Qumran

We will visit Qumran, an ancient site along the Dead Sea during a 14 day trip to the Holy Land in May 2018. This is the village of the Essenes and the place where a shepherd boy found the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The settlement has a long and interesting history and has influenced our faith in many ways.

Qumran sits near the Dead Sea. It is an isolated location, far from Jerusalem and the populated areas of Israel. The men who moved to Qumran did so to get away from multitudes of people, what they felt was a corrupted priesthood and to avoid foreigners who were influencing the Israelites in wrong ways. Philo wrote “They flee the cities and live in villages where clean air and clean social life abound. They either work in the fields or in crafts that contribute to peace.”

The people who lived in Qumran were a monastic sect called the Essenes. Philo described them in this way, “They do not hoard silver and gold and do not acquire great landholdings; procuring for themselves only what is necessary for life. Thus they live without goods and without property, not by misfortune, but out of preference. They do not make armaments of any kind. They do not keep slaves and detest slavery. … With respect to philosophy, they dismiss logic but have an extremely high regard for virtue. They honor the Sabbath with great respect over the other days of the week. They have an internal rule which all learn, together with rules on piety, holiness, justice and the knowledge of good and bad.”

Pliney the Elder wrote, “To the west (of the Dead Sea) the Essenes have put the necessary distance between themselves and the insalubrious shore. They are a people unique of its kind and admirable beyond all others in the whole world; without women and renouncing love entirely, without money and having for company only palm trees. Owing to the throng of newcomers, this people is daily reborn in equal number; indeed, those whom, wearied by the fluctuations of fortune, life leads to adopt their customs, stream in in great numbers. Thus, unbelievable though this may seem, for thousands of centuries a people has existed which is eternal yet into which no one is born: so fruitful for them is the repentance which others feel for their past lives!"

Josephus says, “They renounce pleasure as an evil, and regard continence and resistance to passions as a virtue. They disdain marriage for themselves, being content to adopt the children of others at a tender age in order to instruct them. They do not abolish marriage, but are convinced women are all licentious and incapable of fidelity to one man. They despise riches. When they enter the sect, they must surrender all of their money and possessions into the common fund, to be put at the disposal of everyone; one single property for the whole group. Therefore neither the humiliation of poverty nor the pride of possession is to be seen anywhere among them.”

Josephus also wrote, “Before sunrise they recite certain ancestral prayers to the sun as though entreating it to rise. They work until about 11 A.M. when they put on ritual loincloths and bathe for purification. Then they enter a communal hall,where no one else is allowed,and eat only one bowlful of food for each man, together with their loaves of bread. They eat in silence. Afterwards they lay aside their sacred garment and go back to work until the evening. At evening they partake dinner in the same manner. During meals they are sober and quiet and their silence seems a great mystery to people outside. Their food and drink are so measured out that they are satisfied but no more.”

The men of Qumran are famous for their scrolls. The community copied scriptures, works written by others and writings of their own. The copyists worked in a disciplined manner so the product of their work would be error free. They counted letters to make sure each scroll was correctly copied, and then the scrolls were checked for style. Letters could not touch each other and the script had to conform to a specific style.

The Essenes assembled a library of scrolls. Every book of the Bible, with the exception of Esther, is contained in their library. Other great works both religious and nonreligious can be found also. Writings of their teachers are found among the scrolls and give clues to their theology.

During our 14 day trip to the Holy Land in May 2018 we will see the ruins of Qumran. We will see the Scriptorium, mikvah pools, craft houses and kitchen. We will also have the opportunity to walk up to caves where the scrolls were stored. We can climb into several caves to explore and see how they connect together.

The site was destroyed during the first Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 AD. With the dissolving of Jewish society the Essene communities ceased to exist.