The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect Part 2

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 pa.s.sage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The pa.s.sage runs: ?????? ?p????ta?, ???? ?a? t??e?

a?t?? ????ate???ta? ?p? ???? et? t?? ??sa?, ????? d? ?a? pa??e?e???s??.

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 ???sa? has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write s???sa?,(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 Encrat.i.te 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 ha?ai_ (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." ?????? ?p????ta? 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 circ.u.mcision 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 G.o.d, 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 att.i.tude 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.

From a much later time Dr. Schechter has gleaned some notices of a sect of "Zadokites" in whose tenets also he recognizes resemblances to those of our sect. Kirkisani, a Karaite author of the tenth century,(87) says: "Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites and contradicted them publicly. He revealed a part of the truth, and composed books [a book] in which he frequently denounced the Rabbanites and criticised them. But he adduced no proof for anything he said, merely saying it by way of statement, except in one thing, namely, in his prohibition against marrying the daughter of the brother and the daughter of the sister. For he adduced as proof their being a.n.a.logous to the paternal and maternal aunt."(88)

This is a matter about which our sectaries are especially fierce in their denunciations of the laxity of the orthodox. The argument they employ is the same which Kirkisani attributes to Zadok. It is, however, the obvious argument, if the principle of a.n.a.logy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.(89) Kirkisani also says that the Zadokites absolutely forbade divorce, which the Scripture permitted, agreeing in this with the Christians and with the Isawites, whose founders, Jesus and Obadiah of Ispahan,(90) had likewise forbidden it. We are not told expressly that our sect prohibited divorce, but their prohibition of remarriage during the life of the divorced wife would have the same effect. Finally, Kirkisani says that the Zadokites fixed all the months at thirty days each,(91) and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Pa.s.sover and the Tabernacles, making the feast consist of seven days exclusive of the Sabbath. Substantially the same statements are made about the Zadokites by another Karaite author, Hada.s.si, who flourished in the middle of the twelfth century, and perhaps derived his information from Kirkisani.

What the "Zadokite" writings really were to which these authors refer is not known. It is certain, however, that both the Karaites and their opponents took them to be Sadducean works. In the pa.s.sage about Zadok, part of which Dr. Schechter quotes (see above), Kirkisani says: "After the appearance of the Rabbanites (the first of whom was Simeon the Just), the Sadducees appeared; their leaders were Zadok and Boethus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites," etc.(92) Zadok's disclosure of a part of truth was followed by the full discovery of the truth about the laws by Anan, the founder of the Karaites. Not only do the opponents of the Karaites stigmatize Anan and his followers as the remnants of the disciples of Zadok and Boethus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Ba?ir (first half of the eleventh century) says that, in the times of the second temple, the Rabbanites, who were then called Pharisees, had the upper hand, while the Karaites, then known as Sadducees, were less influential.(93) The Karaite author of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in ma.n.u.script in St.

Petersburg(94) polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the great _Malleus Karaeorum_, about the proper way of determining the beginning of the months (and consequently the dates of the feasts), which the Rabbanites fixed by calculation of the conjunctions, while the Karaites depended on observation of the visible new moon. The ancients, he says, required evidence of the appearance of the new moon.(95) Saadia, who mistakenly a.s.sumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity-the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin(96)-a.s.serted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boethus that the law required the beginning of the month to be determined by actual observation; witnesses were heard only to prove that observation confirmed the calculation. To this the author replies: "The book of the Zadokites (Sadducees) is well known, and there is no such thing in it as that man (Saadia) avers. In the book of Zadok are various things in which he dissents from the Rabbanites of the second temple with regard to sacrifices and other matters, but there is not a syllable of what the Fayyumite (Saadia) says."(97) Saadia himself appears not to have questioned the authenticity of the writings that went under the name of Zadok, with which he seems to have been acquainted, directly or indirectly, for in a pa.s.sage quoted by Yefet ben 'Ali he says that Zadok had proved from the one hundred and fifty days in the story of the flood just the opposite of what the Karaites try to prove from them.(98)

Zadokite books thus meant, for all those from whom our information comes, Sadducean books; and so, in the sense that, whatever their age and origin, they contained substantially Sadducean teachings, most modern scholars, also, have understood the name.

The possibility that Sadducean writings from the beginning of the Christian era had survived to the Middle Ages cannot well be denied, especially in view of the preservation of the book of the unknown sect that forms the subject of our present study in copies as late as the tenth or eleventh century; and even if the book which the Karaites took for Sadducean was erroneously attributed to that sect, there is no sufficient ground for identifying it with the texts in our hands or for ascribing it to our sect. A thirty-day month, and the prohibition of divorce and of marriage with a niece, are much too slender a foundation to support so large an inference, and it is hardly legitimate to argue that if we had the entire book, of which only a part-or, according to Dr. Schechter, excerpts-is preserved, we might find other and more significant agreements.

Dr. Schechter has also remarked certain coincidences between the tenets of our sect and those of the Falashas, or Abyssinian Jews, whom, with Beer, he is disposed to connect in some way with the Dositheans. Their Sabbath laws resemble those in the Jubilees and in the texts before us; they also prohibit marriage with a niece; they have a tradition that the Pentateuch was brought to Abyssinia by Azariah, the son of Zadok (1 Kings 4 2); certain features of their calendar may possibly be related to that of the Zadokites as described by Kirkisani. Here, again, the correspondences are not numerous or distinctive enough to establish an historical connection.

Putting together these scattered indicia, Dr. Schechter arrives at a theory of the history and relations of the sect which must be given in his own words:-

We may, then, formulate our hypothesis that our text is const.i.tuted of fragments forming extracts from a Zadok book, known to us chiefly from the writings of Kirkisani. The Sect which it represented, did not however pa.s.s for any length of time under the name of Zadokites, but was soon in some way amalgamated with and perhaps also absorbed by the Dosithean Sect, and made more proselytes among the Samaritans than among the Jews, with which former sect it had many points of similarity. In the course of time, however, the Dosithean Sect also disappeared, and we have only some traces left of them in the lingering sect of the Falashas, with whom they probably came into close contact at an early period of their (the Falashas') existence, and to whom they handed down a good many of their practices. The only real difficulty in the way of this hypothesis is, that according to our Text the Sect had its original seat in Damascus, north of Palestine, and it is difficult to see how they reached the Dositheans, and subsequently the Falashas, who had their main seats in the south of Palestine, or Egypt. But this could be explained by a.s.suming special missionary efforts on the part of the Zadokites by sending their emissaries to Egypt, a country which was especially favourable to such an enterprise because of the existence of the Onias Temple there. The severance of the Egyptian Jews from the Palestinian influence (though they did not entirely give up their loyalty to the Jerusalem Sanctuary), prepared the ground for the doctrines of such a Sect as the Zadokites in which all allegiance to Judah and Jerusalem was rejected, and in which the descendants of the House of Zadok (of whom indeed Onias himself was one) represented both the Priest and the Messiah.

The evidence adduced in support of this ingenious hypothesis has already been examined in detail, and the results need only be summarized here: There is nothing in the book before us to warrant cla.s.sing the men who made the new covenant in the land of Damascus as a Zadokite sect;(99) neither the external nor the internal evidence suffices to identify the work quoted by Kirkisani as Zadokite (by which he and all the rest understood Sadducean) with the book before us; the connection of the sect with the Dositheans rests in great part on misunderstanding of the testimonies about the Dositheans-misunderstandings, it is fair to say, which are not all original with Dr. Schechter,-in part upon points of resemblance which are not distinctive enough to prove anything. Of the peculiar organization of our sect, which would be conclusive, there is no trace anywhere.

A much more sensational hypothesis was broached by Mr. G. Margoliouth in the _Athenaeum_ for November 26, 1910, under the t.i.tle, "The Sadducean Christians of Damascus." He takes "the root" which G.o.d caused to spring from Israel and Aaron (1 7) for the same person who is subsequently called the Anointed one (Messiah), and distinguishes this figure from the Teacher of Righteousness, also called the Anointed one, who appeared twenty years later. "Both these Messiahs were dead when the doc.u.ment was composed, but they were both expected to reappear in the latter days."

The first of them, the Messiah descended from Aaron and Israel, in consequence of whose work "they meditated over their sin, and knew that they were guilty men," is John the Baptist. John's father was a priest, and though his mother also is said to have been of priestly descent, "this need not stand in the way of believing that there was a strain of non-priestly Israelite blood in the family." The Sadducees would naturally prefer a priestly Messiah to a Davidic one, and, when John won the recognition of the people as a prophet sent by G.o.d, it would not be strange if a priestly party acclaimed him as in some sense a Messiah, or anointed leader of the nation.

The other Messiah, the Teacher of Righteousness, must then be Jesus. That he appeared twenty years after John, so far from being an argument against this identification, would relieve the difficulty of trying to crowd John's whole history into little more than a year. "It is surely not necessary to defend the Lucan tradition on this point at all hazards, and it seems quite likely that the newly discovered doc.u.ment has at last given us the right perspective of events."

If these identifications are correct, the "man of scoffing," or Belial,(100) who is sent to pervert the nation and turn it from the law, can be no other than the Apostle Paul, and it is noted for confirmation that "the period here a.s.signed to his activity and that of his immediate following is about forty years, a s.p.a.ce of time not far removed from the result of recent critical computation."

The New Covenant so often referred to in the texts is clearly to be connected with the identical conception and expression in the New Testament, nor does it seem to be accidental that the Teacher of Righteousness is several times spoken of as the "only" or "unique" one.

Mr. Margoliouth presents his complete hypothesis as follows:-

The natural and apparently inevitable conclusion of the whole matter, therefore, is that we have here to deal with a primitive Judaeo-Christian body of people which consisted of priests and Levites belonging to the Boethusian section of the Sadducean party,(101) fortified-as the doc.u.ment shows-by a considerable Israelitish lay element, besides a real or contemplated admixture of proselytes. They acknowledged, as we have seen, John the Baptist, as a Messiah of the family of Aaron, and they also believed in Jesus as a kind of second (or, perhaps, as pre-eminent) Messiah whose special function it was to be a "Teacher of Righteousness." Paul they abhorred; and they strove with all their might to combine the full observance of the Mosaic Law, as they understood it, with the principles of the "new covenant," again as they understood it. On the destruction of the Temple by t.i.tus, finding that it would not serve any good purpose to linger in Judaea, they determined to migrate to Damascus,(102) intending to establish their central organization in that city, and to found communities of the sect in different parts of the neighboring country. It was at this juncture that the manifesto, bearing as it does unmistakable marks of personal touch, was composed by a leader of the movement.

No scholar who has made an independent study of the texts published by Dr.

Schechter can have failed to consider the question whether these schismatics, with their "unique teacher,"(103) their "new covenant," their "Supervisor," whose name and functions might be compared with those of a bishop ?p?s??p??, their loyalty to their dead leader, G.o.d's Anointed one (Messiah), who made them know his holy spirit, and their expectation of an Anointed one in the last times, their hostility to the Pharisees, can have been a Jewish Christian sect.

The more closely the doc.u.ments are examined, however, the less tenable this conjecture appears. One feature of the sectarian eschatology which, if established, would afford the most striking coincidence with early Christian belief, namely, that the Messiah who died in the early days of the sect is to "reappear" (Margoliouth), or "rise again" (Schechter), has no support whatever in the text.(104) The "new covenant" in the land of Damascus is plainly the obligation by which the members of the sect bind themselves to the organization, with its peculiar interpretations of the law and its distinctive observances. Neither in the terms of the covenant nor in the law itself is there anything that suggests Christian origin or influence. That "a man should love his neighbor as himself" is not peculiarly or even preeminently a Christian precept. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs reiterate it; by the most orthodox rabbis it was recognized as the most comprehensive commandment in the law.

The things which the sect esteems of vital importance lie wholly in the sphere of the law; polemic zeal for a code which is at every point more rigorous than that of the Pharisees is the salient characteristic of both parts of the book. The moral precepts are the commonplaces of Judaism narrowed to a sectarian horizon.(105) The judgment of G.o.d is similarly circ.u.mscribed. It is not a judgment of the world or of the Jewish people, but of those who reject and controvert the legal interpretation of the sect, and of those who have fallen away from it.

The code of law which is the const.i.tuent principle of the sect and the reason for its existence was given it by its founder, the Teacher of Righteousness. This unique teacher was not a prophetic reformer, but "the interpreter of the law who came to Damascus," "the legislator." The statutes he decreed are final; the sect "shall receive no others until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last times."

Mr. Margoliouth thinks that the "teacher of righteousness" to whom the sect attributed its inst.i.tutions and laws was Jesus. The statement of this conjecture is its refutation. The role of a legislator is the last which the character and teaching of Jesus in the Gospels would suggest even to a sect in search of a founder. That he, whose disregard for the Pharisaic rules of Sabbath observance repeatedly got him into trouble, should, within a generation after his death, have been metamorphosed into the author of the sabbatical code in our texts, which out-pharisees the Pharisees at every point, surpa.s.ses ordinary powers of imagination. The Christian Jews of the first century in Palestine, so far as we know anything about them, conformed in the matter of observance to the authority of the scribes and Pharisees, and alleged the express command of Jesus for this practice (Matt. 23 2). Early Christian heresies sometimes exhibit ascetic features reminding us of the Essenes; but none of ultra-legalistic tendency is known.

As our sect is very zealous for things which have no connection with Christianity, so on the other hand the texts disclose no trace of specific Christian beliefs or conceptions. For the Christian Jews of the first century, the belief that Jesus, who had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, was the Messiah of prophecy, that he had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, whence he was presently to come in might and majesty, according to the vision of Daniel, to usher in the new era, was the pith and substance of their faith, the "heresy" by which they were separated from their countrymen, the focus of their polemic and apologetic in controversies with those who rejected their Messiah. It is impossible to imagine a writing as long as this, and imbued as strongly as this with a controversial spirit, proceeding from any Christian sect, in which there should not be so much as an allusion to any of these things; or that a sect which put John the Baptist in so high a place should not make something of baptism in the admission of members.

Apart from these general considerations, Mr. Margoliouth's identifications rest upon a palpable misinterpretation. On page 1 we read: "But because G.o.d remembered the covenant with the forefathers, he left Israel a remnant, and did not suffer them to be exterminated. And at the end of wrath ... he visited them and caused to spring up from Israel and Aaron a root of his planting _to inherit his land and to prosper on the good things of his earth_." The italicized clauses prove beyond question that the "root" is not an individual, but is a collective designation for the first generation of the sect.(106) The parallel pa.s.sage on p. 5 says explicitly: "G.o.d remembered the covenant with the forefathers, and he raised up from Aaron men of insight and from Israel wise men, and he heard them, and they dug the well." "The well is the law, and they who dug it are the exiles of Israel who migrated to Judah and sojourned in the land of Damascus." In the face of this perfectly plain meaning of the pa.s.sage Mr. Margoliouth takes "the root" for the person designated in other places as "the Anointed from Aaron and Israel," who led the people "to recognize their wickedness and know that they were guilty men."(107) In this first Messiah he recognizes John the Baptist, and, consequently, in the Teacher of Righteousness who came after him, Jesus. The point of correspondence is the relation between the forerunner and his successor. The text, however, as I have just showed, says nothing of a precursor of the teacher of righteousness; on the contrary, it was this teacher who first brought light to the generation which in the consciousness of its sin was groping like the blind, and guided them in the way of G.o.d's heart.(108)

That by the "man of scoffing" the Apostle Paul is meant is for Mr.

Margoliouth a corollary of the preceding identifications, and falls with them. The enemies of Paul were doubtless capable of calling him all sorts of hard names, but there is nothing in the epithets "scorner" and "liar,"

or in the doings attributed to this figure, which fits Paul better than any other false teacher and sower of discord, while the reference to the fate of the men of war who followed the "man of lies" seems quite inapplicable to Paul.(109)

That we should be unable to identify the Covenanters of Damascus with any sect previously known is not surprising. The three or four centuries in the middle of which the Christian era falls were prolific in sects and heresies of many complexions, as were the centuries following the rise of Islam. Through Philo, Josephus, the church Fathers, and the Talmud, we are acquainted with some of them; but it is probable that there were many others of which no reports have reached us. If we cannot, out of the collection at our disposal, put a label on our Covenanters, we may console ourselves with the reflection that here we know one Jewish sect from its own monuments, and that the texts in our hands, mutilated as they are, suffice to give us a much clearer notion of its peculiarities than we get of most of the other sects from the descriptions which have come down to us.

Its affinities with various antipharisaic or antirabbinical parties, such as the Samaritans, the Sadducees, and, in later times, the Karaites, is obvious. It shared with all these a zeal for the letter and the literal interpretation, and a disposition to extend the law by a.n.a.logy of principle, as a result of which their rules were in general much stricter than those of the Rabbis, who possessed in the theory of tradition and in their methods of exegesis the means of adapting the law to changed conditions, and who were also more disposed to give the precedence to the great principles of humanity in the law over its particular prescriptions when the two seemed to conflict. The organization of the sect, on the other hand, has no parallel within our knowledge. In view of the use of the name "camps" for the local communities, and the references to the "mustering" of the members, the "trumpets of the congregation," and the like, it may be surmised that the organization of Israel in the wilderness suggested the plan, and that the Supervisors were meant to correspond to the chiefs of the tribes (for instance, Num. 1 10), each having authority over a separate camp.

The sect seems to have perpetuated itself for a considerable time, otherwise this book would hardly have been preserved. It may perhaps be conjectured that it survived long enough to be gathered, along with numerous younger sects, into the capacious bosom of Karaism, of which it was in various points a precursor. Such an hypothesis would explain how it came about that copies of the book were made in the tenth century and later, we should then suppose by Karaite scribes.(110)

Dr. Schechter has laid all students of Judaism under new obligations by the discovery and publication of these texts. They will join with their congratulations the hope that he may find yet other treasures among the acc.u.mulations of the Genizah.

FOOTNOTES

1 Doc.u.ments of Jewish Sectaries. Volume I. Fragments of a Zadokite Work. Edited, with Translation, Introduction, and Notes, by S.

Schechter. Cambridge University Press. 1910.

2 It may be added that the quotations are singularly inexact.

3 In my translation I have sometimes thought it possible to adhere to the text where Dr. Schechter has preferred a conjectural emendation.

4 That is, probably, against the legitimate high priest of the time (perhaps Onias).-The rendering "_by_ his Anointed" is grammatically admissible, but would be unintelligible in this context.

5 It would be possible to render "the penitents of Israel."

6 The four or five words which follow are unintelligible.