heart, every man doing as he pleased (3 10 ff.); the men who entered into the new covenant in the land of Damascus went back and proved false, and turned aside from the well of living waters (19 33 f.). Their names were struck out of the registers of the sect, as were those of such as fell away in later times.

We can readily imagine that many found the rule of the sect too strict and the discipline by which it was enforced too severe. Our texts, however, speak not of such occasional and individual lapses, but of the repudiation of the covenant by numbers at one time. It seems that another leader had arisen, of very different temper from the founder, who drew away many after him. In the eyes of those who remained steadfast in the faith, the new teacher was naturally a false prophet, a kind of antichrist. He is called the liar (“the man of lies,” 20 15), the scoffer (1 14); his adherents are scoffers,22 who uttered error about the righteous [pg 340] statutes, and spurned the covenant and plighted faith which they established in the land of Damascus, that is to say, the new covenant. They and their families shall have no portion in the house of the law (20 10 ff.). For their unfaithfulness they were delivered to the sword (3 10 ff.), until of all the men of war who went with the liar none was left (20 14 ff.).23 This came to pass about forty years after the death of the unique teacher (l.c.). If the emigration to Damascus occurred under Antiochus Epiphanes,24 the end of the episode of the false prophet would fall about the beginning of the first century b.c., and we should have at least an upper limit for the writing of the book. The passion which every mention of this defection arouses suggests that it was fresh in memory, and would incline us to date the writing not very long after the time indicated. It should be observed, however, that the sentence which counts forty years from the death of the unrivalled teacher to the end of the liar's army sits loose in the context, and may be a gloss, in which case the book might be some decades older.

With the remnant who remained faithful through the great defection “God confirmed his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them the secret of things in which all Israel was in error, his holy Sabbaths and his glorious festivals and his righteous testimonies and his true ways and the pleasure of his will, things which if a man do he shall live by them. He opened a way before them, and they dug a well for copious waters.” “In the abundance of his wonderful grace he atoned for their guilt and forgave their transgression, and built for them a sure house in Israel, the like of which did not arise in times past nor until now” (3 12-20). The prediction of the sure house (1 Sam. 2 35) seems to be fulfilled in the stability of the sect itself, or perhaps, with closer adherence to the prophecy, in that of its faithful priesthood.

So much may be gathered from the book about the origin and history of the sect. We turn now to its expectation. As a teacher of righteousness, an anointed one (priest), was the founder of the sect, so in the last times a teacher of righteousness, an [pg 341] anointed one, shall appear (6 10 f.). Those who proved faithless to the covenant are cut off from the community, “from the time when the unique teacher was taken away until the anointed one from Aaron and Israel shall arise” (19 35-20 1), that is, during the whole of the present dispensation. Dr. Schechter regards the anointed one who is to appear in the future as the founder of the sect redivivus: the present dispensation “seems to be the period intervening between the first appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness (p. 1, l. 11) (the founder of the Sect), who was gathered in or died,25 and the second appearance of the Teacher of Righteousness who is to rise in ‘the end of the days’ (p. 6, l. 11). Moreover, the Only Teacher, or Teacher of Righteousness, is identical with the Messiah, or the Anointed one from Aaron and Israel, whose advent is expected by the Sect.”26 The texts, however, say nothing of the disappearance, or a second appearance, or reappearance, or return of the founder; nor do the words “until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last days,” “until the anointed shall arise from Aaron and Israel,” mean that he shall rise from the dead, as Dr. Schechter interprets them.27 The Messiah whose advent the sect expects at the end of the present period of history is, as in the older parts of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a priest; and the function of the priest-messiah is not, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to mediate between man and God, but to instruct men in righteousness, to guide them in the way of God's heart. That the founder of the sect also was both priest and teacher is by no means sufficient to establish the identity of the two figures. It was the office of the priest to teach Israel the law, “all the statutes which the Lord hath spoken unto them through Moses” (Lev. 10 11; cf. Deut. 33 10); “the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek [pg 342] the law at his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts” (Mal. 2 7). Ezra is the type of a priest who had not only prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it, but to teach in Israel statutes and judgments (Ezra 7 10); he was, according to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the restorer of Judaism. It was a departure from the ideal of the law itself that, when the priesthood showed itself unworthy of its calling, the teaching function was assumed by lay scribes, and even in later times there were many priestly teachers among the Scribes and among the Doctors. That our sect looks back to one such as its founder, and forward to another as the great teacher of the Messianic age, is in no way surprising. If the author had meant what Dr. Schechter thinks, it is fair to assume that he would have said it unmistakably; for the identity of the expected Messiah with the dead founder, if it was part of the belief of the sect, would of necessity be a singular and significant part of it.28

The coming judgment of God is represented rather as a judgment on the faithless members of the sect, including those who have seceded from it or been expelled, than in its more general aspects. The long eschatological passage in B (20 15 to the end) is illegible in spots near the beginning, but the general tenor is clear:

Here the fragment ends. The destruction of those who fall away from the sect is threatened in other places; it will suffice to quote the most important (19 5 ff.):

It is possible, of course, that the judgment of the heathen world, which looms so large in most of the apocalypses, may have had a place in parts of the book now lost, but if it had been a very important feature in the expectation of the sect we should hardly fail to find at least allusions to it in the pages in our hands. The author is almost exclusively interested in the sect itself, in the division which had rent it, and in polemics against laxer interpretations of the law. This limitation of the horizon is characteristically sectarian, and may suggest, moreover, as has been said above, that the writer is not far removed in time from the split in the new organization.

The polemic is especially pointed against certain opponents who are described as “those who build a wall and plaster it with stucco” (4 19; 8 12).33 They follow a commandment (ṣau); probably connoting, as in Hosea 5 11, from which the phrase is taken, an arbitrary rule of their own, a commandment of men.34 God hates them, his anger is kindled against them (8 18). These “builders” are false teachers; Biblical denunciations of the false prophets are applied to them. (See especially 8 12 f.) Points in which their teaching is particularly assailed are that they allow polygamy and the remarriage of divorced persons during the life of the other party, and hold it lawful for a man to marry his niece; [pg 345] that they defile the sanctuary by the laxity of some of their rules and practice about sexual uncleanness; they presume blasphemously to impugn the “statutes of the covenant of God” (the legislation of the sect), declaring that they are not right, and saying abominable things about them (4 20-5 14). The positions so hotly denounced, especially in the matter of marriage and divorce, are those of the Palestinian rabbis as we know them in the Mishna and kindred works, and in so far as the Pharisees had a dominating influence in the schools of the law they may be regarded as in a peculiar sense the object of this invective, which is, however, sweeping enough to include all rabbinical Judaism. Such verses as Isaiah 50 11 and 59 4 ff. are hurled at them; they are compared to Johanneh and his brother, whom Belial raised up against Moses (5 17 ff.).35

The sect prohibited polygamy, which they stigmatized as fornication, arguing from the creation—“a male and a female created he them” (cf. Matt. 19 4), and from the story of the flood—“by pairs they went into the ark,” and from the law which forbade the prince to multiply wives unto himself (Deut. 17 17), that is, as they understood it, to take more than one wife. To forestall an objection, it is added: “But David had not read in the sealed book of the law which was in the ark, for it was not opened in Israel from the time of the death of Eleazar and Joshua and the elders who worshipped the Astartes, but was hidden and not brought to light until Zadok arose” (5 2-5; see below, p. 359).

Marriage with another woman while a man had a divorced wife living was apparently put in the same category with having two wives at the same time (4 20 f.; cf. Matt. 5 31 f.). Marriage with a niece (brother's or sister's daughter) they treated as incest, reasoning that marriage between a woman and her uncle stood on all fours with marriage between a man and his aunt, which was expressly forbidden as within the prohibited degrees of kinship.36 The three snares of Belial by which he ensnared Israel [pg 346] are fornication (that is, plural or incestuous unions), wealth (that is, unrighteous gain), and the pollution of the sanctuary (4 15 f.; cf. 5 6 f.).37

The same rigorous tendency which appears in the attitude of the sect in regard to marriage pervades the whole legal part of the work before us. The rules for the observance of the Sabbath (10 14-11 21) will make this clear.