Michael Baigent - The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

4. The classical writers use the term ‘Essene’ to denote what they describe as a major sub-division of Judaism, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Nowhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, is the term ‘Essene’ found.

5. Josephus declares the Essenes to have been on congenial terms with Herod the Great, who, he says, ‘had these Essenes in such honour and thought higher of them than their mortal nature required’. 15Yet the Qumran literature indicates a militant hostility towards non-Judaic authorities in general, and towards Herod and his dynasty in particular. What is more, Qumran appears to have been abandoned and uninhabited for some years precisely because of persecution by Herod.

6. According to classical writers, the Essenes were pacifist. Philo specifically states that their numbers included no makers of weapons or armour. 16Josephus emphatically distinguishes between the non-violent Essenes and the militantly messianic and nationalistic Zealots. Yet the ruins of Qumran include a defensive tower of a manifestly military nature, and what ‘can only be described as a forge’. 17As for the Qumran literature, it is often martial in the extreme, as exemplified by such texts as the ‘War Scroll’. Indeed, the bellicose character of such texts would seem to have less in common with what Josephus says of the Essenes than with what he and others say of the so-called Zealots — which is precisely what Roth and Driver claimed the Qumran community to be, thereby incurring the fury of de Vaux and the international team.

The Qumran community wrote mostly not in Greek, but in Aramaic and Hebrew. So far as Aramaic and Hebrew are concerned, no accepted etymology for the origins of the term ‘Essene’ has hitherto been found. Even the classical writers were mystified by its derivation. Philo, for example, suggested that, in his opinion, the name stemmed from the Greek word for ‘holy’, ‘ oseeos’, and that the Essenes were therefore the ‘ Oseeotes’, or ‘Holy Ones’. 18

One theory has enjoyed a certain qualified currency among certain modern scholars, notably Geza Vermes of Oxford University. According to Vermes, the term ‘Essene’ derives from the Aramaic word ‘ assayya’, which means ‘healers’. 19This has fostered an image in some quarters of the Essenes as medical practitioners, a Judaic equivalent of the Alexandrian ascetics known as the ‘Therapeutae’. But the word ‘ assayya’ does not occur anywhere in the corpus of Qumran literature; nor is there any reference to healing, to medical activities or to therapeutic work. To derive ‘Essene’ from ‘ assayya’ ’, therefore, remains purely speculative; and there would be no reason to credit it at all unless there were no other options.

In fact, there is another option — not just a possibility, but a probability. If the Qumran community never refer to themselves as ‘Essenes’ or ‘ assayya’, they do employ a number of other Hebrew and Aramaic terms. From these terms, it is clear that the community did not have a single definitive name for themselves. They did, however, have a highly distinctive and unique concept of themselves, and this concept is reflected by a variety of appellations and designations. 20The concept rests ultimately on the all-important ‘Covenant’, which entailed a formal oath of obedience, totally and eternally, to the Law of Moses. The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls would thus refer to themselves as, for example, ‘the Keepers of the Covenant’. As synonyms for ‘Covenant’ and ‘Law’, they would often use the same words that figure so prominently in Taoism — ‘way’, ‘work’ or ‘works’ (’ma’asim’ in Hebrew). They would speak, for instance, of’the Perfect of the Way’, or ‘the Way of Perfect Righteousness’ 21 —‘way’ meaning ‘the work of the Law’, or ‘the way in which the Law functions’, ‘the way in which the Law works’. Variations of these themes run all through the Dead Sea Scrolls to denote the Qumran community and its members.

In the ‘Habakkuk Commentary’, Eisenman, continuing this line of thought, found one particularly important such variation — the ‘ Osei ha-Torah’, which translates as the ‘Doers of the Law’. 22This term would appear to be the source of the word ‘Essene’, for the collective form of ‘ Osei ha-Torah’ is ‘ Osim’, pronounced ‘Oseem’. The Qumran community would thus have constituted, collectively, ‘the Osim’. They seem, in fact, to have been known as such. An early Christian writer, Epiphanius, speaks of an allegedly ‘heretical’ Judaic sect which once occupied an area around the Dead Sea. This sect, he says, were called the ‘Ossenes’. 23It is fairly safe to conclude that the ‘Essenes’, the ‘Ossenes’ of Epiphanius and the ‘ Osim’ of the Qumran community were one and the same.

Thus the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be thought of as ‘Essenes’, but not in the sense as defined and described by Josephus, Philo and Pliny. The accounts of the classical chroniclers prove to be altogether too circumscribed. They have also prevented many modern scholars from making the necessary connections — perhaps, in some cases, because it was not deemed desirable to do so. If the connections are made, a different and broader picture emerges — a picture in which such terms as ‘Essene’ and ‘the Qumran community’ will prove to be interchangeable with others. Eisenman effectively summarises the situation: