Chapter 5

Concerning the Sabbath, to keep it as it is prescribed.1. On the sixth day no man shall do any work from the time when the disk of the sun is distant from the western portal38by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.2. On the Sabbath a man shall not engage in any foolish conversation; and he shall not exact repayment from his neighbor; nor shall he give judgment in matters of property; he shall not talk about matters of work and labor to be done on the next day.3. A man shall not walk in the country to do the work of his business on the Sabbath. He shall not walk outside of his town above one thousand39cubits.4. No man shall eat on the Sabbath anything except what was previously prepared or what is spoiling in the field. He shall not eat or drink anything but what was in the camp. If he be on the way and descend to bathe, he may drink as he stands, but must not draw water in any vessel.405. He must not send a foreigner to do his business on the Sabbath day.6. A man must not put on soiled garments or such as are brought by a gentile, without washing them in water or rubbing them with frankincense.417. A man shall not exchange pledges42of his own accord on the Sabbath.8. A man shall not follow his cattle, to pasture them outside his town, except within 2000 cubits. He shall not lift his arm to strike them with his fist; if the animal is breachy, let him not take her out of the house.9. A man shall not take anything out of a house into the street, nor[pg 347]bring anything from the street into the house; and if he be in the entry, he shall not pass anything out of it or bring anything into it.10. He shall not open on the Sabbath a vessel the cover of which has been luted on.11. A man shall not carry on his person spices, going out or coming in on the Sabbath.12. Within a house he shall not lift stone nor earth on the Sabbath day.13. The nurse shall not carry an infant in arms, going out or coming in with it on the Sabbath.14. A man shall not deal harshly with his slave or his maid or his hired servant on the Sabbath.15. A man shall not deliver cattle of their young on the Sabbath day.16. If a beast fall into a cistern or trap, a man shall not lift it out on the Sabbath.17. A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written,“aside from your Sabbaths.”The dietary laws afford other examples of the strict rules of the sect.43Fish may be eaten only if, while still alive, they have been split open and drained of their blood; grasshoppers and locusts must be put alive into the water or the fire (in which they are to be cooked); honey in the comb is apparently prohibited. So, again, in a house in which a death has occurred, fixtures, such as nails and pegs in the walls, are unclean; and wood, stone, and dust are capable of contracting and communicating various kinds of uncleanness (12 15-18). The sect sees in these stricter distinctions between clean and unclean the superiority of its ordinances over those of other Jews, whom they regard as sinfully lax. The Pharisees are to them gross latitudinarians!Oaths are to be taken only by the covenant and the curses of the covenant, that is, the vows by which the members of the sect bind themselves, on their admission to it, to live in conformity with its rule and submit to the authority of those set over them,[pg 348]and the curses invoked on such as violate these obligations.44Oaths by God, whether under the nameAleph Lamed(ElorElohim) orAleph Daleth (Adonai)are prohibited;45nor is it permissible to mention in the oath the law of Moses; the formula of the oath is strictly sectarian (15 1 ff.).46But, though the name of God is not used,“if a man swear and transgress the oath, he profanes the name”(15 3). Obligations voluntarily assumed under oath (vows) are to be fulfilled to the letter; neither redemption nor annulment seems to be allowed, unless to carry out the vow would be a transgression of the covenant.Another point in which the sect is at variance with the great body of the Jews is the calendar. They represent the faithful remnant to whom God revealed the mysteries about which all Israel went astray, his holy sabbaths and his glorious festivals, and his righteous testimonies, and his true ways (3 12 ff.). The point of this appears when it is compared with Jubilees 1 14:“They will forget my law and all my commandments and all my judgments, and will go astray as to new moons and sabbaths and festivals and jubilees and ordinances”(cf. 6 34 ff., 23 19). The texts before us do not explain what the peculiarities of the sectarian calendar were, but inasmuch as the Book of Jubilees, under the title“The Book of the Division of the Times by their Jubilees and their Sabbatical Years,”is cited as an authority for the exact determination of“their ends”(the coming crisis of history), it may be inferred with much probability that our sect had a calendar constructed on principles similar to that of the Jubilees,47in which the seasons and festivals were not determined by lunar observations or astronomical tables, as among the Jews generally, but had a fixed place in a solar year. Such upsetting of the calendar is branded as heresy in Midrash Tehillim on Ps. 28 5:“They do not regard the work of the Lord,[pg 349]nor the operation of his hands....‘The operation of his hands’means the new moons; as it is said,‘God made the two great lights,’and it is written,‘He made the moon for festival seasons.’48These are the heretics who do not calculate (by the moon) the festival seasons and the equinoxes.‘He will tear them down and not build them up.’He will tear them down, in this world, and not build them up, in the world to come.”Perhaps the Boëthusians, who hired false witnesses to deceive the authorities about the appearance of the new moon, were not merely animated by a desire to harass the rabbis, but were partisans of some such calendar reform.The organization of the sect furnished it an effective means of enforcing its rules by discipline. This organization is so peculiar that it must be described in some detail. Like the normal Jewish community, it consists of three classes, priests, levites, and Israelites, to whom as a fourth class may be added proselytes. In this order they are mustered and inscribed in the rolls of the camp. In some sense all the members of the sect are priests. Ezekiel 44 15 is quoted and explained:“‘The priests and the levites and the sons of Zadok who kept the charge of his sanctuary’[sic]. The priests are the exiles of Israel who migrated from the land of Judah and [the levites are]49those who attached themselves to them; and the sons of Zadok are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the last days.”Allegory apart, it appears that the priests were of the Zadokite line, but this legitimacy is assumed, not emphasized. Priests and levites formed part of every court of ten judges (see below, p.351); and in every company of ten Israelites (the quorum of a religious assembly), a priest, well versed in the Book of Institutes,50must be present, to whose words all must conform. If the priest does not possess the requisite qualifications, and a competent levite is at hand, it shall be ordained that all who enter the camp shall go out and come in at his orders. In a[pg 350]case of leprosy the priest shall come and stand in the midst of the camp and the Supervisor shall instruct him in the interpretation of the law; even if the priest be an ignoramus, it is he who must shut up the leper, for the decision belongs to them (13 1 ff.). To a priest is assigned also the duty of taking the census of the commonalty; he who fills this office must be between thirty and sixty years old, versed in the Book of [Institutes and] in all the prescriptions of the law, to pronounce them according to their prescriptions (14 3 ff.).A much more important place in the organization is filled by an officer whose title (mebaḳḳer) signifies“examiner,”“inspector,”and may perhaps best be rendered“Supervisor.”51Every“camp,”or settlement, of the sect had a Supervisor, and over these stood a“Supervisor of all the camps,”who must be a man in the prime of life, between thirty and fifty years of age. To the Supervisor of the individual camp it belonged to instruct the community“in the works of God, and make them familiar with his wonderful deeds of might, and recount before them the things that happened long ago...; and he shall have compassion on them as a father toward his children (13 7 ff.).”52We have seen that he has even to instruct the priest in the rules for the diagnosis of leprosy.53The admission of new members to the sect is also in his hands; no one is permitted to introduce a man into the[pg 351]congregation without his consent. He examines the candidates in regard to their character and intelligence, their physical strength and courage, and their possessions, and enrolls each in his proper place in the lot54of the camp (13 11 ff.). From the following badly defaced lines so much at least can be made out, that the Supervisor had extensive powers of control over the dealings of members of the sect with outsiders in the way of trade. He evidently had also a leading part in the administration of justice and the enforcement of the discipline of the sect, but the state of the text here denies us insight into the particulars.Courts were constituted of ten members,55chosenad hocfrom the congregation, four of the tribe of Levi and Aaron and six Israelites, all well versed in the Book of Institutes and in the Foundations of the Covenant, between twenty-five and sixty years of age. No man of more than sixty shall be a judge,“for on account of the unfaithfulness of mankind his days were shortened, and through the wrath of God on the inhabitants of the earth he bade to remove their understanding before they completed their days (10 4 ff.).”The rules relating to the competence of witnesses are strict. No one may testify against the accused in a capital case who is not a god-fearing man old enough to be included in the census (that is, at least twenty years of age, Exod. 30 14); nor shall a man's testimony be credited against his neighbor who is himself a wilful transgressor of any of the commandments, until he has come to repentance (9 23-10 3). A peculiar provision is made for the case that a single witness (on whose testimony therefore conviction could not be had) sees a capital offence committed. He is to make known the facts to the Supervisor, who records the testimony in writing. If subsequently the offence is committed again in the presence of another witness, the same process is repeated; on a second repetition, the testimony of the three single witnesses combined suffices for conviction (9 16 ff.).56[pg 352]Besides the penalties of the Mosaic law, the sect has a formidable means of discipline in expulsion, or as it is called“separation from the Purity,”which may in some cases be inflicted even on the testimony of one witness (9 21 ff.). Josephus vividly depicts the desperate straits into which those came who, for grave offences, were expelled from the Essene order; being unable to eat food not prepared by members of the order, they were exposed to starvation. This particular consequence would not follow separation from our sect; but the lot of the excommunicated man was evidently hard enough.“When his deeds come to light he is to be expelled from the congregation, as though his lot had never fallen in the midst of the disciples of God; according to his misdeeds men shall bear him in remembrance ... until the day when he returns to take his place in the station of the men of perfect holiness. No man shall have any dealings with him in matters of property or work, for all the saints of the Most High have cursed him”(20 3 ff.); such have no part in the“house of the law”; their names are erased from the rolls of the congregation (20 10 f.). They are not only cut off from the communion of saints in this world, but are doomed to extermination by the hand of Belial (8 1 f., 19 14 f.). One who leads men astray and profanes the Sabbath and the festivals shall not be put to death, but shall be committed to the custody of men;57if he is cured of his error, they shall keep him for seven years, and afterwards he may come into the assembly (12 3 ff.). A member of the sect who seduces others to apostasy is more severely dealt with:“A man over whom the spirits of Belial have rule,58and who advocates defection (Deut. 13 6), shall be judged according to the law of the necromancer and the wizard”(12 2 f.; cf. Deut. 18 9).59The sect possessed the Jewish Scriptures. The books of the law are“the hut of the King”(i.e. the congregation)—the fallen hut which God had promised to raise up;“the pillar of your images”are the books of the prophets, whose words Israel despised. The founder of the sect, the star out of Jacob, is the[pg 353]interpreter of the law who came to Damascus (7 14 ff.). The authority of the Pentateuch is appealed to in support of the position of the sect in the matter of marriage and divorce; their peculiar statutes and ordinances are the true interpretation and application of the law of God. The prophets are frequently cited, and allusions to passages in the prophets or reminiscences of their phraseology are much more numerous. There are similar reminiscences of the Psalms and of the Proverbs, and perhaps of other books among the Hagiographa. As regards the Old Testament scriptures, therefore, the sect stood on common ground with Palestinian orthodoxy.60The formula of citation is peculiar; a quotation is usually introduced by the words“as he said,”rarely“as God said”; or with the name of the sacred author,“as Moses said.”Besides the Biblical books, we have a quotation from Levi—probably the Testament of that Patriarch—introduced by the same phrase as quotations from the Bible; and the reader is referred to the Book of Jubilees by name for an exact computation of the last times. There is nothing to indicate that the authority attributed to these writings was inferior to that of the Hagiographa. The canon of the“Scriptures”was not defined, even in the rabbinical schools, until the second century of our era, and in the sects many books enjoyed high esteem which the orthodox repudiated.61To a different class belong, apparently, the Book of Institutes, and the Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,62but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded[pg 354]of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the“statutes and ordinances”of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to asperush; in technical phrase, a collection of sectarianhalakoth, such as is preserved in the second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a legal manual. The objection to committinghalakahto writing which was long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.The sect had houses of worship, which a man in a state of uncleanness is forbidden to enter (11 22),63but nothing more is said about them, except that when the trumpets of the congregation are blown, the blowing shall follow or precede the service, and not interrupt it. It is a natural surmise that they answered to the synagogues both as places of worship and of religious instruction, such, for example, as the Supervisor is required to give. The name,Beth hishtahawōth, literally,“house of bowing[pg 355]down”(in worship), is peculiar, and may have been chosen to distinguish these sectarian conventicles from the synagogues of regular Judaism, as the English nonconformists of various stripes would not call their meeting-houses churches. It is possible that the prayers of the sect may have been accompanied by genuflections and prostrations such as, though unknown in the synagogue, have formed in all ages and religions a common feature of Oriental worship; but it is also possible that“bowing down”simply stands by metonymy for worship, as is often the case with the corresponding Syriac verb,segad.64Sacrificial worship was also maintained.65The City of the Sanctuary was eminently holy; sexual intercourse within its limits is forbidden,“defiling the City of the Sanctuary with their impurity”(beniddatham).66To this city, probably, the sacrifices were brought to which there is frequent reference.“No one shall send to the altar burnt offerings or oblation, frankincense or wood, by a man who is unclean with any of the forms of uncleanness; for it is written, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the righteous is an acceptable oblation”(11 18 ff.). On the Sabbath nothing is to be brought upon the altar except the Sabbath burnt offerings—that is, we may suppose, the stated daily burnt offerings with the supplementary Sabbath victims (13 17 f.; see Num. 28 1-10). Votive sacrifices are also mentioned;[pg 356]it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.). There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community; in its registers their names are enrolled in the first rank. Their place in the courts and in the local religious community, and their duties in the examination of lepers, have already been mentioned. Those who officiated at the sanctuary had doubtless their legal toll from private sacrifices of every kind. Lost property for which no owner appears falls to the priests; a man who has appropriated such property shall confess to the priest, and all that he pays in restitution belongs to the priest, besides the ram of the trespass offering (9 13 ff.).A charitable fund is provided by monthly payment of certain dues by members of the community to the Supervisor. From this fund relief is given by the judges to the poor and needy, to the aged, to the wanderer (?), to such as have fallen into captivity to foreigners, and others (14 12 ff.).The religious conceptions and beliefs of the sect present little that is peculiar. For God the nameElis consistently used, without any epithets.Adonaiis mentioned only to forbid its use in oaths. The only other name which occurs is the Most High (once, in the phrase“the saints of the Most High,”that is, the members of the sect). There is repeated reference to the holy spirit: God, through his Anointed, made men know his holy spirit (2 12); the opponents of the sect, by blasphemous speech against the statutes of God's covenant, defiled their holy spirit (5 11);67its members are warned not to defile his holy spirit by failing to observe the distinctions of clean and unclean which God has ordained (7 3 f.).The“Prince of Lights (Urim),”through whom Moses and Aaron arise, is perhaps, as the contrast to Belial suggests, one of the highest angels.68The destroying angels execute God's[pg 357]inescapable judgment on those who turned out of the way and despised the statute (2 6). The fall of the Watchers, which is a favorite subject in the apocalyptic literature, is referred to in 2 18. The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is“let loose”during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.); his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.); he also exterminates the faithless in the day of God's visitation (8 1 f.). Another name for the devil is Mastema (the commoner name in Jubilees), equivalent to Satan,“the adversary.”The angel of Mastema ceases to follow a man who resolves to return to the law of Moses (16 4 f.). According to Jubilees 10 8 f., 11 5, Mastema had permission from God to employ some of his evil spirits to corrupt men and lead them astray.Concerning the future life we read only that those who hold firmly to the law are“for eternal life,”69or, as it is elsewhere expressed,“have the assurance that they shall live a thousand generations.”To a punishment of the wicked after death70or to a resurrection of the dead there is no allusion whatever.The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly theyeṣer hara'of the rabbis). It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.). We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. Particular emphasis is laid in several places on the commandments,“thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people,”“thou shalt reprove thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him”(Lev. 19 17, 18).71[pg 358]Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further,“any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.”It is forbidden also to exact of another an oath except in the presence of the judges; he who does so transgresses the law which forbids a man to take justice into his own hands. Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property,“in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme”(12 6 f.), that is, to prevent the profaning of God's name (15 3), a motive frequently urged in similar connection in the rabbinical writings. On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.), He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. Like many sects, it exhibits the separatist inclination to outdo the orthodox in zeal for the letter and in strenuousness of practice, and it is not surprising that its interpretations of the law frequently agree with those of other strict-constructionists, such as Samaritans, Sadducees, Karaites; but these coincidences illustrate a common tendency rather than prove historical connection. The[pg 359]relation to the Book of Jubilees is, however, such as to show that there was some affinity between our sect and the circles in which that work originated. Jubilees is cited as authority on the last times; its calendar probably contains the secrets of God's holy sabbaths and glorious festivals about which all Israel was in error; the rules for the observance of the Sabbath in our book accord in many particulars with the injunctions in Jubilees 50 6 ff. (see also 2 26 ff.); and various other resemblances might be pointed out, such as the preference for the unornamented word God (in Jubilees, God, or the Lord), in contrast with the many mouth-filling periphrases in Enoch; the holy spirit in men; the name Mastema for the adversary instead of Satan; Belial who ensnares men, and the spirits of Belial which rule over sinners, besides others to which Dr. Schechter directs attention in his notes. The relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is less clear. The saying attributed to Levi (4 15) is not found in the Testament, and the other resemblances Dr. Schechter has noted are vague or belong to the commonplaces. The place of honor given to Judah in the Testaments, as we have them, is strikingly at variance with the attitude of our sect toward that tribe and its princes. The Levite Messiah of the Testaments is not precisely the same as the“Anointed from Aaron and Israel”in our book. In Jubilees also there are salient features, such as the more developed angelology and the form of the Messianic expectation, which hardly permit us to suppose that the book was a product of our sect, however highly it may have been esteemed by it.The sect gives especial honor to the sons of Zadok, the ancient priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 44 15, 2 Chron. 31 10, Sirach 51 12 Heb.); they are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the latter times (4 3); it was Zadok who brought to light the Book of the Law which no one had seen since the death of Eleazar and Joshua (5 5). The context of the latter passage would suggest that Zadok the contemporary of David is meant, who after the deposition of Abiathar became Solomon's chief priest.72The precedence given[pg 360]to the sons of Zadok may possibly have a side reference to the illegitimate high priests of Seleucid creation, such as Menelaus, though, if this were the intention, we should expect it to be emphasized.The passages quoted are the only places in the book in which the name Zadok or the sons of Zadok appear, and they are certainly a very slender reason for describing the body which produced the book as a“Zadokite”sect, whatever meaning may be attached to the term. On the contrary, one of the outstanding things in the constitution of the sect is the predominance of the lay element. The Supervisor is a layman; laymen form the majority in every court; the Messiah is the“Anointed from Aaronand Israel.”Whether the external testimony upon which Dr. Schechter relies for justification of the name is more adequate will be considered below.Zadok and the sons of Zadok suggest the Sadducees,73whose name, according to the most probable explanation, designates them as descendants (or followers and partisans) of Zadok. Here again it is a question whether Zadok of David's time is meant, so that the Sadducees were the Zadokite aristocracy of the priesthood, as most modern scholars think, or whether the name of the Sadducee sect is derived from a heresiarch of much later times, as the Jewish legend represents which makes Zadok, from whom the sect descends, a recalcitrant disciple of Antigonus of Socho, about the middle of the second centuryb.c., contemporary, if we rightly interpret our texts, with the origin of the sect we are studying.With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The[pg 361]accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,74so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)75says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first centuryb.c., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.76The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his[pg 362]learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).77The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty[pg 363]days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (epagomenae). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.78Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,79and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of onlyfourextra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.80We do not know whether the Dositheans[pg 364]of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or countedfiveextra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius81on 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,”82is inclined to perceive in the statement“at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.”The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not,“some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,”nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon's conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,83“some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.”Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.Dr. Schechter thinks that the statement of Epiphanius quoted[pg 365]above that the Dositheans“abstain from eating living creatures”“may have some connection with the law in our text on p. 12, l. 11, which may perhaps be understood to imply that the sect forbade honey, regarding it as'eber min haḥai(a limb cut off from a living animal), which would agree with the testimony of Abul-Fath that they forbade the eating of eggs, except those which were found in a slaughtered fowl.”Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται does not mean“abstain from eating living creatures,”but“abstain from animal food,”84while our sect certainly did not include vegetarianism among its eccentricities, any more than the depreciation of marriage.Several authors describe the Dositheans as extravagant sabbatarians. Origen reports that their rule was, that in whatever place and in whatever posture the Sabbath found a man, there and thus he was to remain till its end. Abul-Fath gives a longer account of their Sabbath laws, which are much stricter than those of our texts. It was forbidden, for example, to feed domestic animals or give them drink on the Sabbath, they were to be provided on Friday with enough provender and water to last them through the Sabbath. Extreme sabbatarianism is, however, a sectarian propensity which does not have to be borrowed.Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans“have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,”in which he thinks“we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination), and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles”(Introduction, pp. xxiii f.). What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner; for they regard it as a defilement to come in contact with any one or even to touch[pg 366]a man of another religion.85It 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 607a.d.), charges Dositheus86is natural enough in a Samaritan heresiarch; in the same sentence Eulogius accuses him of scorning the prophets of God, which, again, is not peculiar to the Dositheans, but is the general Samaritan position. It has been remarked above (p. 353) that our sect gives especial honor to the books of the prophets“whose words Israel has despised”; and, however unfriendly the attitude of these seceders to the degenerate Judah of their time, there is no indication of animosity to the patriarch, as there is none in the Jubilees.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,87says:“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 analogous to the paternal and maternal aunt.”88This 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 analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common[pg 367]in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.89Kirkisani 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,90had 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,91and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Passover 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, Hadassi, 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 passage 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 Boëthus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites,”etc.92Zadok'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 Boëthus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Baṣir (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.93The Karaite author[pg 368]of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in manuscript in St. Petersburg94polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the greatMalleus 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.95Saadia, who mistakenly assumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity—the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin96—asserted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boëthus 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.”97Saadia 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 passage 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[pg 369]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:—

Concerning the Sabbath, to keep it as it is prescribed.1. On the sixth day no man shall do any work from the time when the disk of the sun is distant from the western portal38by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.2. On the Sabbath a man shall not engage in any foolish conversation; and he shall not exact repayment from his neighbor; nor shall he give judgment in matters of property; he shall not talk about matters of work and labor to be done on the next day.3. A man shall not walk in the country to do the work of his business on the Sabbath. He shall not walk outside of his town above one thousand39cubits.4. No man shall eat on the Sabbath anything except what was previously prepared or what is spoiling in the field. He shall not eat or drink anything but what was in the camp. If he be on the way and descend to bathe, he may drink as he stands, but must not draw water in any vessel.405. He must not send a foreigner to do his business on the Sabbath day.6. A man must not put on soiled garments or such as are brought by a gentile, without washing them in water or rubbing them with frankincense.417. A man shall not exchange pledges42of his own accord on the Sabbath.8. A man shall not follow his cattle, to pasture them outside his town, except within 2000 cubits. He shall not lift his arm to strike them with his fist; if the animal is breachy, let him not take her out of the house.9. A man shall not take anything out of a house into the street, nor[pg 347]bring anything from the street into the house; and if he be in the entry, he shall not pass anything out of it or bring anything into it.10. He shall not open on the Sabbath a vessel the cover of which has been luted on.11. A man shall not carry on his person spices, going out or coming in on the Sabbath.12. Within a house he shall not lift stone nor earth on the Sabbath day.13. The nurse shall not carry an infant in arms, going out or coming in with it on the Sabbath.14. A man shall not deal harshly with his slave or his maid or his hired servant on the Sabbath.15. A man shall not deliver cattle of their young on the Sabbath day.16. If a beast fall into a cistern or trap, a man shall not lift it out on the Sabbath.17. A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written,“aside from your Sabbaths.”The dietary laws afford other examples of the strict rules of the sect.43Fish may be eaten only if, while still alive, they have been split open and drained of their blood; grasshoppers and locusts must be put alive into the water or the fire (in which they are to be cooked); honey in the comb is apparently prohibited. So, again, in a house in which a death has occurred, fixtures, such as nails and pegs in the walls, are unclean; and wood, stone, and dust are capable of contracting and communicating various kinds of uncleanness (12 15-18). The sect sees in these stricter distinctions between clean and unclean the superiority of its ordinances over those of other Jews, whom they regard as sinfully lax. The Pharisees are to them gross latitudinarians!Oaths are to be taken only by the covenant and the curses of the covenant, that is, the vows by which the members of the sect bind themselves, on their admission to it, to live in conformity with its rule and submit to the authority of those set over them,[pg 348]and the curses invoked on such as violate these obligations.44Oaths by God, whether under the nameAleph Lamed(ElorElohim) orAleph Daleth (Adonai)are prohibited;45nor is it permissible to mention in the oath the law of Moses; the formula of the oath is strictly sectarian (15 1 ff.).46But, though the name of God is not used,“if a man swear and transgress the oath, he profanes the name”(15 3). Obligations voluntarily assumed under oath (vows) are to be fulfilled to the letter; neither redemption nor annulment seems to be allowed, unless to carry out the vow would be a transgression of the covenant.Another point in which the sect is at variance with the great body of the Jews is the calendar. They represent the faithful remnant to whom God revealed the mysteries about which all Israel went astray, his holy sabbaths and his glorious festivals, and his righteous testimonies, and his true ways (3 12 ff.). The point of this appears when it is compared with Jubilees 1 14:“They will forget my law and all my commandments and all my judgments, and will go astray as to new moons and sabbaths and festivals and jubilees and ordinances”(cf. 6 34 ff., 23 19). The texts before us do not explain what the peculiarities of the sectarian calendar were, but inasmuch as the Book of Jubilees, under the title“The Book of the Division of the Times by their Jubilees and their Sabbatical Years,”is cited as an authority for the exact determination of“their ends”(the coming crisis of history), it may be inferred with much probability that our sect had a calendar constructed on principles similar to that of the Jubilees,47in which the seasons and festivals were not determined by lunar observations or astronomical tables, as among the Jews generally, but had a fixed place in a solar year. Such upsetting of the calendar is branded as heresy in Midrash Tehillim on Ps. 28 5:“They do not regard the work of the Lord,[pg 349]nor the operation of his hands....‘The operation of his hands’means the new moons; as it is said,‘God made the two great lights,’and it is written,‘He made the moon for festival seasons.’48These are the heretics who do not calculate (by the moon) the festival seasons and the equinoxes.‘He will tear them down and not build them up.’He will tear them down, in this world, and not build them up, in the world to come.”Perhaps the Boëthusians, who hired false witnesses to deceive the authorities about the appearance of the new moon, were not merely animated by a desire to harass the rabbis, but were partisans of some such calendar reform.The organization of the sect furnished it an effective means of enforcing its rules by discipline. This organization is so peculiar that it must be described in some detail. Like the normal Jewish community, it consists of three classes, priests, levites, and Israelites, to whom as a fourth class may be added proselytes. In this order they are mustered and inscribed in the rolls of the camp. In some sense all the members of the sect are priests. Ezekiel 44 15 is quoted and explained:“‘The priests and the levites and the sons of Zadok who kept the charge of his sanctuary’[sic]. The priests are the exiles of Israel who migrated from the land of Judah and [the levites are]49those who attached themselves to them; and the sons of Zadok are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the last days.”Allegory apart, it appears that the priests were of the Zadokite line, but this legitimacy is assumed, not emphasized. Priests and levites formed part of every court of ten judges (see below, p.351); and in every company of ten Israelites (the quorum of a religious assembly), a priest, well versed in the Book of Institutes,50must be present, to whose words all must conform. If the priest does not possess the requisite qualifications, and a competent levite is at hand, it shall be ordained that all who enter the camp shall go out and come in at his orders. In a[pg 350]case of leprosy the priest shall come and stand in the midst of the camp and the Supervisor shall instruct him in the interpretation of the law; even if the priest be an ignoramus, it is he who must shut up the leper, for the decision belongs to them (13 1 ff.). To a priest is assigned also the duty of taking the census of the commonalty; he who fills this office must be between thirty and sixty years old, versed in the Book of [Institutes and] in all the prescriptions of the law, to pronounce them according to their prescriptions (14 3 ff.).A much more important place in the organization is filled by an officer whose title (mebaḳḳer) signifies“examiner,”“inspector,”and may perhaps best be rendered“Supervisor.”51Every“camp,”or settlement, of the sect had a Supervisor, and over these stood a“Supervisor of all the camps,”who must be a man in the prime of life, between thirty and fifty years of age. To the Supervisor of the individual camp it belonged to instruct the community“in the works of God, and make them familiar with his wonderful deeds of might, and recount before them the things that happened long ago...; and he shall have compassion on them as a father toward his children (13 7 ff.).”52We have seen that he has even to instruct the priest in the rules for the diagnosis of leprosy.53The admission of new members to the sect is also in his hands; no one is permitted to introduce a man into the[pg 351]congregation without his consent. He examines the candidates in regard to their character and intelligence, their physical strength and courage, and their possessions, and enrolls each in his proper place in the lot54of the camp (13 11 ff.). From the following badly defaced lines so much at least can be made out, that the Supervisor had extensive powers of control over the dealings of members of the sect with outsiders in the way of trade. He evidently had also a leading part in the administration of justice and the enforcement of the discipline of the sect, but the state of the text here denies us insight into the particulars.Courts were constituted of ten members,55chosenad hocfrom the congregation, four of the tribe of Levi and Aaron and six Israelites, all well versed in the Book of Institutes and in the Foundations of the Covenant, between twenty-five and sixty years of age. No man of more than sixty shall be a judge,“for on account of the unfaithfulness of mankind his days were shortened, and through the wrath of God on the inhabitants of the earth he bade to remove their understanding before they completed their days (10 4 ff.).”The rules relating to the competence of witnesses are strict. No one may testify against the accused in a capital case who is not a god-fearing man old enough to be included in the census (that is, at least twenty years of age, Exod. 30 14); nor shall a man's testimony be credited against his neighbor who is himself a wilful transgressor of any of the commandments, until he has come to repentance (9 23-10 3). A peculiar provision is made for the case that a single witness (on whose testimony therefore conviction could not be had) sees a capital offence committed. He is to make known the facts to the Supervisor, who records the testimony in writing. If subsequently the offence is committed again in the presence of another witness, the same process is repeated; on a second repetition, the testimony of the three single witnesses combined suffices for conviction (9 16 ff.).56[pg 352]Besides the penalties of the Mosaic law, the sect has a formidable means of discipline in expulsion, or as it is called“separation from the Purity,”which may in some cases be inflicted even on the testimony of one witness (9 21 ff.). Josephus vividly depicts the desperate straits into which those came who, for grave offences, were expelled from the Essene order; being unable to eat food not prepared by members of the order, they were exposed to starvation. This particular consequence would not follow separation from our sect; but the lot of the excommunicated man was evidently hard enough.“When his deeds come to light he is to be expelled from the congregation, as though his lot had never fallen in the midst of the disciples of God; according to his misdeeds men shall bear him in remembrance ... until the day when he returns to take his place in the station of the men of perfect holiness. No man shall have any dealings with him in matters of property or work, for all the saints of the Most High have cursed him”(20 3 ff.); such have no part in the“house of the law”; their names are erased from the rolls of the congregation (20 10 f.). They are not only cut off from the communion of saints in this world, but are doomed to extermination by the hand of Belial (8 1 f., 19 14 f.). One who leads men astray and profanes the Sabbath and the festivals shall not be put to death, but shall be committed to the custody of men;57if he is cured of his error, they shall keep him for seven years, and afterwards he may come into the assembly (12 3 ff.). A member of the sect who seduces others to apostasy is more severely dealt with:“A man over whom the spirits of Belial have rule,58and who advocates defection (Deut. 13 6), shall be judged according to the law of the necromancer and the wizard”(12 2 f.; cf. Deut. 18 9).59The sect possessed the Jewish Scriptures. The books of the law are“the hut of the King”(i.e. the congregation)—the fallen hut which God had promised to raise up;“the pillar of your images”are the books of the prophets, whose words Israel despised. The founder of the sect, the star out of Jacob, is the[pg 353]interpreter of the law who came to Damascus (7 14 ff.). The authority of the Pentateuch is appealed to in support of the position of the sect in the matter of marriage and divorce; their peculiar statutes and ordinances are the true interpretation and application of the law of God. The prophets are frequently cited, and allusions to passages in the prophets or reminiscences of their phraseology are much more numerous. There are similar reminiscences of the Psalms and of the Proverbs, and perhaps of other books among the Hagiographa. As regards the Old Testament scriptures, therefore, the sect stood on common ground with Palestinian orthodoxy.60The formula of citation is peculiar; a quotation is usually introduced by the words“as he said,”rarely“as God said”; or with the name of the sacred author,“as Moses said.”Besides the Biblical books, we have a quotation from Levi—probably the Testament of that Patriarch—introduced by the same phrase as quotations from the Bible; and the reader is referred to the Book of Jubilees by name for an exact computation of the last times. There is nothing to indicate that the authority attributed to these writings was inferior to that of the Hagiographa. The canon of the“Scriptures”was not defined, even in the rabbinical schools, until the second century of our era, and in the sects many books enjoyed high esteem which the orthodox repudiated.61To a different class belong, apparently, the Book of Institutes, and the Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,62but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded[pg 354]of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the“statutes and ordinances”of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to asperush; in technical phrase, a collection of sectarianhalakoth, such as is preserved in the second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a legal manual. The objection to committinghalakahto writing which was long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.The sect had houses of worship, which a man in a state of uncleanness is forbidden to enter (11 22),63but nothing more is said about them, except that when the trumpets of the congregation are blown, the blowing shall follow or precede the service, and not interrupt it. It is a natural surmise that they answered to the synagogues both as places of worship and of religious instruction, such, for example, as the Supervisor is required to give. The name,Beth hishtahawōth, literally,“house of bowing[pg 355]down”(in worship), is peculiar, and may have been chosen to distinguish these sectarian conventicles from the synagogues of regular Judaism, as the English nonconformists of various stripes would not call their meeting-houses churches. It is possible that the prayers of the sect may have been accompanied by genuflections and prostrations such as, though unknown in the synagogue, have formed in all ages and religions a common feature of Oriental worship; but it is also possible that“bowing down”simply stands by metonymy for worship, as is often the case with the corresponding Syriac verb,segad.64Sacrificial worship was also maintained.65The City of the Sanctuary was eminently holy; sexual intercourse within its limits is forbidden,“defiling the City of the Sanctuary with their impurity”(beniddatham).66To this city, probably, the sacrifices were brought to which there is frequent reference.“No one shall send to the altar burnt offerings or oblation, frankincense or wood, by a man who is unclean with any of the forms of uncleanness; for it is written, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the righteous is an acceptable oblation”(11 18 ff.). On the Sabbath nothing is to be brought upon the altar except the Sabbath burnt offerings—that is, we may suppose, the stated daily burnt offerings with the supplementary Sabbath victims (13 17 f.; see Num. 28 1-10). Votive sacrifices are also mentioned;[pg 356]it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.). There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community; in its registers their names are enrolled in the first rank. Their place in the courts and in the local religious community, and their duties in the examination of lepers, have already been mentioned. Those who officiated at the sanctuary had doubtless their legal toll from private sacrifices of every kind. Lost property for which no owner appears falls to the priests; a man who has appropriated such property shall confess to the priest, and all that he pays in restitution belongs to the priest, besides the ram of the trespass offering (9 13 ff.).A charitable fund is provided by monthly payment of certain dues by members of the community to the Supervisor. From this fund relief is given by the judges to the poor and needy, to the aged, to the wanderer (?), to such as have fallen into captivity to foreigners, and others (14 12 ff.).The religious conceptions and beliefs of the sect present little that is peculiar. For God the nameElis consistently used, without any epithets.Adonaiis mentioned only to forbid its use in oaths. The only other name which occurs is the Most High (once, in the phrase“the saints of the Most High,”that is, the members of the sect). There is repeated reference to the holy spirit: God, through his Anointed, made men know his holy spirit (2 12); the opponents of the sect, by blasphemous speech against the statutes of God's covenant, defiled their holy spirit (5 11);67its members are warned not to defile his holy spirit by failing to observe the distinctions of clean and unclean which God has ordained (7 3 f.).The“Prince of Lights (Urim),”through whom Moses and Aaron arise, is perhaps, as the contrast to Belial suggests, one of the highest angels.68The destroying angels execute God's[pg 357]inescapable judgment on those who turned out of the way and despised the statute (2 6). The fall of the Watchers, which is a favorite subject in the apocalyptic literature, is referred to in 2 18. The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is“let loose”during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.); his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.); he also exterminates the faithless in the day of God's visitation (8 1 f.). Another name for the devil is Mastema (the commoner name in Jubilees), equivalent to Satan,“the adversary.”The angel of Mastema ceases to follow a man who resolves to return to the law of Moses (16 4 f.). According to Jubilees 10 8 f., 11 5, Mastema had permission from God to employ some of his evil spirits to corrupt men and lead them astray.Concerning the future life we read only that those who hold firmly to the law are“for eternal life,”69or, as it is elsewhere expressed,“have the assurance that they shall live a thousand generations.”To a punishment of the wicked after death70or to a resurrection of the dead there is no allusion whatever.The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly theyeṣer hara'of the rabbis). It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.). We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. Particular emphasis is laid in several places on the commandments,“thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people,”“thou shalt reprove thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him”(Lev. 19 17, 18).71[pg 358]Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further,“any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.”It is forbidden also to exact of another an oath except in the presence of the judges; he who does so transgresses the law which forbids a man to take justice into his own hands. Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property,“in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme”(12 6 f.), that is, to prevent the profaning of God's name (15 3), a motive frequently urged in similar connection in the rabbinical writings. On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.), He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. Like many sects, it exhibits the separatist inclination to outdo the orthodox in zeal for the letter and in strenuousness of practice, and it is not surprising that its interpretations of the law frequently agree with those of other strict-constructionists, such as Samaritans, Sadducees, Karaites; but these coincidences illustrate a common tendency rather than prove historical connection. The[pg 359]relation to the Book of Jubilees is, however, such as to show that there was some affinity between our sect and the circles in which that work originated. Jubilees is cited as authority on the last times; its calendar probably contains the secrets of God's holy sabbaths and glorious festivals about which all Israel was in error; the rules for the observance of the Sabbath in our book accord in many particulars with the injunctions in Jubilees 50 6 ff. (see also 2 26 ff.); and various other resemblances might be pointed out, such as the preference for the unornamented word God (in Jubilees, God, or the Lord), in contrast with the many mouth-filling periphrases in Enoch; the holy spirit in men; the name Mastema for the adversary instead of Satan; Belial who ensnares men, and the spirits of Belial which rule over sinners, besides others to which Dr. Schechter directs attention in his notes. The relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is less clear. The saying attributed to Levi (4 15) is not found in the Testament, and the other resemblances Dr. Schechter has noted are vague or belong to the commonplaces. The place of honor given to Judah in the Testaments, as we have them, is strikingly at variance with the attitude of our sect toward that tribe and its princes. The Levite Messiah of the Testaments is not precisely the same as the“Anointed from Aaron and Israel”in our book. In Jubilees also there are salient features, such as the more developed angelology and the form of the Messianic expectation, which hardly permit us to suppose that the book was a product of our sect, however highly it may have been esteemed by it.The sect gives especial honor to the sons of Zadok, the ancient priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 44 15, 2 Chron. 31 10, Sirach 51 12 Heb.); they are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the latter times (4 3); it was Zadok who brought to light the Book of the Law which no one had seen since the death of Eleazar and Joshua (5 5). The context of the latter passage would suggest that Zadok the contemporary of David is meant, who after the deposition of Abiathar became Solomon's chief priest.72The precedence given[pg 360]to the sons of Zadok may possibly have a side reference to the illegitimate high priests of Seleucid creation, such as Menelaus, though, if this were the intention, we should expect it to be emphasized.The passages quoted are the only places in the book in which the name Zadok or the sons of Zadok appear, and they are certainly a very slender reason for describing the body which produced the book as a“Zadokite”sect, whatever meaning may be attached to the term. On the contrary, one of the outstanding things in the constitution of the sect is the predominance of the lay element. The Supervisor is a layman; laymen form the majority in every court; the Messiah is the“Anointed from Aaronand Israel.”Whether the external testimony upon which Dr. Schechter relies for justification of the name is more adequate will be considered below.Zadok and the sons of Zadok suggest the Sadducees,73whose name, according to the most probable explanation, designates them as descendants (or followers and partisans) of Zadok. Here again it is a question whether Zadok of David's time is meant, so that the Sadducees were the Zadokite aristocracy of the priesthood, as most modern scholars think, or whether the name of the Sadducee sect is derived from a heresiarch of much later times, as the Jewish legend represents which makes Zadok, from whom the sect descends, a recalcitrant disciple of Antigonus of Socho, about the middle of the second centuryb.c., contemporary, if we rightly interpret our texts, with the origin of the sect we are studying.With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The[pg 361]accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,74so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)75says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first centuryb.c., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.76The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his[pg 362]learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).77The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty[pg 363]days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (epagomenae). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.78Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,79and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of onlyfourextra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.80We do not know whether the Dositheans[pg 364]of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or countedfiveextra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius81on 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,”82is inclined to perceive in the statement“at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.”The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not,“some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,”nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon's conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,83“some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.”Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.Dr. Schechter thinks that the statement of Epiphanius quoted[pg 365]above that the Dositheans“abstain from eating living creatures”“may have some connection with the law in our text on p. 12, l. 11, which may perhaps be understood to imply that the sect forbade honey, regarding it as'eber min haḥai(a limb cut off from a living animal), which would agree with the testimony of Abul-Fath that they forbade the eating of eggs, except those which were found in a slaughtered fowl.”Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται does not mean“abstain from eating living creatures,”but“abstain from animal food,”84while our sect certainly did not include vegetarianism among its eccentricities, any more than the depreciation of marriage.Several authors describe the Dositheans as extravagant sabbatarians. Origen reports that their rule was, that in whatever place and in whatever posture the Sabbath found a man, there and thus he was to remain till its end. Abul-Fath gives a longer account of their Sabbath laws, which are much stricter than those of our texts. It was forbidden, for example, to feed domestic animals or give them drink on the Sabbath, they were to be provided on Friday with enough provender and water to last them through the Sabbath. Extreme sabbatarianism is, however, a sectarian propensity which does not have to be borrowed.Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans“have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,”in which he thinks“we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination), and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles”(Introduction, pp. xxiii f.). What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner; for they regard it as a defilement to come in contact with any one or even to touch[pg 366]a man of another religion.85It 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 607a.d.), charges Dositheus86is natural enough in a Samaritan heresiarch; in the same sentence Eulogius accuses him of scorning the prophets of God, which, again, is not peculiar to the Dositheans, but is the general Samaritan position. It has been remarked above (p. 353) that our sect gives especial honor to the books of the prophets“whose words Israel has despised”; and, however unfriendly the attitude of these seceders to the degenerate Judah of their time, there is no indication of animosity to the patriarch, as there is none in the Jubilees.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,87says:“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 analogous to the paternal and maternal aunt.”88This 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 analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common[pg 367]in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.89Kirkisani 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,90had 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,91and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Passover 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, Hadassi, 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 passage 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 Boëthus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites,”etc.92Zadok'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 Boëthus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Baṣir (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.93The Karaite author[pg 368]of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in manuscript in St. Petersburg94polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the greatMalleus 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.95Saadia, who mistakenly assumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity—the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin96—asserted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boëthus 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.”97Saadia 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 passage 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[pg 369]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:—

Concerning the Sabbath, to keep it as it is prescribed.1. On the sixth day no man shall do any work from the time when the disk of the sun is distant from the western portal38by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.2. On the Sabbath a man shall not engage in any foolish conversation; and he shall not exact repayment from his neighbor; nor shall he give judgment in matters of property; he shall not talk about matters of work and labor to be done on the next day.3. A man shall not walk in the country to do the work of his business on the Sabbath. He shall not walk outside of his town above one thousand39cubits.4. No man shall eat on the Sabbath anything except what was previously prepared or what is spoiling in the field. He shall not eat or drink anything but what was in the camp. If he be on the way and descend to bathe, he may drink as he stands, but must not draw water in any vessel.405. He must not send a foreigner to do his business on the Sabbath day.6. A man must not put on soiled garments or such as are brought by a gentile, without washing them in water or rubbing them with frankincense.417. A man shall not exchange pledges42of his own accord on the Sabbath.8. A man shall not follow his cattle, to pasture them outside his town, except within 2000 cubits. He shall not lift his arm to strike them with his fist; if the animal is breachy, let him not take her out of the house.9. A man shall not take anything out of a house into the street, nor[pg 347]bring anything from the street into the house; and if he be in the entry, he shall not pass anything out of it or bring anything into it.10. He shall not open on the Sabbath a vessel the cover of which has been luted on.11. A man shall not carry on his person spices, going out or coming in on the Sabbath.12. Within a house he shall not lift stone nor earth on the Sabbath day.13. The nurse shall not carry an infant in arms, going out or coming in with it on the Sabbath.14. A man shall not deal harshly with his slave or his maid or his hired servant on the Sabbath.15. A man shall not deliver cattle of their young on the Sabbath day.16. If a beast fall into a cistern or trap, a man shall not lift it out on the Sabbath.17. A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written,“aside from your Sabbaths.”The dietary laws afford other examples of the strict rules of the sect.43Fish may be eaten only if, while still alive, they have been split open and drained of their blood; grasshoppers and locusts must be put alive into the water or the fire (in which they are to be cooked); honey in the comb is apparently prohibited. So, again, in a house in which a death has occurred, fixtures, such as nails and pegs in the walls, are unclean; and wood, stone, and dust are capable of contracting and communicating various kinds of uncleanness (12 15-18). The sect sees in these stricter distinctions between clean and unclean the superiority of its ordinances over those of other Jews, whom they regard as sinfully lax. The Pharisees are to them gross latitudinarians!Oaths are to be taken only by the covenant and the curses of the covenant, that is, the vows by which the members of the sect bind themselves, on their admission to it, to live in conformity with its rule and submit to the authority of those set over them,[pg 348]and the curses invoked on such as violate these obligations.44Oaths by God, whether under the nameAleph Lamed(ElorElohim) orAleph Daleth (Adonai)are prohibited;45nor is it permissible to mention in the oath the law of Moses; the formula of the oath is strictly sectarian (15 1 ff.).46But, though the name of God is not used,“if a man swear and transgress the oath, he profanes the name”(15 3). Obligations voluntarily assumed under oath (vows) are to be fulfilled to the letter; neither redemption nor annulment seems to be allowed, unless to carry out the vow would be a transgression of the covenant.Another point in which the sect is at variance with the great body of the Jews is the calendar. They represent the faithful remnant to whom God revealed the mysteries about which all Israel went astray, his holy sabbaths and his glorious festivals, and his righteous testimonies, and his true ways (3 12 ff.). The point of this appears when it is compared with Jubilees 1 14:“They will forget my law and all my commandments and all my judgments, and will go astray as to new moons and sabbaths and festivals and jubilees and ordinances”(cf. 6 34 ff., 23 19). The texts before us do not explain what the peculiarities of the sectarian calendar were, but inasmuch as the Book of Jubilees, under the title“The Book of the Division of the Times by their Jubilees and their Sabbatical Years,”is cited as an authority for the exact determination of“their ends”(the coming crisis of history), it may be inferred with much probability that our sect had a calendar constructed on principles similar to that of the Jubilees,47in which the seasons and festivals were not determined by lunar observations or astronomical tables, as among the Jews generally, but had a fixed place in a solar year. Such upsetting of the calendar is branded as heresy in Midrash Tehillim on Ps. 28 5:“They do not regard the work of the Lord,[pg 349]nor the operation of his hands....‘The operation of his hands’means the new moons; as it is said,‘God made the two great lights,’and it is written,‘He made the moon for festival seasons.’48These are the heretics who do not calculate (by the moon) the festival seasons and the equinoxes.‘He will tear them down and not build them up.’He will tear them down, in this world, and not build them up, in the world to come.”Perhaps the Boëthusians, who hired false witnesses to deceive the authorities about the appearance of the new moon, were not merely animated by a desire to harass the rabbis, but were partisans of some such calendar reform.The organization of the sect furnished it an effective means of enforcing its rules by discipline. This organization is so peculiar that it must be described in some detail. Like the normal Jewish community, it consists of three classes, priests, levites, and Israelites, to whom as a fourth class may be added proselytes. In this order they are mustered and inscribed in the rolls of the camp. In some sense all the members of the sect are priests. Ezekiel 44 15 is quoted and explained:“‘The priests and the levites and the sons of Zadok who kept the charge of his sanctuary’[sic]. The priests are the exiles of Israel who migrated from the land of Judah and [the levites are]49those who attached themselves to them; and the sons of Zadok are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the last days.”Allegory apart, it appears that the priests were of the Zadokite line, but this legitimacy is assumed, not emphasized. Priests and levites formed part of every court of ten judges (see below, p.351); and in every company of ten Israelites (the quorum of a religious assembly), a priest, well versed in the Book of Institutes,50must be present, to whose words all must conform. If the priest does not possess the requisite qualifications, and a competent levite is at hand, it shall be ordained that all who enter the camp shall go out and come in at his orders. In a[pg 350]case of leprosy the priest shall come and stand in the midst of the camp and the Supervisor shall instruct him in the interpretation of the law; even if the priest be an ignoramus, it is he who must shut up the leper, for the decision belongs to them (13 1 ff.). To a priest is assigned also the duty of taking the census of the commonalty; he who fills this office must be between thirty and sixty years old, versed in the Book of [Institutes and] in all the prescriptions of the law, to pronounce them according to their prescriptions (14 3 ff.).A much more important place in the organization is filled by an officer whose title (mebaḳḳer) signifies“examiner,”“inspector,”and may perhaps best be rendered“Supervisor.”51Every“camp,”or settlement, of the sect had a Supervisor, and over these stood a“Supervisor of all the camps,”who must be a man in the prime of life, between thirty and fifty years of age. To the Supervisor of the individual camp it belonged to instruct the community“in the works of God, and make them familiar with his wonderful deeds of might, and recount before them the things that happened long ago...; and he shall have compassion on them as a father toward his children (13 7 ff.).”52We have seen that he has even to instruct the priest in the rules for the diagnosis of leprosy.53The admission of new members to the sect is also in his hands; no one is permitted to introduce a man into the[pg 351]congregation without his consent. He examines the candidates in regard to their character and intelligence, their physical strength and courage, and their possessions, and enrolls each in his proper place in the lot54of the camp (13 11 ff.). From the following badly defaced lines so much at least can be made out, that the Supervisor had extensive powers of control over the dealings of members of the sect with outsiders in the way of trade. He evidently had also a leading part in the administration of justice and the enforcement of the discipline of the sect, but the state of the text here denies us insight into the particulars.Courts were constituted of ten members,55chosenad hocfrom the congregation, four of the tribe of Levi and Aaron and six Israelites, all well versed in the Book of Institutes and in the Foundations of the Covenant, between twenty-five and sixty years of age. No man of more than sixty shall be a judge,“for on account of the unfaithfulness of mankind his days were shortened, and through the wrath of God on the inhabitants of the earth he bade to remove their understanding before they completed their days (10 4 ff.).”The rules relating to the competence of witnesses are strict. No one may testify against the accused in a capital case who is not a god-fearing man old enough to be included in the census (that is, at least twenty years of age, Exod. 30 14); nor shall a man's testimony be credited against his neighbor who is himself a wilful transgressor of any of the commandments, until he has come to repentance (9 23-10 3). A peculiar provision is made for the case that a single witness (on whose testimony therefore conviction could not be had) sees a capital offence committed. He is to make known the facts to the Supervisor, who records the testimony in writing. If subsequently the offence is committed again in the presence of another witness, the same process is repeated; on a second repetition, the testimony of the three single witnesses combined suffices for conviction (9 16 ff.).56[pg 352]Besides the penalties of the Mosaic law, the sect has a formidable means of discipline in expulsion, or as it is called“separation from the Purity,”which may in some cases be inflicted even on the testimony of one witness (9 21 ff.). Josephus vividly depicts the desperate straits into which those came who, for grave offences, were expelled from the Essene order; being unable to eat food not prepared by members of the order, they were exposed to starvation. This particular consequence would not follow separation from our sect; but the lot of the excommunicated man was evidently hard enough.“When his deeds come to light he is to be expelled from the congregation, as though his lot had never fallen in the midst of the disciples of God; according to his misdeeds men shall bear him in remembrance ... until the day when he returns to take his place in the station of the men of perfect holiness. No man shall have any dealings with him in matters of property or work, for all the saints of the Most High have cursed him”(20 3 ff.); such have no part in the“house of the law”; their names are erased from the rolls of the congregation (20 10 f.). They are not only cut off from the communion of saints in this world, but are doomed to extermination by the hand of Belial (8 1 f., 19 14 f.). One who leads men astray and profanes the Sabbath and the festivals shall not be put to death, but shall be committed to the custody of men;57if he is cured of his error, they shall keep him for seven years, and afterwards he may come into the assembly (12 3 ff.). A member of the sect who seduces others to apostasy is more severely dealt with:“A man over whom the spirits of Belial have rule,58and who advocates defection (Deut. 13 6), shall be judged according to the law of the necromancer and the wizard”(12 2 f.; cf. Deut. 18 9).59The sect possessed the Jewish Scriptures. The books of the law are“the hut of the King”(i.e. the congregation)—the fallen hut which God had promised to raise up;“the pillar of your images”are the books of the prophets, whose words Israel despised. The founder of the sect, the star out of Jacob, is the[pg 353]interpreter of the law who came to Damascus (7 14 ff.). The authority of the Pentateuch is appealed to in support of the position of the sect in the matter of marriage and divorce; their peculiar statutes and ordinances are the true interpretation and application of the law of God. The prophets are frequently cited, and allusions to passages in the prophets or reminiscences of their phraseology are much more numerous. There are similar reminiscences of the Psalms and of the Proverbs, and perhaps of other books among the Hagiographa. As regards the Old Testament scriptures, therefore, the sect stood on common ground with Palestinian orthodoxy.60The formula of citation is peculiar; a quotation is usually introduced by the words“as he said,”rarely“as God said”; or with the name of the sacred author,“as Moses said.”Besides the Biblical books, we have a quotation from Levi—probably the Testament of that Patriarch—introduced by the same phrase as quotations from the Bible; and the reader is referred to the Book of Jubilees by name for an exact computation of the last times. There is nothing to indicate that the authority attributed to these writings was inferior to that of the Hagiographa. The canon of the“Scriptures”was not defined, even in the rabbinical schools, until the second century of our era, and in the sects many books enjoyed high esteem which the orthodox repudiated.61To a different class belong, apparently, the Book of Institutes, and the Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,62but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded[pg 354]of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the“statutes and ordinances”of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to asperush; in technical phrase, a collection of sectarianhalakoth, such as is preserved in the second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a legal manual. The objection to committinghalakahto writing which was long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.The sect had houses of worship, which a man in a state of uncleanness is forbidden to enter (11 22),63but nothing more is said about them, except that when the trumpets of the congregation are blown, the blowing shall follow or precede the service, and not interrupt it. It is a natural surmise that they answered to the synagogues both as places of worship and of religious instruction, such, for example, as the Supervisor is required to give. The name,Beth hishtahawōth, literally,“house of bowing[pg 355]down”(in worship), is peculiar, and may have been chosen to distinguish these sectarian conventicles from the synagogues of regular Judaism, as the English nonconformists of various stripes would not call their meeting-houses churches. It is possible that the prayers of the sect may have been accompanied by genuflections and prostrations such as, though unknown in the synagogue, have formed in all ages and religions a common feature of Oriental worship; but it is also possible that“bowing down”simply stands by metonymy for worship, as is often the case with the corresponding Syriac verb,segad.64Sacrificial worship was also maintained.65The City of the Sanctuary was eminently holy; sexual intercourse within its limits is forbidden,“defiling the City of the Sanctuary with their impurity”(beniddatham).66To this city, probably, the sacrifices were brought to which there is frequent reference.“No one shall send to the altar burnt offerings or oblation, frankincense or wood, by a man who is unclean with any of the forms of uncleanness; for it is written, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the righteous is an acceptable oblation”(11 18 ff.). On the Sabbath nothing is to be brought upon the altar except the Sabbath burnt offerings—that is, we may suppose, the stated daily burnt offerings with the supplementary Sabbath victims (13 17 f.; see Num. 28 1-10). Votive sacrifices are also mentioned;[pg 356]it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.). There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community; in its registers their names are enrolled in the first rank. Their place in the courts and in the local religious community, and their duties in the examination of lepers, have already been mentioned. Those who officiated at the sanctuary had doubtless their legal toll from private sacrifices of every kind. Lost property for which no owner appears falls to the priests; a man who has appropriated such property shall confess to the priest, and all that he pays in restitution belongs to the priest, besides the ram of the trespass offering (9 13 ff.).A charitable fund is provided by monthly payment of certain dues by members of the community to the Supervisor. From this fund relief is given by the judges to the poor and needy, to the aged, to the wanderer (?), to such as have fallen into captivity to foreigners, and others (14 12 ff.).The religious conceptions and beliefs of the sect present little that is peculiar. For God the nameElis consistently used, without any epithets.Adonaiis mentioned only to forbid its use in oaths. The only other name which occurs is the Most High (once, in the phrase“the saints of the Most High,”that is, the members of the sect). There is repeated reference to the holy spirit: God, through his Anointed, made men know his holy spirit (2 12); the opponents of the sect, by blasphemous speech against the statutes of God's covenant, defiled their holy spirit (5 11);67its members are warned not to defile his holy spirit by failing to observe the distinctions of clean and unclean which God has ordained (7 3 f.).The“Prince of Lights (Urim),”through whom Moses and Aaron arise, is perhaps, as the contrast to Belial suggests, one of the highest angels.68The destroying angels execute God's[pg 357]inescapable judgment on those who turned out of the way and despised the statute (2 6). The fall of the Watchers, which is a favorite subject in the apocalyptic literature, is referred to in 2 18. The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is“let loose”during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.); his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.); he also exterminates the faithless in the day of God's visitation (8 1 f.). Another name for the devil is Mastema (the commoner name in Jubilees), equivalent to Satan,“the adversary.”The angel of Mastema ceases to follow a man who resolves to return to the law of Moses (16 4 f.). According to Jubilees 10 8 f., 11 5, Mastema had permission from God to employ some of his evil spirits to corrupt men and lead them astray.Concerning the future life we read only that those who hold firmly to the law are“for eternal life,”69or, as it is elsewhere expressed,“have the assurance that they shall live a thousand generations.”To a punishment of the wicked after death70or to a resurrection of the dead there is no allusion whatever.The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly theyeṣer hara'of the rabbis). It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.). We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. Particular emphasis is laid in several places on the commandments,“thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people,”“thou shalt reprove thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him”(Lev. 19 17, 18).71[pg 358]Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further,“any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.”It is forbidden also to exact of another an oath except in the presence of the judges; he who does so transgresses the law which forbids a man to take justice into his own hands. Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property,“in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme”(12 6 f.), that is, to prevent the profaning of God's name (15 3), a motive frequently urged in similar connection in the rabbinical writings. On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.), He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. Like many sects, it exhibits the separatist inclination to outdo the orthodox in zeal for the letter and in strenuousness of practice, and it is not surprising that its interpretations of the law frequently agree with those of other strict-constructionists, such as Samaritans, Sadducees, Karaites; but these coincidences illustrate a common tendency rather than prove historical connection. The[pg 359]relation to the Book of Jubilees is, however, such as to show that there was some affinity between our sect and the circles in which that work originated. Jubilees is cited as authority on the last times; its calendar probably contains the secrets of God's holy sabbaths and glorious festivals about which all Israel was in error; the rules for the observance of the Sabbath in our book accord in many particulars with the injunctions in Jubilees 50 6 ff. (see also 2 26 ff.); and various other resemblances might be pointed out, such as the preference for the unornamented word God (in Jubilees, God, or the Lord), in contrast with the many mouth-filling periphrases in Enoch; the holy spirit in men; the name Mastema for the adversary instead of Satan; Belial who ensnares men, and the spirits of Belial which rule over sinners, besides others to which Dr. Schechter directs attention in his notes. The relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is less clear. The saying attributed to Levi (4 15) is not found in the Testament, and the other resemblances Dr. Schechter has noted are vague or belong to the commonplaces. The place of honor given to Judah in the Testaments, as we have them, is strikingly at variance with the attitude of our sect toward that tribe and its princes. The Levite Messiah of the Testaments is not precisely the same as the“Anointed from Aaron and Israel”in our book. In Jubilees also there are salient features, such as the more developed angelology and the form of the Messianic expectation, which hardly permit us to suppose that the book was a product of our sect, however highly it may have been esteemed by it.The sect gives especial honor to the sons of Zadok, the ancient priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 44 15, 2 Chron. 31 10, Sirach 51 12 Heb.); they are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the latter times (4 3); it was Zadok who brought to light the Book of the Law which no one had seen since the death of Eleazar and Joshua (5 5). The context of the latter passage would suggest that Zadok the contemporary of David is meant, who after the deposition of Abiathar became Solomon's chief priest.72The precedence given[pg 360]to the sons of Zadok may possibly have a side reference to the illegitimate high priests of Seleucid creation, such as Menelaus, though, if this were the intention, we should expect it to be emphasized.The passages quoted are the only places in the book in which the name Zadok or the sons of Zadok appear, and they are certainly a very slender reason for describing the body which produced the book as a“Zadokite”sect, whatever meaning may be attached to the term. On the contrary, one of the outstanding things in the constitution of the sect is the predominance of the lay element. The Supervisor is a layman; laymen form the majority in every court; the Messiah is the“Anointed from Aaronand Israel.”Whether the external testimony upon which Dr. Schechter relies for justification of the name is more adequate will be considered below.Zadok and the sons of Zadok suggest the Sadducees,73whose name, according to the most probable explanation, designates them as descendants (or followers and partisans) of Zadok. Here again it is a question whether Zadok of David's time is meant, so that the Sadducees were the Zadokite aristocracy of the priesthood, as most modern scholars think, or whether the name of the Sadducee sect is derived from a heresiarch of much later times, as the Jewish legend represents which makes Zadok, from whom the sect descends, a recalcitrant disciple of Antigonus of Socho, about the middle of the second centuryb.c., contemporary, if we rightly interpret our texts, with the origin of the sect we are studying.With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The[pg 361]accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,74so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)75says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first centuryb.c., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.76The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his[pg 362]learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).77The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty[pg 363]days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (epagomenae). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.78Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,79and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of onlyfourextra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.80We do not know whether the Dositheans[pg 364]of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or countedfiveextra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius81on 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,”82is inclined to perceive in the statement“at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.”The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not,“some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,”nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon's conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,83“some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.”Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.Dr. Schechter thinks that the statement of Epiphanius quoted[pg 365]above that the Dositheans“abstain from eating living creatures”“may have some connection with the law in our text on p. 12, l. 11, which may perhaps be understood to imply that the sect forbade honey, regarding it as'eber min haḥai(a limb cut off from a living animal), which would agree with the testimony of Abul-Fath that they forbade the eating of eggs, except those which were found in a slaughtered fowl.”Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται does not mean“abstain from eating living creatures,”but“abstain from animal food,”84while our sect certainly did not include vegetarianism among its eccentricities, any more than the depreciation of marriage.Several authors describe the Dositheans as extravagant sabbatarians. Origen reports that their rule was, that in whatever place and in whatever posture the Sabbath found a man, there and thus he was to remain till its end. Abul-Fath gives a longer account of their Sabbath laws, which are much stricter than those of our texts. It was forbidden, for example, to feed domestic animals or give them drink on the Sabbath, they were to be provided on Friday with enough provender and water to last them through the Sabbath. Extreme sabbatarianism is, however, a sectarian propensity which does not have to be borrowed.Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans“have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,”in which he thinks“we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination), and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles”(Introduction, pp. xxiii f.). What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner; for they regard it as a defilement to come in contact with any one or even to touch[pg 366]a man of another religion.85It 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 607a.d.), charges Dositheus86is natural enough in a Samaritan heresiarch; in the same sentence Eulogius accuses him of scorning the prophets of God, which, again, is not peculiar to the Dositheans, but is the general Samaritan position. It has been remarked above (p. 353) that our sect gives especial honor to the books of the prophets“whose words Israel has despised”; and, however unfriendly the attitude of these seceders to the degenerate Judah of their time, there is no indication of animosity to the patriarch, as there is none in the Jubilees.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,87says:“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 analogous to the paternal and maternal aunt.”88This 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 analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common[pg 367]in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.89Kirkisani 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,90had 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,91and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Passover 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, Hadassi, 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 passage 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 Boëthus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites,”etc.92Zadok'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 Boëthus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Baṣir (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.93The Karaite author[pg 368]of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in manuscript in St. Petersburg94polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the greatMalleus 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.95Saadia, who mistakenly assumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity—the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin96—asserted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boëthus 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.”97Saadia 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 passage 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[pg 369]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:—

Concerning the Sabbath, to keep it as it is prescribed.1. On the sixth day no man shall do any work from the time when the disk of the sun is distant from the western portal38by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.2. On the Sabbath a man shall not engage in any foolish conversation; and he shall not exact repayment from his neighbor; nor shall he give judgment in matters of property; he shall not talk about matters of work and labor to be done on the next day.3. A man shall not walk in the country to do the work of his business on the Sabbath. He shall not walk outside of his town above one thousand39cubits.4. No man shall eat on the Sabbath anything except what was previously prepared or what is spoiling in the field. He shall not eat or drink anything but what was in the camp. If he be on the way and descend to bathe, he may drink as he stands, but must not draw water in any vessel.405. He must not send a foreigner to do his business on the Sabbath day.6. A man must not put on soiled garments or such as are brought by a gentile, without washing them in water or rubbing them with frankincense.417. A man shall not exchange pledges42of his own accord on the Sabbath.8. A man shall not follow his cattle, to pasture them outside his town, except within 2000 cubits. He shall not lift his arm to strike them with his fist; if the animal is breachy, let him not take her out of the house.9. A man shall not take anything out of a house into the street, nor[pg 347]bring anything from the street into the house; and if he be in the entry, he shall not pass anything out of it or bring anything into it.10. He shall not open on the Sabbath a vessel the cover of which has been luted on.11. A man shall not carry on his person spices, going out or coming in on the Sabbath.12. Within a house he shall not lift stone nor earth on the Sabbath day.13. The nurse shall not carry an infant in arms, going out or coming in with it on the Sabbath.14. A man shall not deal harshly with his slave or his maid or his hired servant on the Sabbath.15. A man shall not deliver cattle of their young on the Sabbath day.16. If a beast fall into a cistern or trap, a man shall not lift it out on the Sabbath.17. A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written,“aside from your Sabbaths.”

Concerning the Sabbath, to keep it as it is prescribed.

1. On the sixth day no man shall do any work from the time when the disk of the sun is distant from the western portal38by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.

2. On the Sabbath a man shall not engage in any foolish conversation; and he shall not exact repayment from his neighbor; nor shall he give judgment in matters of property; he shall not talk about matters of work and labor to be done on the next day.

3. A man shall not walk in the country to do the work of his business on the Sabbath. He shall not walk outside of his town above one thousand39cubits.

4. No man shall eat on the Sabbath anything except what was previously prepared or what is spoiling in the field. He shall not eat or drink anything but what was in the camp. If he be on the way and descend to bathe, he may drink as he stands, but must not draw water in any vessel.40

5. He must not send a foreigner to do his business on the Sabbath day.

6. A man must not put on soiled garments or such as are brought by a gentile, without washing them in water or rubbing them with frankincense.41

7. A man shall not exchange pledges42of his own accord on the Sabbath.

8. A man shall not follow his cattle, to pasture them outside his town, except within 2000 cubits. He shall not lift his arm to strike them with his fist; if the animal is breachy, let him not take her out of the house.

9. A man shall not take anything out of a house into the street, nor[pg 347]bring anything from the street into the house; and if he be in the entry, he shall not pass anything out of it or bring anything into it.

10. He shall not open on the Sabbath a vessel the cover of which has been luted on.

11. A man shall not carry on his person spices, going out or coming in on the Sabbath.

12. Within a house he shall not lift stone nor earth on the Sabbath day.

13. The nurse shall not carry an infant in arms, going out or coming in with it on the Sabbath.

14. A man shall not deal harshly with his slave or his maid or his hired servant on the Sabbath.

15. A man shall not deliver cattle of their young on the Sabbath day.

16. If a beast fall into a cistern or trap, a man shall not lift it out on the Sabbath.

17. A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.

18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.

19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.

20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written,“aside from your Sabbaths.”

The dietary laws afford other examples of the strict rules of the sect.43Fish may be eaten only if, while still alive, they have been split open and drained of their blood; grasshoppers and locusts must be put alive into the water or the fire (in which they are to be cooked); honey in the comb is apparently prohibited. So, again, in a house in which a death has occurred, fixtures, such as nails and pegs in the walls, are unclean; and wood, stone, and dust are capable of contracting and communicating various kinds of uncleanness (12 15-18). The sect sees in these stricter distinctions between clean and unclean the superiority of its ordinances over those of other Jews, whom they regard as sinfully lax. The Pharisees are to them gross latitudinarians!

Oaths are to be taken only by the covenant and the curses of the covenant, that is, the vows by which the members of the sect bind themselves, on their admission to it, to live in conformity with its rule and submit to the authority of those set over them,[pg 348]and the curses invoked on such as violate these obligations.44Oaths by God, whether under the nameAleph Lamed(ElorElohim) orAleph Daleth (Adonai)are prohibited;45nor is it permissible to mention in the oath the law of Moses; the formula of the oath is strictly sectarian (15 1 ff.).46But, though the name of God is not used,“if a man swear and transgress the oath, he profanes the name”(15 3). Obligations voluntarily assumed under oath (vows) are to be fulfilled to the letter; neither redemption nor annulment seems to be allowed, unless to carry out the vow would be a transgression of the covenant.

Another point in which the sect is at variance with the great body of the Jews is the calendar. They represent the faithful remnant to whom God revealed the mysteries about which all Israel went astray, his holy sabbaths and his glorious festivals, and his righteous testimonies, and his true ways (3 12 ff.). The point of this appears when it is compared with Jubilees 1 14:“They will forget my law and all my commandments and all my judgments, and will go astray as to new moons and sabbaths and festivals and jubilees and ordinances”(cf. 6 34 ff., 23 19). The texts before us do not explain what the peculiarities of the sectarian calendar were, but inasmuch as the Book of Jubilees, under the title“The Book of the Division of the Times by their Jubilees and their Sabbatical Years,”is cited as an authority for the exact determination of“their ends”(the coming crisis of history), it may be inferred with much probability that our sect had a calendar constructed on principles similar to that of the Jubilees,47in which the seasons and festivals were not determined by lunar observations or astronomical tables, as among the Jews generally, but had a fixed place in a solar year. Such upsetting of the calendar is branded as heresy in Midrash Tehillim on Ps. 28 5:“They do not regard the work of the Lord,[pg 349]nor the operation of his hands....‘The operation of his hands’means the new moons; as it is said,‘God made the two great lights,’and it is written,‘He made the moon for festival seasons.’48These are the heretics who do not calculate (by the moon) the festival seasons and the equinoxes.‘He will tear them down and not build them up.’He will tear them down, in this world, and not build them up, in the world to come.”Perhaps the Boëthusians, who hired false witnesses to deceive the authorities about the appearance of the new moon, were not merely animated by a desire to harass the rabbis, but were partisans of some such calendar reform.

The organization of the sect furnished it an effective means of enforcing its rules by discipline. This organization is so peculiar that it must be described in some detail. Like the normal Jewish community, it consists of three classes, priests, levites, and Israelites, to whom as a fourth class may be added proselytes. In this order they are mustered and inscribed in the rolls of the camp. In some sense all the members of the sect are priests. Ezekiel 44 15 is quoted and explained:“‘The priests and the levites and the sons of Zadok who kept the charge of his sanctuary’[sic]. The priests are the exiles of Israel who migrated from the land of Judah and [the levites are]49those who attached themselves to them; and the sons of Zadok are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the last days.”Allegory apart, it appears that the priests were of the Zadokite line, but this legitimacy is assumed, not emphasized. Priests and levites formed part of every court of ten judges (see below, p.351); and in every company of ten Israelites (the quorum of a religious assembly), a priest, well versed in the Book of Institutes,50must be present, to whose words all must conform. If the priest does not possess the requisite qualifications, and a competent levite is at hand, it shall be ordained that all who enter the camp shall go out and come in at his orders. In a[pg 350]case of leprosy the priest shall come and stand in the midst of the camp and the Supervisor shall instruct him in the interpretation of the law; even if the priest be an ignoramus, it is he who must shut up the leper, for the decision belongs to them (13 1 ff.). To a priest is assigned also the duty of taking the census of the commonalty; he who fills this office must be between thirty and sixty years old, versed in the Book of [Institutes and] in all the prescriptions of the law, to pronounce them according to their prescriptions (14 3 ff.).

A much more important place in the organization is filled by an officer whose title (mebaḳḳer) signifies“examiner,”“inspector,”and may perhaps best be rendered“Supervisor.”51Every“camp,”or settlement, of the sect had a Supervisor, and over these stood a“Supervisor of all the camps,”who must be a man in the prime of life, between thirty and fifty years of age. To the Supervisor of the individual camp it belonged to instruct the community“in the works of God, and make them familiar with his wonderful deeds of might, and recount before them the things that happened long ago...; and he shall have compassion on them as a father toward his children (13 7 ff.).”52We have seen that he has even to instruct the priest in the rules for the diagnosis of leprosy.53The admission of new members to the sect is also in his hands; no one is permitted to introduce a man into the[pg 351]congregation without his consent. He examines the candidates in regard to their character and intelligence, their physical strength and courage, and their possessions, and enrolls each in his proper place in the lot54of the camp (13 11 ff.). From the following badly defaced lines so much at least can be made out, that the Supervisor had extensive powers of control over the dealings of members of the sect with outsiders in the way of trade. He evidently had also a leading part in the administration of justice and the enforcement of the discipline of the sect, but the state of the text here denies us insight into the particulars.

Courts were constituted of ten members,55chosenad hocfrom the congregation, four of the tribe of Levi and Aaron and six Israelites, all well versed in the Book of Institutes and in the Foundations of the Covenant, between twenty-five and sixty years of age. No man of more than sixty shall be a judge,“for on account of the unfaithfulness of mankind his days were shortened, and through the wrath of God on the inhabitants of the earth he bade to remove their understanding before they completed their days (10 4 ff.).”The rules relating to the competence of witnesses are strict. No one may testify against the accused in a capital case who is not a god-fearing man old enough to be included in the census (that is, at least twenty years of age, Exod. 30 14); nor shall a man's testimony be credited against his neighbor who is himself a wilful transgressor of any of the commandments, until he has come to repentance (9 23-10 3). A peculiar provision is made for the case that a single witness (on whose testimony therefore conviction could not be had) sees a capital offence committed. He is to make known the facts to the Supervisor, who records the testimony in writing. If subsequently the offence is committed again in the presence of another witness, the same process is repeated; on a second repetition, the testimony of the three single witnesses combined suffices for conviction (9 16 ff.).56

Besides the penalties of the Mosaic law, the sect has a formidable means of discipline in expulsion, or as it is called“separation from the Purity,”which may in some cases be inflicted even on the testimony of one witness (9 21 ff.). Josephus vividly depicts the desperate straits into which those came who, for grave offences, were expelled from the Essene order; being unable to eat food not prepared by members of the order, they were exposed to starvation. This particular consequence would not follow separation from our sect; but the lot of the excommunicated man was evidently hard enough.“When his deeds come to light he is to be expelled from the congregation, as though his lot had never fallen in the midst of the disciples of God; according to his misdeeds men shall bear him in remembrance ... until the day when he returns to take his place in the station of the men of perfect holiness. No man shall have any dealings with him in matters of property or work, for all the saints of the Most High have cursed him”(20 3 ff.); such have no part in the“house of the law”; their names are erased from the rolls of the congregation (20 10 f.). They are not only cut off from the communion of saints in this world, but are doomed to extermination by the hand of Belial (8 1 f., 19 14 f.). One who leads men astray and profanes the Sabbath and the festivals shall not be put to death, but shall be committed to the custody of men;57if he is cured of his error, they shall keep him for seven years, and afterwards he may come into the assembly (12 3 ff.). A member of the sect who seduces others to apostasy is more severely dealt with:“A man over whom the spirits of Belial have rule,58and who advocates defection (Deut. 13 6), shall be judged according to the law of the necromancer and the wizard”(12 2 f.; cf. Deut. 18 9).59

The sect possessed the Jewish Scriptures. The books of the law are“the hut of the King”(i.e. the congregation)—the fallen hut which God had promised to raise up;“the pillar of your images”are the books of the prophets, whose words Israel despised. The founder of the sect, the star out of Jacob, is the[pg 353]interpreter of the law who came to Damascus (7 14 ff.). The authority of the Pentateuch is appealed to in support of the position of the sect in the matter of marriage and divorce; their peculiar statutes and ordinances are the true interpretation and application of the law of God. The prophets are frequently cited, and allusions to passages in the prophets or reminiscences of their phraseology are much more numerous. There are similar reminiscences of the Psalms and of the Proverbs, and perhaps of other books among the Hagiographa. As regards the Old Testament scriptures, therefore, the sect stood on common ground with Palestinian orthodoxy.60The formula of citation is peculiar; a quotation is usually introduced by the words“as he said,”rarely“as God said”; or with the name of the sacred author,“as Moses said.”Besides the Biblical books, we have a quotation from Levi—probably the Testament of that Patriarch—introduced by the same phrase as quotations from the Bible; and the reader is referred to the Book of Jubilees by name for an exact computation of the last times. There is nothing to indicate that the authority attributed to these writings was inferior to that of the Hagiographa. The canon of the“Scriptures”was not defined, even in the rabbinical schools, until the second century of our era, and in the sects many books enjoyed high esteem which the orthodox repudiated.61

To a different class belong, apparently, the Book of Institutes, and the Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,62but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded[pg 354]of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the“statutes and ordinances”of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to asperush; in technical phrase, a collection of sectarianhalakoth, such as is preserved in the second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a legal manual. The objection to committinghalakahto writing which was long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.

The sect had houses of worship, which a man in a state of uncleanness is forbidden to enter (11 22),63but nothing more is said about them, except that when the trumpets of the congregation are blown, the blowing shall follow or precede the service, and not interrupt it. It is a natural surmise that they answered to the synagogues both as places of worship and of religious instruction, such, for example, as the Supervisor is required to give. The name,Beth hishtahawōth, literally,“house of bowing[pg 355]down”(in worship), is peculiar, and may have been chosen to distinguish these sectarian conventicles from the synagogues of regular Judaism, as the English nonconformists of various stripes would not call their meeting-houses churches. It is possible that the prayers of the sect may have been accompanied by genuflections and prostrations such as, though unknown in the synagogue, have formed in all ages and religions a common feature of Oriental worship; but it is also possible that“bowing down”simply stands by metonymy for worship, as is often the case with the corresponding Syriac verb,segad.64

Sacrificial worship was also maintained.65The City of the Sanctuary was eminently holy; sexual intercourse within its limits is forbidden,“defiling the City of the Sanctuary with their impurity”(beniddatham).66To this city, probably, the sacrifices were brought to which there is frequent reference.“No one shall send to the altar burnt offerings or oblation, frankincense or wood, by a man who is unclean with any of the forms of uncleanness; for it is written, the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, but the prayer of the righteous is an acceptable oblation”(11 18 ff.). On the Sabbath nothing is to be brought upon the altar except the Sabbath burnt offerings—that is, we may suppose, the stated daily burnt offerings with the supplementary Sabbath victims (13 17 f.; see Num. 28 1-10). Votive sacrifices are also mentioned;[pg 356]it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.). There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community; in its registers their names are enrolled in the first rank. Their place in the courts and in the local religious community, and their duties in the examination of lepers, have already been mentioned. Those who officiated at the sanctuary had doubtless their legal toll from private sacrifices of every kind. Lost property for which no owner appears falls to the priests; a man who has appropriated such property shall confess to the priest, and all that he pays in restitution belongs to the priest, besides the ram of the trespass offering (9 13 ff.).

A charitable fund is provided by monthly payment of certain dues by members of the community to the Supervisor. From this fund relief is given by the judges to the poor and needy, to the aged, to the wanderer (?), to such as have fallen into captivity to foreigners, and others (14 12 ff.).

The religious conceptions and beliefs of the sect present little that is peculiar. For God the nameElis consistently used, without any epithets.Adonaiis mentioned only to forbid its use in oaths. The only other name which occurs is the Most High (once, in the phrase“the saints of the Most High,”that is, the members of the sect). There is repeated reference to the holy spirit: God, through his Anointed, made men know his holy spirit (2 12); the opponents of the sect, by blasphemous speech against the statutes of God's covenant, defiled their holy spirit (5 11);67its members are warned not to defile his holy spirit by failing to observe the distinctions of clean and unclean which God has ordained (7 3 f.).

The“Prince of Lights (Urim),”through whom Moses and Aaron arise, is perhaps, as the contrast to Belial suggests, one of the highest angels.68The destroying angels execute God's[pg 357]inescapable judgment on those who turned out of the way and despised the statute (2 6). The fall of the Watchers, which is a favorite subject in the apocalyptic literature, is referred to in 2 18. The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is“let loose”during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.); his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.); he also exterminates the faithless in the day of God's visitation (8 1 f.). Another name for the devil is Mastema (the commoner name in Jubilees), equivalent to Satan,“the adversary.”The angel of Mastema ceases to follow a man who resolves to return to the law of Moses (16 4 f.). According to Jubilees 10 8 f., 11 5, Mastema had permission from God to employ some of his evil spirits to corrupt men and lead them astray.

Concerning the future life we read only that those who hold firmly to the law are“for eternal life,”69or, as it is elsewhere expressed,“have the assurance that they shall live a thousand generations.”To a punishment of the wicked after death70or to a resurrection of the dead there is no allusion whatever.

The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly theyeṣer hara'of the rabbis). It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.). We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. Particular emphasis is laid in several places on the commandments,“thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people,”“thou shalt reprove thy neighbor and not bear sin because of him”(Lev. 19 17, 18).71[pg 358]Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further,“any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.”It is forbidden also to exact of another an oath except in the presence of the judges; he who does so transgresses the law which forbids a man to take justice into his own hands. Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property,“in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme”(12 6 f.), that is, to prevent the profaning of God's name (15 3), a motive frequently urged in similar connection in the rabbinical writings. On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.), He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.

No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. Like many sects, it exhibits the separatist inclination to outdo the orthodox in zeal for the letter and in strenuousness of practice, and it is not surprising that its interpretations of the law frequently agree with those of other strict-constructionists, such as Samaritans, Sadducees, Karaites; but these coincidences illustrate a common tendency rather than prove historical connection. The[pg 359]relation to the Book of Jubilees is, however, such as to show that there was some affinity between our sect and the circles in which that work originated. Jubilees is cited as authority on the last times; its calendar probably contains the secrets of God's holy sabbaths and glorious festivals about which all Israel was in error; the rules for the observance of the Sabbath in our book accord in many particulars with the injunctions in Jubilees 50 6 ff. (see also 2 26 ff.); and various other resemblances might be pointed out, such as the preference for the unornamented word God (in Jubilees, God, or the Lord), in contrast with the many mouth-filling periphrases in Enoch; the holy spirit in men; the name Mastema for the adversary instead of Satan; Belial who ensnares men, and the spirits of Belial which rule over sinners, besides others to which Dr. Schechter directs attention in his notes. The relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is less clear. The saying attributed to Levi (4 15) is not found in the Testament, and the other resemblances Dr. Schechter has noted are vague or belong to the commonplaces. The place of honor given to Judah in the Testaments, as we have them, is strikingly at variance with the attitude of our sect toward that tribe and its princes. The Levite Messiah of the Testaments is not precisely the same as the“Anointed from Aaron and Israel”in our book. In Jubilees also there are salient features, such as the more developed angelology and the form of the Messianic expectation, which hardly permit us to suppose that the book was a product of our sect, however highly it may have been esteemed by it.

The sect gives especial honor to the sons of Zadok, the ancient priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 44 15, 2 Chron. 31 10, Sirach 51 12 Heb.); they are the chosen ones of Israel, men designated by name, who arose in the latter times (4 3); it was Zadok who brought to light the Book of the Law which no one had seen since the death of Eleazar and Joshua (5 5). The context of the latter passage would suggest that Zadok the contemporary of David is meant, who after the deposition of Abiathar became Solomon's chief priest.72The precedence given[pg 360]to the sons of Zadok may possibly have a side reference to the illegitimate high priests of Seleucid creation, such as Menelaus, though, if this were the intention, we should expect it to be emphasized.

The passages quoted are the only places in the book in which the name Zadok or the sons of Zadok appear, and they are certainly a very slender reason for describing the body which produced the book as a“Zadokite”sect, whatever meaning may be attached to the term. On the contrary, one of the outstanding things in the constitution of the sect is the predominance of the lay element. The Supervisor is a layman; laymen form the majority in every court; the Messiah is the“Anointed from Aaronand Israel.”Whether the external testimony upon which Dr. Schechter relies for justification of the name is more adequate will be considered below.

Zadok and the sons of Zadok suggest the Sadducees,73whose name, according to the most probable explanation, designates them as descendants (or followers and partisans) of Zadok. Here again it is a question whether Zadok of David's time is meant, so that the Sadducees were the Zadokite aristocracy of the priesthood, as most modern scholars think, or whether the name of the Sadducee sect is derived from a heresiarch of much later times, as the Jewish legend represents which makes Zadok, from whom the sect descends, a recalcitrant disciple of Antigonus of Socho, about the middle of the second centuryb.c., contemporary, if we rightly interpret our texts, with the origin of the sect we are studying.

With the Sadducees, as we know them from the New Testament, Josephus, and rabbinical sources, our sect cannot well be identified. There is, however, a sect sometimes associated with the Sadducees, namely, the Dositheans, in whose teachings and customs Dr. Schechter finds such resemblances as lead him to surmise that the Dositheans were an offshoot of our sect. The[pg 361]accounts of the Dositheans in writers of different ages and religious connections, from Origen and Epiphanius down to the Samaritan Chronicler Abul-Fath and the Moslem heresiographer Shahrastani, are notoriously confused and contradictory,74so that many scholars have felt constrained to conclude that there was more than one sect of the name. The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. Other Fathers give no date for the rise of the heresy, but by coupling it with the Sadducees seem to imply that it was older than Christianity; thus (Pseudo)Tertullian (probably after Hippolytus)75says that Dositheus the Samaritan was the first to reject the prophets as not inspired; the Sadducees, springing from this root of error, ventured to deny the resurrection also. From this Philaster probably drew the inference that Zadok, the founder of the Sadducees, was a disciple of Dositheus. The Samaritan and Moslem authors agree with the Fathers in treating the Dositheans as a Samaritan sect. Abul-Fath, a Samaritan writer of the fourteenth century, puts the beginnings of the sect in the first centuryb.c., at the time when the yoke of the Jews had been broken by the kings of the gentiles, and the Samaritans were able to return and restore their sanctuary, which had been destroyed by Simon and John Hyrcanus.76The Moslem writer Shahrastani, in his[pg 362]learned work on Religious Sects and Philosophical Schools (first half of the twelfth century), gives substantially the same date: the founder of the Dositheans, who professed to be the prophet foretold by Moses, the star spoken of in the law, appeared about a century before Christ.

In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees; just as the Talmudic legend which makes Zadok and Boëthus apostate disciples of Antigonus of Socho is but a mythological way of saying that Sadducees and Boëthusians were addicted to the same heresies concerning retribution, or as the coupling of Dositheus and Simon Magus means that both passed for Samaritan arch-heretics.

The first point of agreement between the Dositheans and our sect which Dr. Schechter notes is in the calendar. Abul-Fath says that the Dositheans did away with the computation of the almanac (tables of lunar conjunctions), making all their months exactly thirty days long, and (thus) annulled the correct festivals and the ordinance of the fasts and the affliction (Day of Atonement).77The circle of thirty disciples, who, with a woman called Helena (Moon), formed the train of Dositheus, according to the Clementine Recognitions (ii, 8) symbolized the days of the month. If our sect employed the calendar of the Book of Jubilees, as seems highly probable, they also had thirty-day months; but it would not follow that the system was original with them, nor that the Dositheans must have adopted it from them. There were, in fact, from very remote times, two years in use within the area of the ancient civilizations, a lunar-solar year, consisting of twelve lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days each, with a thirteenth month added every two or three years to maintain approximate agreement with the solar year and make the months fall in the same seasons, and a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, divided into twelve months of thirty[pg 363]days each without regard to the lunations, and five extra days (epagomenae). The former was the system of the Babylonians and the Greeks, as well as the Jews; the latter was in use in Egypt from immemorial times until the Roman reforms. From the Egyptians it was borrowed by the Abyssinians; it was employed also for some centuries before and after the Christian era in the calendars of Gaza and Ashkelon. The Persians had the same system; the Yashts contain a liturgy for the thirty regents of the days of the month, the five extra days being assigned to the divine Gathas. Probably under Persian influences, this calendar was established in Armenia, Cappadocia, and other parts of Asia Minor.78

Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,79and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. The peculiarity of the system of the Book of Jubilees is not the uniform length of the months, but the admission of onlyfourextra days, thus making an even fifty-two weeks (364 days), which was of more concern to the author than the increased error of a whole day in the solar year.80We do not know whether the Dositheans[pg 364]of Abul-Fath and the Sadducees of Kirkisani (of whom later) agreed in this point with Jubilees, or countedfiveextra days like the rest of the world. The former may be thought probable, but it cannot be assumed as certain. The year of 365 days is also found in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 6.

Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius81on 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,”82is inclined to perceive in the statement“at least an echo of the law of our sect prohibiting a second marriage as long as the first wife is alive.”The passage in Epiphanius is more than obscure, and the text is for that reason suspected. The passage runs: Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται, ἀλλὰ καί τινες αὐτῶν ἐγκρατεύονται ἀπὸ γάμων μετὰ τοῦ βιῶσαι, ἄλλοι δὲ καὶ παρθενεύουσιν. Whatever this may mean, it certainly is not,“some of them abstain from marriage after the death of their first wives,”nor does anything in the context justify the large changes in the text which would be required to force this sense upon it. Casaubon's conjecture υἱῶσαι has nothing to commend it. The simplest solution of the difficulty would be to write συμβιῶσαι,83“some of them refrain from marital relations after having lived together, others preserve their virginity.”Whether this emendation is right or not, it is clear that Epiphanius describes his Dositheans as a kind of Encratite ascetics, while the prohibition of polygamy—whether contemporaneous or consecutive—by our sect has a totally different ground; of asceticism there is, indeed, no symptom in its ordinances.

Dr. Schechter thinks that the statement of Epiphanius quoted[pg 365]above that the Dositheans“abstain from eating living creatures”“may have some connection with the law in our text on p. 12, l. 11, which may perhaps be understood to imply that the sect forbade honey, regarding it as'eber min haḥai(a limb cut off from a living animal), which would agree with the testimony of Abul-Fath that they forbade the eating of eggs, except those which were found in a slaughtered fowl.”Ἐμψύχων ἀπέχονται does not mean“abstain from eating living creatures,”but“abstain from animal food,”84while our sect certainly did not include vegetarianism among its eccentricities, any more than the depreciation of marriage.

Several authors describe the Dositheans as extravagant sabbatarians. Origen reports that their rule was, that in whatever place and in whatever posture the Sabbath found a man, there and thus he was to remain till its end. Abul-Fath gives a longer account of their Sabbath laws, which are much stricter than those of our texts. It was forbidden, for example, to feed domestic animals or give them drink on the Sabbath, they were to be provided on Friday with enough provender and water to last them through the Sabbath. Extreme sabbatarianism is, however, a sectarian propensity which does not have to be borrowed.

Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans“have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,”in which he thinks“we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination), and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles”(Introduction, pp. xxiii f.). What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner; for they regard it as a defilement to come in contact with any one or even to touch[pg 366]a man of another religion.85It 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 607a.d.), charges Dositheus86is natural enough in a Samaritan heresiarch; in the same sentence Eulogius accuses him of scorning the prophets of God, which, again, is not peculiar to the Dositheans, but is the general Samaritan position. It has been remarked above (p. 353) that our sect gives especial honor to the books of the prophets“whose words Israel has despised”; and, however unfriendly the attitude of these seceders to the degenerate Judah of their time, there is no indication of animosity to the patriarch, as there is none in the Jubilees.

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,87says:“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 analogous 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 analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common[pg 367]in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.89Kirkisani 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,90had 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,91and that they did not count the Sabbath among the seven days of the celebration of the Passover 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, Hadassi, 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 passage 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 Boëthus.... Zadok was the first who exposed the Rabbanites,”etc.92Zadok'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 Boëthus, but the older Karaites expressly claim this origin. Thus Joseph al-Baṣir (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.93The Karaite author[pg 368]of an anonymous commentary on Exodus preserved in manuscript in St. Petersburg94polemizes against a disciple of Saadia, the greatMalleus 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.95Saadia, who mistakenly assumed that the beginning of the month had been determined astronomically from remote antiquity—the calendar was, in fact, of Sinaitic origin96—asserted that the taking of testimony about the appearance of the moon was an innovation occasioned by the contention of Zadok and Boëthus 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.”97Saadia 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 passage 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:—

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