Lecture 14 -- Discovery and Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Summary Outline

Here is a wonderful example of correspondence between our literary
sources, both Dead Sea [Scrolls] and outside literary sources, which
describe communal meals being held by the members of this community and
the archaeological evidence where we clearly see evidence of communal
meals practiced by this community.

In our last lecture, we talked about the major groups or sects that developed
in the Late Second Temple period in Judea, focusing especially on the
Pharisees and Sadducees. In this lecture and the next three, we’ll discuss
a group that many scholars identify with the Essenes, that is, the community
that lived at Qumran and deposited scrolls in the nearby caves.

Qumran is located on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, south of Jericho
and east of Jerusalem. In 1946-1947, Bedouins discovered in caves at
Qumran pottery jars, some of which contained ancient parchment scrolls.
These scrolls made their way onto the antiquities market, and soon scholars
realized that scrolls had been found near the site of Qumran. It had already
been surveyed, but a new expedition was conducted in the 1950s to excavate
the site and explore the caves nearby for more scrolls.

Eventually, the remains of more than 900 different scrolls were found in
11 caves. These remains were mostly fragmentary. One cave yielded more
than 500 different scrolls, strewn on the floor of the cave, where they had
disintegrated into thousands of small fragments. Scholars literally spent
decades sifting by hand through these fragments, Dying to determine which
pieces belonged together. This task is now done, and all of the Dead Sea
scrolls have been fully accessible to the public for well over a decade.

The excavation of the site of Qumran itself revealed a settlement that had
been established around 100 B.C. and was destroyed by earthquake in 31
B.C., by tire in 9 B.C. or a little later, and finally, by the Romans in A.D.
68. This Hasmonean site is very small and evidences no private dwellings.
Instead, all of the rooms in the settlement were used either for communal
purposes or as workshops. If most or all of the members of this community
lived nearby in huts or tents, then the population could reasonably be
estimated at 100 to 150.

This complex included a two-story Watchtower, what was probably a
scriptorium of sorts, a communal dining room, many workshops, an extensive
Water system, and a large cemetery nearby. The place was visually modest:
Walls are made of mostly uncut fieldstone, floors are either dirt or rough
flagstone, and there is no interior decoration, no stucco.

In our next lecture, we will look at some of the other interesting features at
Qumran, including peculiar animal bone deposits, the potter’s workshop, the
water system and pools, and the large adjacent cemetery.

Questions to Consider
1. Why did conspiracy theories arise about the Dead Sea Scrolls soon after
their discovery? A
2. One of the questions frequently posed in the popular media is: Who
Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Does the identification of a room at Qumran
as a “scriptorium” help us answer this question?


Lecture 14-Transcript
Discovery and Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls

In our last lecture, we talked about the major groups or sects that developed in
the late Second Temple period in Judea focusing especially on the Pharisees
and Sadducees. What I would like to do now and in our next couple of
lectures is talk about a group that many scholars identify with the Essenes,
that is the community that lived at Qumran and deposited the scrolls in the
nearby caves.

What we are going to start out by doing is talking about the initial discovery
of the Dead Sea scrolls, and the exploration of the site of Qumran. We are
then going to go around the site of Qumran and look at some the major
features that make the site so unique, and then we will talk about what the
Dead Sea scrolls are and how they relate to the site of Qumran and what they
tell us about this particular group.

First of all, where is the site of Qumran located? It is located on the north-
west shore of the Dead Sea, to the south of Jericho and to the east of
Jerusalem. To give you a sense of scale, today it is about a half an hour
drive from Jerusalem down to Qumran. The area around Qumran consists of
rugged cliffs that go steeply down to the shore of the Dead Sea. Qumran is
located, by the way, in an area that many people refer to as the West Bank.
That is the territory that was under the rule of the government of Jordan from
the time the state of Israel was established in 1948 and up until the 6-day war
in 1967 and since then, of course, it has been under Israeli control.

What is the story of the initial discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls? There are
many different versions of the story, and I am going to give you just a very
simplified version which is that one day a Bedouin boy wandered into a
cave in the vicinity of site of Qumran. This occurred in the winter/spring
of l946/ 1947. Vlfhen the Bedouin wandered into this cave, which We call
Cave 1 at Qumran, he reportedly saw a row of tall cylindrical pottery jars
covered with bowl-shaped lids. The Bedouin boy called to other members of
his tribe. They came and opened up the jars; found that most of the jars were
empty, but at least a couple of the jars contained ancient scrolls, which the
Bedouin removed from the cave apparently on several different occasions.
Eventually the Bedouin removed seven complete or nearly complete scrolls
from Cave 1 at Qumran.

The Bedouin, of course, did not know that these were ancient scrolls. In fact
because the scrolls were Written on parchment, which is processed animal
hide, it looked to them like pieces of old shoe leather and so they did the
logical thing; they took these scrolls and offered them for sale to a man who
worked as a cobbler, a shoemaker in the area of Bethlehem. That man’s name
was Kando. Kando pLu‘chased the seven scrolls from the Bedouin. Kando
also did not know that these were ancient scrolls, but he could see that there
was writing on some of them. He could not read the writing, but he thought
that maybe the writing was ancient Syriac. You see, Kando was a member of
the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem.

He took four of the scrolls and offered them for sale to the Patriarch of the
Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem at that time, a man named Athanasius
Yeshua Samuel. Athanasius Yeshua Samuel purchased those four scrolls
from Kando for the sum of 24 British pounds sterling, which was equivalent
to approximately 100 U.S. dollars at that time. The other three scrolls that
Kando had he offered for sale to somebody else, a man named Eleazar Lipa
Sukenik. Who was Eleazar Lipa Sukenik? He was an Israeli biblical scholar
and archaeologist based at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. On November
29, 1947, coincidentally by the way the very same day that the U.N. voted
in favor of the establishment of the state of Israel, Sukenik traveled to
Bethlehem to see the three scrolls that Kando was offering for sale, and
Sukenik arranged to purchase them. I should add parenthetically here that
Sukenik was apparently the first scholar to recognize what these scrolls were,
because you have to realize that the Dead Sea scrolls had surfaced at this
point on the antiquities market, these scrolls from Cave 1, without anybody
knowing where they had been found, where they came from, what their date
was, or whether they were even authentic ancient scrolls. Sukenik was the
first to realize that these were authentic ancient scrolls dating to about the
time of Jesus, and he arranged to purchase those three scrolls from Kando.

In the meantime at the Athanasius Yeshua Samuel had purchased his four
scrolls as an investment hoping to turn around and make a profit off of
reselling them. He tried for a number of years to resell his four scrolls without
any success on the markets in the Middle East, and eventually gave up and
brought them to the United States and put them for sale in the U.S. On June
1, 1954, Athanasius Yeshua Samuel placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal
advertising his four scrolls for sale, and the ad actually says, “The Four Dead
Sea Scrolls, biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 B.C. are for sale.
This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an
individual or group.”

It just so happened that when the ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal,
Sukenik’ son Yigael Yadin was inthe United States on a fundraising mission.
Yigael Yadin, of course, eventually became a very famous archaeologist later
excavating among other things, the site of Masada and eventually served
as Chief of Staff of the Israeli army. Well, it just so happened that when
Athanasius Yeshua Samuel placed his ad in the Wall Street Journal, Yadin
was in the U.S. on a fundraising mission, someone brought to his attention
the ad in the Wall Street Journal, and through the aid of middle man, Yadin
was able to arrange for purchase of those four scrolls. By the way Athanasius
Yeshua Samuel received $250,000 for the four scrolls so he actually did
make a nice profit off of his investment.

So eventually all seven scrolls from Cave l came to be in the possession of
the state of Israel and subsequently the state of Israel built a special building
on the grounds of the Israel museum in Jerusalem called the Shrine of the
Book to house and display the seven scrolls from Cave l. If you ever been to
Jerusalem and visited the Shrine of the Book, those are the scrolls that you
saw on display there.

Because the scrolls from Cave l had been deposited in jars, they were in a
good state of preservation and were either complete or nearly complete, and
therefore were relatively easy to read, and so for all intents and purposes
by the middle of the 19505, all seven scrolls from Cave l had been fully
published. The subsequent controversies surrounding delays in the
publication of the Dead Sea scrolls have nothing to do therefore with the
scrolls from Cave l at Qumran. They have to do with scrolls from other
caves at Qumran as we are going to see.

By the late 1940s, scholars realized that these scrolls had come from
somewhere in the area of the Dead Sea, and they had pinpointed the
location as being in the area of the site of Qumran. Qumran was a small
archaeological ruin that was known. It had already been surveyed and visited
by various people, but nobody paid any attention to Qumran until scholars
realized that scrolls were being found in the caves around this site. So by the
late 1940s, early 1950s, scholars realized that the scrolls had been found in
the vicinity of the site of Qumran and an archaeological expedition was then
organized to Qumran. By the time this expedition was organized and took
place, we are now in the 1950s, and what has happened in terms of the larger
political background? Well the British mandate of Palestine ended, Palestine
was partitioned, the state of Israel was established, and now Qumran lay in
the territory that was under the rule of the government of Jordan.

When the expedition of Qumran was conducted in the 1950s, it was
conducted under the auspices of the government of Jordan, and, by the way,
the political situation at the time explains why there were no Israeli or Jewish
scholars involved in the original publication team of the Dead Sea scrolls. It
goes back to the political situation at the time of the original discovery.

Instead the expedition to Qumran was organized and led by a French biblical
scholar named Roland de Vaux, who was affiliated with the French school
of biblical studies and archaeology in Jerusalem, the Ecole biblique et
archéologique. From 1951 to 1956, De Vaux led an exhibition to Qumran
that had two main components. Number one to systematically explore all
of the caves in the vicinity of Qtunran to see if whether there were anymore
scrolls to be found, and number two to excavate the site of Qumran itself

What did De Vaux find in terms of scrolls in caves? Eventually scrolls
were found in ll caves surrounding the site of Qumran which we number
Caves l through ll. All together, these 11 caves yielded the remains of
over 900 different scrolls, but in most cases what we have here are not 900
complete scrolls but small fragments surviving from what had once been
complete scrolls.

Archeologists found about half the caves and Bedouin found the other half of
the caves. But the Bedouin the best caves, and one of the caves that Bedouin
found--and it is interesting that they found it and not the archaeologist
because it was literally right under the noses of the archaeologists as they
digging-was Cave 4. Cave 4, which actually is two caves, 4 A and 4 B,
yielded over 500 different scrolls, but unlike in Cave l where the scrolls had
been deposited in jars; in Cave 4 the scrolls were lying strewn on the floor of
the cave and they had disintegrated into thousands of little fragments.

The subsequent controversy surrounding delays in the publication of the
Dead Sea scrolls have nothing to do with scholarly conspiracies or Vatican
conspiracies or any other kind of conspiracies but really have to do with
the fragmentary nature of these scrolls and especially the massive fragments
from Cave 4 where scholars literally spent decades sifting by hand through
these little fragments trying to figure out which pieces belong together,
which kinds of documents they belong to, and all of this in an era before the
advent of the computer. I should add parenthetically that as of now all the
of Dead Sea scrolls are fully published, and all of the Dead Sea scrolls have
been fully accessible to the public for well over a decade, so nobody can
claim any longer that there are still secrets hidden in the Dead Sea scrolls or
conspiracies to hide information in the Dead Sea scrolls.

The other component of De Vaux’s expedition to Qumran was to excavate
the site of Qumran itself, and we are looking at a photograph of the site of
Qumran, which is a small ruin that sits on a natural terrace overlooking the
Dead Sea, and specifically we are looking here from west to east, and as we
look across the Dead Sea what we see on the other side are the mountains
of Moab, that is the mountains in Jordan. What did De Vaux lind when he
excavated this small ruin? He found a settlement that was established roughly
around 100 B.C. That means that the settlement at Qumran was established
during the Hasmonean period.

This settlement then existed until the year 31 B.C. when it was destroyed by
an earthquake. We will actually look at evidence of the earthquake damage
and De Vaux was able to pinpoint the date of the earthquake precisely to
the year 31 B.C. because the ancient Jewish historian Josephus tells us that
a strong earthquake hit the area of Jericho in the Year 31, and De Vaux was
able to match that up with the archaeological remains.

After the earthquake, the community cleaned up the settlement, rebuilt the
buildings, and continued to live there until another destruction. Somewhere
around the year 9 or 8 B.C. or maybe a little later when the site is burned
down by a fire, a fire that apparently was set by a human enemy so somebody
came and destroyed the settlement, after that, there is a short period of
abandonment maybe lasting only one winter season, the community comes
back, cleans up the site and continues to live there until the year 68 A.D.
when the settlement is destroyed by the Romans at the time of the first Jewish
revolt against the Romans.

In terms of chronology, what we are looking at is a settlement that is
established roughly around 100 B.C. and exists until the year 68 A.D., so
a settlement that is established during the Hasmonean period, continues to
exist through the period when the Romans come in and take over, through
the reign of Herod and his successors, and up until the first Jewish revolt
against the Romans in the year 68 A.D.

What did De Vaux’s excavations uncover in terms of the settlement at
Qumran? We are looking at a plan of the settlement, which is a settlement
that is remarkable in many ways. It is really quite unlike anything else that
we have. One of the things that is interesting about this settlement is that it is
very small and compact in size, and we will see that when we look at some
pictures of it. Another interesting thing about this settlement is that there
are no private houses in the settlement, no private dwellings. Instead all of
the rooms in the settlement were used either for communal purposes, for
example communal dining rooms, or as workshops.

I know what you are thinking. If there are no private houses in the settlement,
where did the people live, i.e., where did the people sleep? As we look at the
settlement, we will see that some of the rooms in the settlement originally
were two stories high. It may be that some of those second story rooms where
used as bedrooms. If you think that all of the members of this community
lived, slept, only inside the settlement, there is so little space for bedrooms
at the second-story level that you would have to estimate a very small
population, maybe 10 to 15 people, but if you think as I think following De
Vaux that most if not all of the members of this community lived, that is
slept, not inside the settlement but outside of it, in tents, in huts, and in some
of the caves around the outside of the settlement, then you can reasonably
estimate a larger population of somewhere around 100 to 150 people.
A small compact settlement, rooms used for communal ptuposes or
Workshops, what are some of the rooms that We are going to looking at in
particular? We are going to look at a structure in the middle of the north
side of the settlement that was a two-story high Watchtower. Why put a
Watchtower in the middle of the north side of the settlement? It’s very
logical, because just like today in antiquity most people coming to Qumran
would have come from the direction of the north, that is from the direction
of Jerusalem in Jericho, so you put a Watchtower there on your north side.
You can post guards, and by the way, that Watchtower could be isolated by
drawbridges all around it so you can also take refuge in the Watchtower if
you are being threatened by an enemy.

From the Watchtower, We will then look at a room that is right in the middle
of the settlement, a room that De Vaux identified as scriptorium or writing
room, and we Will talk about Why he identified it in that way. We Will look at
the largest room in the settlement which is located on the south side. De Vaux
identified this room as an assembly hall because it is the largest room, and he
identified also as a communal dining room, because in the room adjacent to
it he found a pantry of dishes, and We will look also at the pantry.

We will look at one of the many Workshops that dot the settlements
specifically the potter’s Workshop. We will look at the extensive Water system
that runs through the settlement, with many pools for storing water. We will
look at a large cemetery on the plateau to the east of the settlement, and then
We will talk about what the Dead Sea scrolls are and how they relate to all of
these archaeological remains.

Let us start first of all with the tower. Here is a view of the tower as it looks
today and you can see that there is now a modern wooden staircase that
goes up to the second story level. When people come to Qumran today, you
can climb up those steps and go to the original second story level of the
tower, and it is a great thing to do because when you stand up there, you
find yourself looking out over the settlement of Qumran. I always like to say
that I love to take people to visit Qumran because whenever they get there,
they are always disappointed, and they are always disappointed for a couple
of reasons. Number one, most people who visit Qumran do it as part of a
day trip from Jerusalem down to the Dead Sea. First thing in the morning
they leave Jerusalem and go south to Masada and visit Herod’s palaces on
Masada, which visually are spectacular, and then start heading back north
up along the shore of the Dead Sea, stopping in and getting maybe lunch and
for a swim in the Dead Sea, and then hitting Qumran late in the afternoon
on the way back up to Jerusalem. First of all, people have been to Masada
and been overwhelmed by that, and you get to Qumran and this is it, and
most people of course are super-psyched to see Qumran because pretty much
everybody has heard about the Dead Sea scrolls and want to see where they
were found.

You get to Qumran, you climb up to the top of the tower, you look over the
settlement, and what do you see in front of you? You see this very small,
compact, and visually very modest settlement. Notice that walls are made
of rubble, that is Held stones that were not cut or maybe roughly cut for
the corners. Notice that the floors are either dirt floors or rough flagstone
pavement. There is no interior decoration. There are no wall paintings. There
are no mosaics. There is no stucco, so a very small plain and unimpressive
looking settlement.

As we stand on top of the tower and we look down below us, we can see
some of the rooms that we talked about in our plan before. Specifically,
immediately below us, we can see the room that De Vaux identified as the
scriptorium, or writing room, which I am going to come back to in just a
minute. We can see the dining room/assembly hall, the communal dining
room and assembly hall that the southern end of the site which is sort of
off at an angle here, and opening onto it, the pantry with the dishes. The
potter’s workshop is not visible, it would be up in a corner, and the cemetery
is completely off to the left or to the east of the site in our view here. When
you stand at the southern end of the settlement just outside of the buildings
and look down below you, you can see Cave 4. One of the remarkable things
about Qumran is how close Cave 4 with all of its 500 different scrolls is to
the settlement itself; very close by.

Let us now talk about the scriptorium. In the middle of the settlement is this
room that De Vaux identified as a scriptorium or writing room. Why did he
identify it as a scriptorium? It is because of the furniture that he found in
this room. The furniture, which I am going to show you in a minute, comes
not from the room as you see now but actually comes originally from a
second story level. In other words the scriptorium is one of the rooms in the
settlement that originally was two stories high. The furniture that I am going
to show you was originally at the second story level.

When the settlement was destroyed by the Roman in 68, it burned, and the
second story level collapsed, fell down onto the ground, and De Vaux then
picked up the pieces of furniture, had them picked up, had them put back
together and what did he tind? He found long, narrow tables and benches
make of mud brick and covered with plaster. The reason why De Vaux
identified this room as a scriptorium or writing room is because in addition
to the furniture, he found these things mixed in with the debris. These are
inkwells. The picture of the inkwells makes them look very large but they
are small. They are little things. Mixed in with the debris, he found inkwells,
and because of the inkwells De Vaux identified this room as a scriptorium.

Sounds perfectly logical, and you might then think that the scribes sat on
the benches and wrote at the tables they way that we do today. De Vaux’s
identification of this room as a scriptorium has been the subject of a lot
debate because the furniture probably did not work that way, and here is
the problem. The custom of sitting at a table to write the way that we write
today is a custom that developed later in history. It developed specifically
in medieval monasteries with Monks sitting and copying things at tables.
Typically in the ancient world when scribes wrote, they squatted with the
material in their laps. Scholars have objected to De Vaux’s identification of
this room as a scriptorium on the grounds that the scribes would not have
sat on the benches and written at the tables the way we might think they
would have.

Some scholars then have suggested well maybe the furniture worked a little
bit differently. Maybe the scribes sat on the tables, rested their feet on the
benches and Wrote with the material in their laps like that. The problem with
that is the tables are concave underneath. They are only made of mud brick.

If you sit on them they are going to crack and collapse under your weight,
so that explanation really is not satisfactory either. Some scholars have
suggested, well maybe De Vaux was wrong, maybe this room was not used
as a scriptorium, maybe it was used for some other purpose. Maybe, some
scholars have suggested, this room was used as a dining room, a triclinium,
where you reclined to dine on the benches and ate at the tables.
The problem with that is the benches are so narrow, they are only 40 cm wide,
that if you try to recline and dine on them, you are going to roll off; so that
does not work either. So what exactly was this room? I think that De Vaux
was right in identifying it as a scriptorium. First of all, there are the inkwells.
Inkwells are extremely rare finds on archaeological excavations in Israel. I
personally have sorted through thousands and thousands and thousands of
buckets of pottery from various excavations around Israel and I have only
found until now one example of an inkwell, so they are very, very rare finds.

The fact that De Vaux found inkvvells mixed in with the debris suggests that
they was some writing going on in this room, and not only that, let us think
for a minute about what they were writing. They were not writing books,
codices. They were writing scrolls, and to write a scroll what you have to do
is to take the individual pieces of processed animal hide, parchment, and line
them up side by side to make a scroll. These long, narrow tables would be
ideally suited for the preparation of the scroll. So I think that De Vaux was
right, and if that is the case, then we can reasonably suggest that some of the
Dead Sea scrolls might have been Written or copied in this room.

I deliberately say some of the Dead Sea scrolls and not all of the Dead Sea
scrolls because there is no doubt that some of the Dead Sea scrolls were
brought to Qtunran from somewhere else. How do we know that? We know
that because some of the Dead Sea scrolls antedate the establishment of the
settlement. Some of the Dead Sea scrolls were written before the settlement
was established, so clearly some of the scrolls had to have brought to Qumran
from other places, but it may be that some of the scrolls were written or
copied at Qumran, and in this case the best candidate for where that activity
was taking place is this room which De Vaux identified as a scriptorium.

Here is a picture of the dining room/assembly hall and the pantry as they
looked today. De Vaux identified this room as a communal dining room
because of the pantry of dishes found next to it, and as an assembly hall
because it is the largest room in the settlement. The pantry today of course
is empty of the dishes that it originally had contained, but at the time of
excavations what De Vaux found in this room were stacks of dishes,
specifically stacks of over a 1,000 pottery dishes.

There are a couple of interesting things about the pottery dishes that De
Vaux found in the pantry. First of all, they are lying stacked on the iloor in
neat piles but broken. Here is some of the evidence of the earthquake of 31.
Originally those dishes were stacked on wooden shelves lining the walls of
this room. When the earthquake of 31 hit, what happened? The shelves sort
of started to tremble then boom fell on to the floor. The dishes fell, broke,
could not be fixed, and so after the earthquake, what they did was to wall off
this part of the room and simply left the broken dishes like that, and that is
how the archaeologists fotmd them.

The other interesting thing about these dishes to notice is that they are all
what we call open shapes: plates, cups, bowls. So we do not see cooking
pots, we do not see storage jars, and what is interesting about this is that
these open shapes-plates, cups, bowls-are precisely the kinds of dishes
that you would use to dine off of, to set your table with. The presence of
so many dishes stacked in the pantry suggested to De Vaux that communal
meals must have been held in the room adjacent to this, and so De Vaux
identified that large room not only as an assembly hall but also as a communal
dining room.

One of the very interesting things about this is that we learn from the
literature of this sect that one of the central aspects of their lifestyle was
having communal meals. Everybody who was a full member of this sect
participated in communal meals, so what we see here is a wonderful example
of correspondence between our literary sources, both Dead Sea and outside
literary sources, which refer to or describe communal meals being held by the
members of this community or members of this sect, and the archaeological
evidence where we clearly see evidence of communal meals practiced by
this community.

We have now started on our archaeological tour of Qumran, looking at the
tower, looking at the scriptorium or writing room, looking at the communal
dining room and pantry of dishes. In our next lecture, we are going to continue
our tour of the site of Qumran, and We are going to look at some of the other
interesting features including peculiar animal bone deposits, including one of
the workshops, the potter’s workshop. We are going to talk about the Water
system and pools at Qumran, and the large adjacent cemetery.

Lecture 13 -- Pharisees and Sadducees

Summary Outline

The Sadducees believed in complete human free will, so no intervention
at all by God; there is complete human free will. The Pharisees, on the
other hand, emphasized both divine omnipotence-God is all knowing
and all powerful-alongside human freedom and responsibility.

In our last lecture, we saw that Alexander Jannaeus’s failure to obseve
Jewish law aroused the opposition of certain groups in Jewish society, and
we mentioned the Pharisees and the community at Qumran associated
with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we will identify as the Essenes.

Historical sources indicate a third major group, the Sadducees. In this lecture,
we will focus on the Pharisees and Sadducees.

All three groups had separated themselves from the rest of Jewish society
because they believed that the traditional values had been corrupted and that
only they were practicing the law correctly. Events of the 2nd century B.C.,
including the revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the establishment
of the Hasmonean kingdom, seem to have contributed largely to the formation
of these groups.

The Sadducees originally were a branch of a large family called the Zadokites.
Solomon had appointed a man named Zadok to officiate as high priest in the
temple, and from his time, all of the high priests who officiated in the Jerusalem
temple traced their ancestry back to Zadok. In the early 2nd century B.C., right
before the Maccabean revolt, the Zadokite family lost control of the temple
priesthood. This extended broke into three branches: One branch established a
temple in Egypt at Leontopolis, eventually closed by the Roman emperor
Vespasian in 73 A.D; another branch helped found and at least initially led the
community that settled at Qumran; and a third branch stayed in Jerusalem,
accommodated with the ruling powers, and became part of the Jerusalem elite
by the late 1st century B.C. This last branch was what we know as the Sadducees,
but eventually, the term applied to anyone belonging to the upper class and
connoted a political and religious conservatism.

The Pharisees included some of the lower ranks of priests, craftsmen, small
farmers, and merchants. They were known for their recognition of oral
tradition in addition to written law. Because many of the laws in the Hebrew
Bible applied to situations that no longer existed, these men, who were learned
in Jewish law (rabbis), interpreted it for their time and passed down their
interpretations to disciples.

These two groups differ on some important theological issues. For
example, the Sadducees did not believe in life after death because it was
nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Five Books of Moses. The Pharisees,
in contrast, developed a tradition that some sort of afterlife follows death.

Again, the Sadducees believed in complete human free will, without divine
intervention, whereas the Pharisees believed in human free will but also
in the foreknowledge of God. (We will see that the Essenes believed that
everything is preordained by God.)

In the next lecture, we will visit the community that lived at Qumran and
deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves there.

Terms to Remember
Qumran: Ancient settlement by the northwest shore of the Dead Sea,
surrounded by caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
rabbi (“my master”): Originally, a Hebrew term of respect for someone
learned in biblical Jewish law.
Zadokites; Descendants of Zadok, high priest in the time of Solomon.

Questions to Consider
1. What is a sect?
2. What sorts of issues divided the various sects of the Late Second
Temple period?


Lecture 13-Transcript
Pharisees and Sadducees

In our last lecture, we talked about the Hasmonean kingdom, and the fact that
the failure of Alexander Jaimaeus to properly observe Jewish law aroused
the opposition of certain groups in Jewish society. Specifically we mentioned
the Pharisees, and we also referred to the community at Qumran associated
with the Dead Sea scrolls. What I would like to do now is talk about some
of these Jewish groups that emerged during the Hasmonean period, and
specifically in this lecture focus on what we know about the Sadducees and
the Pharisees.

First of all, where does our information come from about these groups? Our
major sources of information are Josephus, the Jewish historian of the lst
century A.D., the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees which are apocryphal books,
that is that they are included in the Catholic canon of Sacred Scripture but
not in the Jewish or Protestant canons, the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran,
the New Testament, and rabbinic literature. These are our major sources of
information about the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

Josephus, who was a very important source of information, calls these groups
haireseis which is a Greek word, singular hairesis. The Latin equivalent of
the Greek word hairesis would be the Latin secta. Automatically, you can
see that our word heresy comes from the Greek word haireseis, and you
can see that our word sect comes from the Latin word secta. So when we
read Josephus in translation and we read that he refers to these groups as
heresies or sects, it automatically raises certain associations for us today, and
the reason is that today heresy and sect or sectarian are words that have a
negative connotation.

Why do these words have a negative conotation today? Because today we
refer to groups that do things that are illegitimate or that we disapprove of as
sects, and we refer to illegitimate practices or unrecognized practices which
we do not approve of heresies. The fact that these words today have negative
connotations is actually a very Christian concept. Originally in Greek and
in Latin, that is in the time of Josephus, haireseis/heresy and secta/sect had
no negative connotations at all. It is only later in the early church that the
church fathers begin to use these terms in order to denigrate their opponents,
but originally they were neutral terms.

We can contrast these terms today, heresy, sect/sectarian with the word
denomination. If we refer to a group that we approve of that is recognized as
a legitimate group within let’s say a larger church, we would refer to that as
a denomination, but if we refer to a sect, we refer to a practice as sectarian
or as a heresy, then clearly it is something that we disapprove of. We go into
this in order to point out that when we read about haireseis or about secta in
Josephus, we must then remove the modern negative connotations that these
words have today and instead understand that they are simply neutral words
that in Greek and in Latin referred to schools of thought or philosophical
schools or different groups or movements without any of the disapproving
connotations that we might read into it from a modern point of view.

What were the major Jewish sects of the Second Temple period, the late
Second Temple period, and what do we know about them? First of all when
we refer to these groups, we must describe them as groups that separated
themselves from other groups largely because they felt alienated, and they
felt alienated because these groups believed that the traditional values
had been corrupted. One of the characteristics then of Jewish sects of the
late Second Temple period of these various groups is that they separated
themselves from the rest of Jewish society and believed that the traditional
values had been corrupted, and they believed that only they were practicing
Judaism in the right way. So one of the characteristics then of these groups,
of these sects of the late Second Temple period, is that each one of them
believed that they were doing things the right way and the others were not
doing things the right way.

Josephus refers specifically to three sects in the late Second Temple period,
and he says as follows, “Indeed there exist among the Jews three schools of
philosophy,” three haireseis in Greek, “the Pharisees belong to the first, the
Sadducees to the second, and to the third belong men who have a reputation
for cultivating a particularly saintly life, called Essenes.” In this lecture we
are going to be focusing on the first two, the Pharisees and Sadducees, and
we will talk about the Essenes in the lectures after this.

When Josephus says that there are three philosophical schools or three
haireseis or three of these groups in Judaism in the late Second Temple
period, he is undoubtedly simplifying a more complex situation. That is,
undoubtedly there were other groups and movements that existed in late
Second Temple period Judaea beginning in the Hasmonean period, but
Josephus does not mentions them. He mentions only Pharisees, Sadducees
and Essenes. Why do I say this? I say this because there is a debate among
scholars as to how many different groups existed in the late Second Temple
period Judaism, and what the major groups were. Some scholars think that
although there may have been other groups, there were really only three
main groups: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, because these are the ones
that we hear of repeatedly in our sources.

Whereas other scholars argue that our sources are only partial in terms of the
information that they provide, and that there must have been a wide range of
groups that existed in Jewish society and indeed in some sources, different
sources, we get hints of other groups because occasionally other groups are
referred to. So there is a question about how complex the picture was. How
many different groups and movements and sects there were in late Second
Temple period Judaea, but for our purposes we are going to focus on the
ones that appear to be the major ones. The ones that we have at least the
most information on and those are for now the Pharisees, Sadducees, and
then later we will also talk about the Essenes.

These sects, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, seemed to have originated
and crystallized by the middle of the 2““ century B.C., and in fact, it is the
events that lead up to the formation of the Hasmonean kingdom, the outbreak
of the revolt against Antiochus IV of Epiphanies culminating with the
establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom that seemed to have contributed
largely to the formation and crystallization of these groups. Remember
that there were some sectors of the Jewish population that opposed some
of the practices of the Hasmoneans, including the fact that they serve not
only as kings but also as high priests, and these sorts of divisions of opinion
apparently contributed to the formation of these different groups, of these
different sects.

What do we know then about the Sadducees? The Sadducees are a group
that on the one hand is well known in the sense that most people have heard
of Sadducees, but on the other hand we have a problem in terms of our
information about them. Our major sources of information on the Sadducees
are all hostile to them, and in fact, our sources of information about the
Sadducees are all external sources. That is, we have no sources of information
about the Sadducees that come from the Sadducees themselves. They come
from people or sources that were not part of the Sadducees movement and
that were hostile to the Sadducees and so present them in a negative light.
What are these sources? Josephus talks about the Sadducees, and he describes
himself as a Pharisee, so he is not a Sadducees but a member of another
group, the New Testament, which is also hostile to Sadducees, and rabbinic
literature, the literature of the later rabbis, which is allied with the Pharisaic
movement or grows out of the Pharisaic movement. So in other words, all of
our sources of information on the Sadducees are external to the Sadducees
and are hostile to the Sadducees, and therefore present them in a biased light
and generally tend to present the Sadducees in a negative light.

What then do we actually know about the Sadducees and about their origins?
The Sadducees were a branch of a larger family called the Zadokites. Who
exactly were the Zadokites? Way back, centuries before the late Second
Temple period, when Solomon had built the first temple on the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, he had appointed a man named Zadok, Hebrew Zadoq,
to officiate as high priest in the temple. From that point on, all of the high
priests who officiated in the Jerusalem temple traced their ancestry back to
Zadok and became known as the Zadokite family.

By the 2““ century B.C. this Zadokite priestly family was a very extended
family. Through a series of complicated events right before the outbreak
of the Maccabean revolt, the Zadokite family lost control of the priesthood
in the Jerusalem temple and the priesthood was taken over, usurped by
other priestly families that were not Zadokites, and from that point on, the
Zadokites never again regained control of the priesthood in the Jerusalem
temple. This Zadokite priestly family, which at this point is very extended,
branches off Different branches ofthe family go and do different things.

One branch of the family, called the Gniads, establish a temple at a place
in Egypt called Leontopolis, and they and their descendents of liciated at
this temple in Egypt until it was closed by Vespasian in the year 73 A.D.
Another branch of the Zadokite family was instrumental in founding and at
least initially leading the community that evidentially settled at Qumran and
deposited the Dead Sea scrolls in the nearby caves. Yet another branch of this
Zadokite family stayed in Jerusalem, accommodated with the ruling powers,
and eventually morphed into group that becomes known as the Sadducees.
So in other words the Sadducees are one branch of the Zadokite family, and
in fact the word Sadducees and Zadokite in Hebrew are basically the same
word, and they then become part of the Jerusalem elite in the late ls* century
B.C. and 1st century A.D.

Who were these people then, these Sadducees, of the late Second Temple
period? They are therefore members of the elite, which means that they
are priestly families by definition, and other members of the Aristocracy.

Although originally the Sadducees are a branch of the Zadokite family,
eventually the term comes to refer to the members of the upper class in
Judaea and especially in Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period. So they
are the high priests, they are the Aristocracy, and therefore not surprisingly,
both politically and religiously, they were conservatives because they were
the elite. They were the upper classes. They had it good. Anybody who has it
good is going to want to preserve the status quo, and therefore is going to be
a conservative. So both politically and religiously they were conservatives.

What does it mean when I say they were religious conservatives? Political
conservatives is clear. They like to keep the status quo, things as they are,
but what does it mean religious conservatives? It means that they were
opposed to religious innovations. Their opposition to religious innovations,
to introducing new things in religious practice, is going to be diametrically
opposite to what we will see among the Pharisees.

Who are the Pharisees? This is another group where it is a little bit difficult
to define them at first. The word Pharisees is a word that actually we do
not know where it originally comes from. In Hebrew, the Pharisees are the
proscheme. The name Pharisee in Hebrew therefore comes from a Hebrew
word, apparently Parash, which means to separate. Actually we are not
positive that is the root of the name but it likely is. So the word Parash,
the root of this name Pharisees, means to separate. What does it mean, the
separate ones, the ones who separated themselves? \Vhy were they called
that? What did the separate themselves from? We do not actually know why
they were called that. Did they separate themselves from the Sadducees,
from the high priests and the elite? Did they separate themselves from
the Hasmoneans to whom they were largely opposed? Did they separate
themselves from the rest of the population considering that the rest of the
population to be too lax in the observance of Jewish law? We do not know;
all of those are possible; we just do not know for sure.

What is interesting is that they did not actually call themselves Pharisees,
they referred to themselves by other names. When they called each other by
a name, they did not say hey over there you Pharisee. They said hey, haver,
friend, or they would call each other scribes or sages, and sometimes they
called each other by the term rabbi. This term rabbi, which is today a loaded
term, means something very different from a modern rabbi. When we say
modem rabbi today, it is somebody who has undergone an politcial process
of ordination and generally leads or officiates in a synagogue, but originally
the term rabbi is a title which literally means my teacher or my master, and
it is a title of respect that you would give to somebody who is an authority in
Jewish law, who is learned in Jewish law, so they would often call each other
by the term rabbi, my master, my teacher.

If the Sadducees were the elite, the upper classes, who were the Pharisees?
The Pharisees came from very diverse backgrounds. They came from both
rural areas and from urban areas. They included some of the lower ranks of
priests, not the high priests, but some of the other kinds of priestly families,
craftsman, small farmers, and merchants. Basically what we have here, and
I hate to use this term because it is so anachronistic, but it is what would
be analogous to kind of middle-class or maybe an upper middle-class, that
is group that is not among the very poor but also not among the wealthiest
classes, but fairly comfortably off.

At this point, I want to actually caution and say that I presented a very sort of
black and white picture of Pharisees and Sadducees, but we have to remember
that the picture was much more complicated than this. Not necessarily every
person who was a high priest or a member of the Jerusalem elite would
of considered themselves the Sadducees, and not everyone who was from
this sort of upper middle-class background would of consider themselves a
Pharisees. The picture is more complex than this, but generally speaking, the
groups do roughly correspond with these kind of socioeconomic groups.

What are the Pharisees known for? One of the major things that they are
known for is their recognition of oral tradition in addition to written law,
and what do I mean there? The core of the Hebrew bible is the Pentateuch,
the Five Books of Moses, or what Jews call the Torah. The Five Books of
Moses contain the laws that the god of Israel gave to his people and which
they were expected to live their lives according to. By definition, if you were
a Jew, a Judean, in antiquity, you then worshiped the god of Israel as your
national deity, as your patron god, and lived your life according to the laws
that he gave his people in those Five Books of Moses; fair enough, that is a
pretty basic element.

What is new about the Pharisees? In addition to the observance of this written
law, the Pharisees added an element of oral tradition, and why is this? The
Hebrew bible, the Five Books of Moses in particular, had been compiled and
edited now centuries before the late Second Temple period, and already by
this time, and it is even more of the case today, many of those laws applied to
situations which no longer existed because times change and there is human
progress and technology changes. Over the course of time, if you want to
continue to live your life according to the laws in the Five Books of Moses,
you are going to need to do a certain degree of interpretation and adaptation
of those laws in order to make them fit the current situation.

To give you a very anachronistic example from today, nowhere in the Five
Books of Moses does it say that you may not flip a light switch on the Jewish
Sabbath, on Saturday. What the Hebrew bible says, what the Pentateuch says
is that you may not light a fire on the Sabbath. Once electricity was invented,
Judaism had a problem; nowhere in the bible does it refer to electricity. So
modern rabbis went back and interpreted the biblical passage that says that
you may not light a fire on the Sabbath to refer also to electricity, and thereby
Jews who observe Jewish law, biblical law, will not flip a light switch on the
Sabbath because that turns on the electricity.

What do the Pharisees do? They develop an oral tradition where these
rabbis, that is these men who are learned in Jewish law, study the biblical
passages, study the biblical laws, and interpret them and begin to pass down
their interpretations to generation of disciples or students. This body of
oral tradition or oral interpretation becomes the characteristic feature of the
Pharisees and distinguishes them from some of the other groups of the late
Second Temple period.

Let us now take a look at some examples of the differences between these
groups as reported by our various sources. Let us see first of all what Josephus
says here about the Sadducees. He says, “But the doctrine of the Sadducees
is this: that souls die with the bodies, nor do they regard the observation of
anything besides what the law enjoins them.” So notice Josephus says that
the Sadducees simply will not accept anything except what is written exactly
in the law, in the torah, in the Five Books of Moses, and as part of this they
believe that souls die with the body, which means that there is no life after
death. Why do they believe that there is no life after death? They believe that
because the Sadducees said nowhere in the Pentateuch is there an explicit
doctrine of the resurrection of the dead after death, so therefore they believe
that souls die with the bodies because there is no reference to anything but
that in the Hebrew bible.

Josephus says about the Pharisees on the other hand, “They also believe
that souls have an immortal vigour in them, and that under the earth there
will be rewards or punishments, accordingly as they have lived virtuously
or vicious in this life.” The Pharisees according to Josephus believe exactly
the opposite. They developed a tradition that after death there is in fact some
sort of an afterlife, and this is diametrically opposed to what the Sadducees
believed, and the Sadducees rejected this because there is no explicit doctrine
of such in the bible.

Very interesting, we actually see this also reflected in Acts of the Apostles
where it says, “For the Sadducees hold that there is no resurrection and that
there are no angels or spirits, while the Pharisees believe in all three.” So
notice that according to Acts also that the Sadducees do not believe in a
resurrection, the Pharisees do, and by the way, here it says the Sadducees
also believe that there no angels or spirits and the Pharisees believe that there
are angels or spirits.

Another one of the differences between these groups is the doctrine of free
will. To what extent is there human free will? The Sadducees believed in
complete human free will, so no intervention at all, by god there is complete
human free will. The Pharisees, on the other hand, emphasized both divine
omnipotence, God is all knowing and all powerful, alongside human freedom
and responsibility. Josephus says for example, “And when they determine
that all things are done by fate,” this is the Pharisees, “and they do not take
the freedom from men of acting as they see fit; since their notion is, that it
has pleased God to make a temperament, whereby what he wills is done, but
so that the will of men can act virtuously or viciously.”

That is actually a little bit confusing so it is a little hard to understand here
what Josephus is saying. We actually have an early rabbi, Rabbi Akiba, who
puts in much more simply. The is what the Pharisees believe: All is foreseen
but free will is given. In other words, people have free will to choose what
they are going to do but because God is all knowing, he knows what you are
going to choose to do before you even do it. So this is the Pharisees doctrine,
which is that there is human free will but there is also an element here of
God knowing what is going to happen.

When we get to talk about the Essenes, we will see that they actually believe
that there is no human free will at all. They believe that everything is
preordained by God, so we have three points of a spectrum here: Sadducees
at one end believing in complete human free will; Essenes at the other end,
no human free will; and the Pharisees somewhere in the middle in this case.

With which sect did Jesus usually engage in debate? If you go through the
gospels you will see that the group that is mentioned over and over again
are the Pharisees, and this then if we take at its most literal reading would
suggest that Jesus engaged most in debate with the Pharisees. However, this
is debated by scholars. Why is it a subject of contention among scholars?
The canonical gospels as we have them today were written down pretty
much after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. Mark which is the
earliest maybe 60 to 70 A.D., but pretty much what we have dates to after
70 A.D. Where is the problem? The problem is that these groups apparently
disappear or cease to exist after 70, so by the time the gospel accounts are
written, these groups pretty much have disappeared.

I actually have to qualify this a minute and say that in recent years some
scholars have suggested that although we do not hear about these groups
after 70, maybe actually they did continue to exist for a while after 7 0, and so
maybe the gospel accounts are not completely anachronistic in that regard;
this is a little bit problematic. It is also problematic because we cannot define
precisely the relationship between the Pharisees and the rabbis after 70. After
70 the dominant group, the dominant religious authority in Judaism become
the rabbis and there is clearly some sort of a relationship between the rabbis
after 70 and the Pharisees before 70 because they have a same sort of view of
the practice of Jewish law, which is that is it is okay to use this body of oral
tradition in order to interpret the written law and to practice Judaism.

Somehow the rabbis after 70 seemed to grow out of the Pharisaic movement
before 70, and it may be in fact that some of the other movements also
continue to exist in some form after 70. There is a Whole problem here
with how long these groups continued to exist after 70, in what form
they continued to exist, and this is the problem in trying to then relate the
groups that we know about with the gospel accounts. If we take the gospel
accounts at face value, it looks like Jesus is usually engaging in debate with
the Pharisees, so there could be two logical explanations for this. Number
l either Jesus really does debate the Pharisees more than any other group,
and the gospels are therefore more or less accurate, or the other possibility
is-and this is what some scholars think-that Jesus is portrayed as debating
the Pharisees because by the time the gospels are being written after 70, the
only major group that really is continuing to exist is the Pharisaic movement,
which is morphing into the rabbis.

This is kind of a conundrum actually. There is actually no solution to this
question. It is an ongoing debate among scholars. I will actually say that
I think that without saying that the gospels are completely historically
accurate, but to my mind it is most likely that Jesus really was debating
mostly with the Pharisees because the Sadducees are the upper classes there
in Jerusalem and they would not have been debating with Jesus when he
is up in Galilee, and the Essenes, well they are a marginal group that we
will see that probably was not debating with Jesus’ movement. So of the
movements that we know about actually, most logically it would have been
the Pharisees who Jesus was engaging in debate with. Anyway, this is what
the gospels portray; usually Jesus is engaged in debate with the Pharisees.

Let us take a look at an example of a passage of where is Jesus is engaged
in a debate. “The Pharisees gathered about him, Jesus, with some scribes,”
and there is whole other question, who are these scribes right? Are they a
different group, are they part of the Pharisaic movement, are they Sadducees,
a whole other question.

The Pharisees gather about him with some scribes who had come
from Jerusalem. They had noticed that some of his disciples ate their
food without first giving their hands a ceremonial washing to purify
them. For the Pharisees and all the Jews observe the rules handed
down from their ancestors, and will not eat until they have washed
their hands in a particular way, and they will not eat anything from
the market without first purifying it by sprinkling it.

And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your
disciples not observe the rules handed down by our ancestors, but
eat food without purifying their hands?” [And this what Jesus says
to them] But he said to them, “It was about you hypocrites that
Isaiah prophesied so finely in the words, ‘This people honors me
with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they
worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines,” [that is a quote
from Isaiah]. “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to
human tradition.”

And this of course from Mark. This is actually very interesting, Jesus of
course, his response is you are hypocrites because you observe the law with
your lips by words but not with your hearts, but then he goes on and he
says that they are worshiping God by teach human precepts as doctrines
and holding to human tradition. What is this reflecting? This is actually
very interesting. It is a criticism of the Pharisaic observance of oral tradition
versus written law. So what Jesus is saying is yoLu° criticism of us, that we
are not washing hand before eating, is based on a tradition that has no basis
in the written law, it is one of your oral traditions; therefore, it is a human
doctrine that has nothing to do with the laws of God, and that is how Jesus
responds to the criticism of the Pharisees, according to this passage in Mark.

With this we are going to wrap up our discussion of Pharisees and Sadducees,
and we will now continue next time with the community that lived at Qumran
and deposited the Dead Sea scrolls in the nearby caves.

Lecture 12 -- The Hasmonean Kingdom

Summary Outline

In other words, the people at Qumran who deposited the Dead Sea

Scrolls in the nearby caves mocked this other group of Jews, the same

group that rebelled against Alexander Jannaeus, as those who seek the

easy way out in the observance of Jewish law.   Who is this group,

then, the seekers of smooth things? This is a name that the group at

Qumran gave to the Pharisees.

e ended our last lecture with the Hasmonean king Aristobulus I,

who ruled from 104 to 103 B.C. Aristobulus I was a ruthless man

who imprisoned his brothers, killing one of them, and allowed his

mother to die of starvation in prison. When Aristobulus I died of an illness,

his widow, Salome Alexandra, Heed his brothers and married one of them,

Alexander Jarmaeus. This was a Levirate marriage, in accordance with

Jewish law. Unfortunately, Alexander Jannaeus would also be high priest

and could marry only a virgin; thus, the marriage violated the law.

This violation was not to be his last. Alexander Jannaeus was a ruthless

ruler who frequently disregarded the Jewish law and, therefore, aroused a

great deal of opposition. Once, during the feast of Tabernacles, Alexander

Jannaeus, acting as high priest, poured holy water on the ground instead of

on the altar; the people became upset and threw at him the citrons they held

as part of the ceremony. In response, Alexander Jarmaeus massacred 6,000

of the pilgrims.

Eventually, the Pharisees had had enough and organized a revolt; for help,

they turned to the nearest outside power, the Seleucid king, Demetrius III.

Demetrius then invaded, but the rebels suddenly had a change of heart,

abandoning Demetrius and returning to Alexander Jamiaeus. Unfortunately

for them, Alexander did not forgive them. According to one of the Dead

Sea Scrolls, he crucified 800 of them, slaughtering their wives and children

before their eyes as they suffered on their crosses, while he banqueted with

his concubines.

Alexander Jannaeus died in 76 B.C., succeeded by his widow, Salome

Alexandra. She ruled the Hasmonean kingdom rather well while her older

son, John Hyrcanus II, served as high priest. VVhen Salome Alexandra died

in 67 B.C., the office of king should have fallen to John Hyrcanus Il, but

a younger son, Aristobulus II, also wanted to be king. A civil war broke out 

between the brothers, who both turned for help to an outside power, Rome. 

Soon, the Romans would simply step in and take over the Hasmonean 

kingdom.

At around the same time, just to the south, a people called the Nabateans 

were prospering. An Arab people, they had established caravan routes 

through the desert, and using those routes, they brought to the 

Mediterranean coast expensive items from the east, such as myrrh and 

frankincense. With time, this lucrative trade had made the Nabateans

wealthy, as is evident in the mins of their capital, Petra, presently in Jordan

southeast of the Dead Sea.

At this desert site appear a colonnaded street, large temples dedicated to

various Nabatean gods, and a Greek-style theater cut into one of the sides 

of the cliffs, indicating Hellenistic influence. Most spectacular are the rock-cut 

tombs, miles of them, in some cases with facades cut to create the illusion of 

three-dimensional buildings.

Our exploration of the Hasmonean kingdom and the Nabatean kingdom to

its south now sets the stage for a look at some of the Jewish groups that came

into existence during the Hasmonean period.

Important Terms

Levirate marriage: Biblical law requiring a man to many his brother’s

widow if his brother was childless.

Nabataeans: An Arab people who created a kingdom in the area of modern

Jordan, the Negev, and the Sinai from the mid-2” century until A.D. 106.

Petra: Capital of the Nabataean kingdom, located to the southeast of the

Dead Sea in modern Jordan.

Pharisees: Jews of the Late Second Temple period who were moderately

prosperous and known for their strict observance of Jewish purity laws.

Questions to Consider

1. Considering the cruelty and atrocities carried out by Hasmonean kings,

such as Aristobulus I and Alexander J annaeus, and their blatant disregard

for the observance of biblical law, why should Jews commemorate the

Maccabean revolt by celebrating Hanukkah?

2. Knowing that Herod was half Idumaean (his father’s side) and half

Nabataean (his mother’s), what would you expect from him in terms of

cultural and religious orientation?

Lecture 12-Transcript

The Hasmonean Kingdom

In our last lecture, we talked about the Maccabean revolt and the

establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom ruled by the Maccabees

and their successors called the Hasmoneans. We talked about some of the

earliest Hasmonean rulers, ending with Aristobulus I who ruled from 104

to 103 B.C. I would like to pick up with Aristobulus I today and look at

him some more, and the rest of the Hasmonean kings up until the end of

the Hasmonean kingdom when it’s nixed by the Romans. Then I would like

to finish up the lecture by looking at one of the very important neighboring

peoples of the Hasmoneans, and that is the Nabateans.

If we go back to remind ourselves of what we were talking about with

Aristobulus I, remember that he was a ruthless man who became king by

imprisoning his brothers, killing one of them, and imprisoning his mother

who died of starvation while she was in prison. He was also a Hellenizer

preferring to use his Greek name Aristobulus instead of his Hebrew name;

and like his predecessor, he continued to increase the size of the Hasmonean

kingdom through territorial expansion. This is one of the very important

things about the policy of the Hasmonean kings, that they enlarge the size

of their kingdom through territorial conquests and forced the non-Jewish

peoples, who they conquered, to convert to Judaism or leave the country.

Among the peoples who were forcibly converted by the Hasmoneans were

the Idumaeans to the south and the Ituraeans, the inhabitants of Galilee and

the Golan to the north. So what happens after the time of Aristobulus I?

Aristobulus I died in 103 B.C. of an illness, and when he died, his widow,

whose name was Salome Alexandra, freed Aristobulus brothers from

captivity because they were still in captivity, and then she married one of

them. This actually sounds like a bit of a peculiar policy that the widow frees

the brothers and then marries one of them, but in fact it is in accordance with

Jewish law.

Biblical Jewish law says that when a brother dies without leaving any heirs,

the widow of that man should then marry one of the brothers. Let us actually

read the biblical passage which is from Deuteronomy,

When brothers reside together, and one of them dies and has no son,
the wife of the decreased shall not be married outside the family to
a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, taking her in
marriage, and performing the duty of a husband’s brother to her,
and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the
deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.

Again this is according to Deuteronomy. This kind of marriage where a widow

marries one of the brothers of her husband is called levirate marriage, and

so when Salome Alexandra, the widow of Aristobulus, married Aristobulus’

brother she was actually acting in accordance with this biblical law.

Of course the idea of the biblical law originally was that a family line should

not come to an end because a brother dies without leaving any heirs. In this

case, Salome Alexandra marries one of Aristobulus’ brothers, a brother whose

name was Alexander Jannaeus; and Alexander Jannaeus now becomes the

next Hasmonean king. It sounds as though this all was in accordance with

biblical law, but in fact by marrying Salome Alexandra, Alexander Jannaeus

actually was breaking biblical law because on the one hand Deuteronomy

mandates this sort of levirate marriage, this marriage between a brother of a

man who died and his widow, but on the other hand there is another law in

the Hebrew bible that prohibits this particular circumstance. This law is in

Leviticus and it says, “He, the high priest, shall marry only a woman who is

a virgin. A widow or a divorced woman or a woman who has been deflled, a

prostitute, these he shall not marry.”

So what is the problem here? On the one hand yes, Alexander Jannaeus was

supposed to marry his brother’s widow in accordance with Deuteronomy,

but because the Hasmonean kings also assumed the office of high priest,

there was a law that prohibited a high priest from marrying a widow. So

in this case, that law should have superseded the principle of levirate

marriage, and Alexander Jannaeus should not have married his brother’s

widow in this particular case. Again although there was a general principal

of levirate marriage, in the particular case of Alexander Jarmaeus, because

he was high priest, there was another law that prohibited him specifically

from marrying a widow, and therefore he should not have married Salome

Alexandra. Basically what this means is that Alexander Jannaeus, when

he becomes Hasmonean king, violates biblical Jewish law by marrying his

brother’s widow.

Alexander Jannaeus in general was a ruthless ruler. He ruled for quite a long

time from 103 B.C. until 76 B.C. He was a ruthless man as we will see,

and he also acted frequently with disregard for the observance of biblical

Jewish law; and Alexander Jannaeus’ actions therefore aroused a great deal

of opposition among the Jewish population. There were already wide sectors

of the Jewish population that believed that the Hasmonean king should not

be acting also as high priest, but Alexander Jannaeus’ blatant disregard for

the observance of biblical Jewish law aroused much more opposition and

especially among a particular group called the Pharisees, who we will be

talking about some more in this lecture and also in our next lecture.

One example of Alexander Jannaeus’ disregard for Jewish law occurred

during the holiday of Sukkot, which is the Feast of Tabenacles, a holiday

that occurs usually around our month of October. As part of the ceremony,

observing this festival, Jews hold a bundle of branches of different species

together with a large bumpy citrus fruit called a citron which is like a

big bumpy lemon, and as part of the ceremony observing this particular

festival, the Feast of Tabernacles, the bundle of branches and the citron are

waved together.

The holiday of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, was one of the pilgrimage

holidays to the Jerusalem temple, and so we have to imagine then that every

year on this holiday masses of Jews would go to Jerusalem and congregate

in the temple, and as part of the observance of this festival, would wave

these branches and the citrus fruits, the citrons, in their hands. One year

during the observance of this festival, Alexander Jannaeus, acting as high

priest, poured holy water on the ground instead of on the altar, and this got

all of the pilgrims upset, and what happens according to Josephus, “For at a

festival which was then celebrated, when he stood upon the altar [he being

Alexander Jannaeus] and was going to sacrifice, the nation rose up against

him and pelted him with citrons.” So when Alexander Jamraeus poured the

water on the ground instead of on the altar, everybody got upset and started

to throw their citrons at him. “At this he flew into a rage and killed about

6,000 of them.” Alexander Jannaeus got so upset that he then massacres

6,000 of the pilgrims. So Alexander Jamiaeus is somebody who did not act in

accordance with Jewish law and who acted ruthlessly and mercilessly against

his enemies, and we see this over and over again.

It is not surprising then that a number of years later, a Jewish revolt breaks

out against Alexander Jannaeus, so some sectors of the Jewish population

were so upset at him that they rise up and revolt, and who do they turn to

for help, they turn to the nearest outside power which is the Seleucid king,

and at that point the name of the Seleucid king was Demetrius III. So these

Jewish rebels turn to Demetrius III for help. Demetrius then invades, and

what happens when he invades Jerusalem? The rebels suddenly decide,

maybe we do not really want to go back to Seleucid rule; maybe we would

prefer a bad Jewish king over a good Greek one. So they stop the revolt, they

abandon Demetrius and the go back to Alexander Jamiaeus. The problem is

that Alexander Jannaeus was really mad at the rebels, and so he decides to

take revenge on them and to punish them for the revolt.

We have a reference to Alexander Jannaeus’ punishment of the Jews in a

Dead Sea Scroll that is called the Pesher Nahum. The Pesher Nahum is

commentary on the prophetic book Nahum, and here is what the relevant

passage says and we are going to sort of go through it carefully in order to

understand it. “Interpreted, this concerns Demetrius, king of Greece, who

sought on the counsel of those who seek smooth things to enter Jerusalem.”

We are going to be talking a little more about Dead Sea Scrolls in another

couple of lectures, but let me just preface by saying that in the literature from

Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls, when you have books that are commentaries,

what they will do is they will cite the original biblical passage and then they

will give the interpretation.

So what we are looking at here is an interpretation of a specific passage from

the book of Nahum where the interpretation starts, interpreted, this concerns

Demetrius, the King of Greece. The relevant passage in the book of Nahum

actually does not say anything about Demetrius king of Greece; the person

who wrote the interpretation, the Pesher on Nahum, however, interpreted this

particular passage as relating to Demetrius, King of Greece.

What we have here then is a passage from this biblical book that was

interpreted by the person who wrote the Pesher as relating to this episode

where Demetrius invades Jerusalem because some sectors of the population

sought his help in their rebellion against Alexander Jamiaeus, and specifically

this particular passage here is starting, interpreted, this concerns Demetrius,

King of Greece, who sought on the counsel of those who seek smooth

things to enter Jerusalem. In other words, the group of Jews, the rebels, who

invited Demetrius in are described here in the Pesher Nahum as those who

seek smooth things. That group of Jew is described here as those who seek

smooth things.

I emphasize this because we will come back to talk about what this means.

What is this group who seeks smooth things? So the passage continues,

“But god did not permit the city to be delivered into the hands of the kings

of Greece, from the time of Antiochus until the coming of the rulers of

the Kittim,” that is the Romans. So the way the author of this document

interpreted things, God intervened and did not allow Jerusalem to be

delivered into the hands of Demetrius. In fact, he did not allow Jerusalem to

be delivered again into the hands of a foreign power until the Romans come

along, and Romans in this document are titled Kittim, a biblical term that is

used here as sort of a cover term for Romans.

So in the Pesher Nahum then from Qumran, we have a reference to this

invasion of Jerusalem by Demetrius because he was invited by the Jewish

rebels who were rebelling against Alexander Jannaeus. After the revolt

ended then, Alexander Jarmaeus decided to take action against and punish

the rebels for having rebelled against him, and Josephus, the ancient Jewish

author, describes this event and describes Alexander Jannaeus’ punishment

as follows. “He [Alexander Jannaeus] brought them [the rebels] back to

Jerusalem; and there he did a thing that was as cruel as could be.” So this

is how he punishes the rebels. “While he feasted with his concubines in a

conspicuous place, he ordered 800 of the Jews to be crucified, and slaughtered

their children and Wives before the eyes of the still-living wretches.”

In other words, Alexander Jannaeus punishes the Jewish rebels by crucifying

them, and while they are writhing in agony on their crosses, he slaughters their

wives and children before their eyes and all of this while he is banqueting with

his concubines. So again, obviously Alexander Jannaeus was not a very nice

person; he was quite ruthless. Interestingly, this same episode, the crucifixion

of these rebels, is referred to in the Pesher Nahum, that same document from

Qumran that we talked about that is a commentary on the biblical book of

Nahum, and here is what the relevant passage in the Pesher Nahum says.

“Interpreted, this concerns the furious young lion,” and there is no doubt

furious young lion here is referring to Alexander Jannaeus, “[who executes

revenge] on those who seek smooth things and hangs men alive.”

So he took revenge on his group of rebels here in the Pesher described as

“those who seek smooth things,” and what does he do, he hangs them alive.

Hanging them alive means he cmcifies them, so this document refers to the

same episode of the crucifixion of Alexander Jannaeus’ opponents as we

read about in Josephus so it is very interesting. We have a document from

Qumran and we have a description in Josephus that pretty much described

this event in the same way. That still leaves us hanging with the seekers of

smooth things. What is this group, those who seek smooth things?

One of the interesting things about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that a lot of times

when they refer to real people or groups of people, they refer to them not

by their real names but by nicknames, and usually the nicknames are puns.

Those who seek smooth things is a pun, a name for a particular group. So the

people who lived at Qumran and deposited the scrolls in the nearby caves

referred to another Jewish group, specifically in this case the group that

rebelled against Alexander Jarmaeus, by the title “those who seek smooth

things.” In order to understand the pun we actually have to go into Hebrew

a bit. Seekers of smooth things in Hebrew is dorshay halakot; those who

seek smooth things, dorshay halakot. Dorshay is seekers. Smooth things,

halak, halakot.

This is a pun on another Hebrew term that is very close seekers of the law,

dorshay halakhot. So halakot is smooth, halakhot is the law. So in other

words, the seekers of smooth things is a pun for a group of people who seek

to observe the law and mockingly the people at Qunran are referring to this

group not as those who seek to observe the law but who seek smooth things.

Well, what does this mean? Those who seek smooth things means those who

seek the easy way out, who look for the easy observance of the law rather

than the correct observance of the law.

In other words, the people at Qumran who deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls

in the nearby caves mocked this other group of Jews, the same group that

rebelled against Alexander Jannaeus, as those who seek the easy way out in

the observance of Jewish law. They, the people at Qumran, saw themselves

as observing the law in the right way, which was a stricter observance of

law, while this group, the one that rebels against Alexander Jannaeus, they

mock as those who seek the easy way out, the seekers of smooth things.

Who is this group then, the seekers of smooth things? This is a name that

the group at Qumran gave to the Pharisees. Specifically the group that rebels

against Alexander Jarmaeus and that is then punished by Alexander Jannaeus

with crucifixion and that is described in this document, the Pesher Nahum, as

those who seek smooth things, that is the Pharisees, and remember that one

of the groups that was especially opposed to Alexander Jannaeus’ disregard

for the observance of Jewish law was the Pharisees.

Alexander Jannaeus dies in 76 B.C. and then he is succeeded to the throne by

his widow, Salome Alexandra, and she rules the Hasmonean kingdom until

67 B.C. when she dies, and this is actually very interesting too because here

we have an example of a Hasmonean queen ruling. By the way, of course,

Salome Alexandra as a woman automatically was disqualified from serving

as high priest in the Jerusalem temple. The high priest in the Jerusalem

temple could only be men, and so Salome Alexandra ruled the Hasmonean

kingdom as queen but her older son served as the high priest while she was

in oflice, and Josephus actually gives Salome Alexandra kind of a glowing

review with a little bit a qualification sort of saying, she was great even

though she was a woman and here is what he says.

She died, after reigning nine years, and she lived in all seventy-
three. She was a woman who showed no signs of the weakness of
her sex for she was sagacious to the greatest degree in the ambition
of governing and demonstrated by her deed at once that her mind
was tit for action.

So all together she was a good queen, she was a good ruler, despite being

a woman. Salome Alexandra then served as queen and her older son, John

Hyrcanus II, served as high priest. When Salome Alexandra died in 67 B.C.,

the office of king should have fallen to her older son, to John Hyrcanus II,

the problem is that Salome Alexandra had a younger son named Aristobulus

II who was very ambitious and who also wanted to be king. So what happens

after Salome Alexandra’s death is that a civil war breaks out over the struggle

to the throne between her two sons, and it is this civil war that eventually

leads to the downfall and collapse of the Hasmonean kingdom, because

eventually both of these sons during the course of the civil war are

going to turn to an outside power for help, that power being Rome, and what

is going to happen eventually is that the Romans then will simply step in and

take over the Hasmonean kingdom. The Hasmonean kingdom falls as a result

of the struggle over the throne between the two sons of Salome Alexandra.

By the time the Hasmonean kingdom reaches its height, which is roughly

around let us say, 100 B.C. or a little afterwards, what we have is then a

sizable kingdom that goes all the way up in the north through Galilee and

the area of the Golan Heights. It includes territories on the eastern side of the

Jordan River and the Dead Sea, through the area of the Judea and including

Idumaea. It is actually quite a sizable kingdom in the end and includes much

of the area that is today within the borders of the state of Israel and the

Palestinian territories, and even some area that today is in the country of

Jordan, excluding part of the Negev desert.

Who was living in this territory while the Hasmoneans had their kingdom?

What I would like to do now is turn to look at the peoples living here to the

south of the Hasmoneans kingdom, bordering on the Hasmonean kingdom,

and talk about them. The people who directly bordered on the Hasmonean

kingdom were a people called the Nabateans. The Nabateans were a Semitic

people, specifically actually they were an Arab people, their language, the

Nabatean language, is an early form of Arabic. Originally the Nabateans

were nomads in the desert and wandered desert routes through the near East

to the Mediterranean coasts.

Originally when we first started hearing about them which is roughly let us

say six century B.C., we hear about them establishing a series of caravan

routes with trading posts along the way through the desert, and what they

would do with these caravans is bring expensive items from the East, for

example myrrh, frankincense, things like that, perfumes. They would bring

these costly items by caravans through the deserts to the Mediterranean

coasts, and then from the Mediterranean coasts, these expensive luxury

items were shipped to the various Hellenistic kingdoms and other kingdoms

around the Mediterranean basin. This was a very lucrative trade, this trade in

these luxury items, and you have to imagine these caravans of various kinds

of pack animals going through the desert. These are precisely the kinds of

items that are very small, lightweight to carry, not breakable, but earn a lot of

money once you get them to their destination.

Over the course of the centuries, the Nabateans established a very lucrative

trade and began to amass quite a bit of money. Eventually some of the

trading posts along the caravan routes turned into permanent settlements,

and over the course of the centuries, these permanent settlements turned into

towns and cities. By the second and 1st centuries B.C., the Nabateans had

established a kingdom in the area through which their caravan routes passed.

The area of the Nabatean kingdom eventually came to include much of what

is today Jordan, much of what is today the Negev desert, and most of the

Sinai Peninsula. The main outlet for the Nabatean trade was the port of Gaza

on the Southern Palestine coast which you will recall was originally one the

Philistine cities.

By the 2“d and lS‘ centuries B.C. when the Nabateans established this kingdom,

they then also established a Monarchy that ruled over this kingdom, and they

established then a capital city for their kingdom at a place called Petra, which

is today in Jordan, to the southeast of the Dead Sea. Many of you might be

familiar with the city of Petra because of its landscape which is absolutely

spectacular. On the one hand, it is an extremely bleak desert landscape but

it is spectacular because it is mountainous, and not only is it mountainous,

but the mountains are made out of a red-colored sandstone. Into this sort of

bleak but very rugged red sandstone landscape, the Nabateans established

their capital city.

If you go to Petra today, you can still wander around it, and in fact it is one of

these world heritage sites today that is protected, and as you approach Petra,

one of the things that strikes you again is how utterly barren this landscape is.

One of the things that the Nabateans did was to establish a very sophisticated

water technology which enabled them to survive in desert conditions, and

not only survive and store water in these sorts of desert conditions, but even

cultivate land in these desert conditions.

When you go to Petra today and you wander around, and it is an enormous

site, you see different parts of the city. There are places where there are

houses and not surprisingly many of the houses are very affluent. Some of

them are beautifully decorated for example with wall paintings. Even though

we are in the middle of the desert, we see things like a colonnaded street,

large temples, which were dedicated to various Nabatean gods, including a

temple that has been coming to light over the last number of years with an

archaeological expedition from the United States, the Great Temple at Petra.

There is a theater which is cut into one of the sides of the cliffs, a Greek-

style theater, and very interesting to notice already that we see here Greek

or Hellenistic influence on the Nabateans. So even though they are a desert

people, originally a Nomadic people, by the time they settle down and build

their capital city at Petra, we see a great deal of Hellenistic influence on them,

just as we see Hellenistic influence on the other native peoples in this area.

By far the most spectacular thing about Petra and what it is best known for

are the rock-cut tombs, miles and miles and miles of tombs that are cut into

the cliffs. Many of these tombs consist of simple openings which led in to

one or more caves where bodies were originally buried, but in some cases,

the facades of the tombs have been cut in beautiful ways to depict buildings

so it makes it look as though you have a three-dimensional building in front

of you when, in fact, what you have is a facade where the face of the bedrock

has been cut.

The most famous of the rock-cut tombs at Petra by far is the tomb that we

are going to look at here. It is a tomb that is reached when you first go into

Petra. In order to go into Petra actually, you have to go through a very long,

narrow, windy canyon which is called the Siq. When you reach the end of

this canyon, you begin to see in front of you the beginnings of one of these

rock-cut tombs, and by far the most spectacular one of these rock-cut tombs,

and here it is, it is called The Khazneh, that is a modern Arabic name, which

means the treasury. Looking at this rock-cut tomb-which by the way might

be familiar to you from the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in

that movie the Holy Grail is supposedly in this structure, which it is not of

course, but anyway, you might have noticed it in the movie-what we see in

this rock-cut tomb is an attempt to imitate a facade of a building to make it

look like a Greek-style temple.

Again, look at the Greek or Hellenistic influence here on the Nabateans. The

quality of this particular rock-cut tomb though indicates that it must be Royal,

not only the quality but also the location of it. The fact that everybody who

goes into Petra, the first thing that you see when you emerge from the Siq is

this in front of you, so the location and the quality of this tomb indicate that

it must be royal, it must be the tomb of one of the Nabatean kings. Which one

we are not sure, possibly Aretas IV, who was the Nabatean king at around the

time of Jesus, so late 1st century B.C. early 1st century A.D., possibly that is

the king who was originally buried in this tomb.

Unfortunately because the tombs are open and people have wandering

around in them now for centuries and centuries, all of the tombs are looted

out of their original contents so we cannot say for sure now who was buried

there but best guess is that it was somebody like Aretas IV.

Although we focus on Petra as the most famous example of a Nabatean city

and rightfully so, the Nabateans established other permanent settlements in

other parts of their kingdom. In fact, there were a series of Nabateans cities

located around the Negev desert. One of them is at Avdat, or the original

Nabatean name Oboda, which is in the middle of the Negev desert. There

what we have is the original Nabatean acropolis which originally had a

temple on top of it, surrounded by houses, and we have other settlements like

that located around the Negev desert. All of these permanent settlements,

even though they are in the middle of the desert, were agricultural settlements

because the Nabateans developed a sophisticated technology which enabled

them to grow agricultural produce even under these harsh desert conditions.

When we look at other aspects of Nabatean culture, we can see very clearly

some of the Greek or Hellenistic influence reflected for example in sculpture,

reliefs, and statues. The Nabateans in terms of material culture are perhaps

best known for their pottery, spectacular pottery which is literally egg-

shell thin, fired very, very hard and decorated with beautiful abstract floral

and geometric designs. It is impossible to mistake this for any other kind

of pottery.

The neighbors of the Hasmoneans to the south were these Nabateans, and

the Nabatean kingdom then continued to exist until the year 106 A.D. when

it was annexed by the Roman emperor Trajan. What we have looked at here

now is the Hasmonean kingdom, the Nabatean kingdom to its south, and this

now sets the stage for talking some more about some of the Jewish groups

that it came to exist during the course of the Hasmonean period.