The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect

by George Foot Moore

The principal seat of the sect was in the region of Damascus, where its adherents formed numerous communities. It was composed of Israelites who had migrated thither from Judaea; thither also had come “the interpreter of the law,” the founder of the sect; there it had been organized by a covenant repeatedly referred to as “the new covenant in the land of Damascus.” Many who entered into this new covenant at the beginning did not long remain true to it; the writer inveighs vehemently against those who fell away, accusing them not only of grave error, but of gross violations of the law; but this crisis had been passed, and when the book was written the community was apparently flourishing.

The most coherent account of the origin of the sect is found on pages 5-6:[3]

At the end of the devastation of the land arose men who removed the boundary and led Israel astray; and the land was laid waste because they spoke rebelliously against the commandments of God by Moses and also against his holy Anointed,[4] and prophesied falsehood to turn Israel back from following God. But God remembered the covenant with the forefathers, and he raised up from Aaron discerning men and from Israel wise men, and he heard them, and they dug the well. “The well, princes dug it, nobles of the people delved it, with the legislator” (Numbers 21 18). The well is the law, and they who dug it are the captivity of Israel[5] who went forth from the land of Judah and sojourned in the land of [pg 333] Damascus, all of whom God called princes because they sought him.[6]... The legislator is the interpreter of the law, as Isaiah said, “Bringing forth a tool for his work” (Isa. 54 16), and the nobles of the people are those who came to delve the well with the statutes which the legislator decreed that men should walk in them in the complete end of wickedness; and besides these they shall not obtain any (statutes) until the teacher of righteousness shall arise in the last times.

The migration is referred to in several other places: “The captivity of Israel, who migrated from the land of Judah” (4 2 f.);[7] “those who held firm made their escape to the northern land,” by which the region of Damascus is meant (7 13 f.; cf. 7 15, 18 f.). The time of the migration is plainly indicated in the passage quoted above (5 20 ff.). The men who, after the end of the devastation of the land, “removed the boundary,” and led Israel astray, speaking rebelliously against the commandments of God by Moses and against his holy Anointed, prophesying falsely to turn Israel away from following God, in consequence of which the land was laid waste, are most naturally taken for the hellenizing leaders of the Seleucid time. In this period, it seems that a number of Jews, including priests and levites, withdrew to the region of Damascus,[8] and there they subsequently bound themselves by covenant to live strictly in accordance with the law as defined by their legislator.

With this the other allusions agree. Thus in A, p. 8 (= B, p. 19), at the end of a violent invective against the sinners, of whom it is said, “The princes of Judah are like those who remove the boundary,” we read that “they separated not from the people [and their sins, B], but presumptuously broke through all restraints, walking in the way of the wicked (heathen), of whom God said, ‘The venom of dragons is their wine, and the head of asps is cruel’[9] (Deut. 32 33). The dragons are the kings of the nations, and their wine means their ways, and the head of asps is the head of the Greek kings who came to inflict vengeance upon them.” This again is most naturally understood of Antiochus [pg 334] Epiphanes; the calamities he brought on the Jews were a direct consequence of the course of the hellenizing party.[10]

A definite date for these occurrences is given in 1 5 ff.: “When God's wrath was over, three hundred and ninety years after he gave them into the power of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, he visited them, and caused to spring up from Israel and Aaron a root of his planting to inherit his land and to thrive on the good things of his earth. And they recognized their wickedness and knew that they were guilty men, and they were like blind men and like men groping their way for twenty years. And God took note of their deeds, that with perfect heart they sought him, and he raised up for them a teacher of righteousness to guide them in the way of his heart.”

The “root” which God, mindful of his covenant, caused to spring up from Aaron and Israel is the men with whom the religious revival, or reformation, began, the forefathers of the sect (see 6 2 f., and below, p. [375]);[11] the “teacher of righteousness” is the “interpreter of the law who came to Damascus” (6 7 f., 7 18 f.). The dates refer therefore to the origin of the sect. Three hundred and ninety years from the taking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar (597 or 586 b.c.) would bring us, by our chronology, to 207 or 196 b.c. The Jewish chronology of the Persian period is, however, always too long by from forty to seventy years,[12] and assuming, as it is fair to do, that our author made the same error, the three hundred ninety years would run out in the middle of the third century. Dr. Schechter suspects, with much probability, that the original reading was “four hundred and ninety years,” the common apocalyptic cycle (Dan. 9 2, 24; Enoch 89-90; 93, etc.). Making the same allowance for error, we should be brought again to a time not far removed from the punishment [pg 335] inflicted on the people by Antiochus Epiphanes (see above, p. [333] f.).[13]

There is nothing in the texts which demands a later date for the origin of the sect. The last event in the national history to which reference is made is the vengeance inflicted on the heathenizing rulers of the people by “the head of the Greek kings.” To the misfortunes of the people in the following centuries, such as the taking of Jerusalem by Pompey or its destruction by Titus, there is no allusion. It may perhaps be inferred not only that the schism antedated these calamities, but that the book was written before them. In the author's frame of mind toward the religious leaders of Palestinian Jewry, he would have been likely to record such conspicuous judgments upon them. A comparison with the Assumption of Moses is instructive on this point. There the sweeping denunciation of the priesthood and the scribes, “their teachers in those times,” and of the godless Asmonaean priest-kings, is followed by the well-deserved judgment inflicted on them by Herod, and after him comes Varus, burning part of the temple, crucifying, and carrying off into slavery. The second of the Psalms of Solomon may also be compared.

The schismatic character of the sect would also be explained [pg 336] if it arose in an age when the character of the political and religious heads of the Jewish people was such as to move God-fearing and law-abiding men to repudiate them with all their ways and works. For it is not merely with a sect, differing from the mass of their fellows in certain opinions and practices, that we have to do, but with a schism. The Covenanters of Damascus are radical come-outers, seceders not only from the land of Judaea, but from established Judaism, on which they look much as the Puritan Separatists in the seventeenth century looked on the English Church; they might have taken to themselves the prophetic word so often in the mouth of the Puritan, “Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord” (Isa. 52 11), as they do apply to the religious teachers of the Jewish church the most violent invectives of the same prophet (50 11, 59 4 ff.; see below, p. [344] f.). They will not even call themselves Jews, they are Israelites who went forth from the land of Judaea; their Messiah is to spring from Aaron and Israel, not from Judah; when the final judgment comes in its appointed time, it will no longer be permitted to make compact with the house of Judah, but every man must stand in his own stronghold;[14] when the glory of God shines out on Israel, all the wicked of Judah shall be cut off, in the day of its trial by fire. They reject the temple in Jerusalem, and will not offer on its altar. If we consider that the Essenes, notwithstanding their wider divergence from the common type of Judaism, seem to have regarded themselves as within the pale of the church, and to have been so regarded by others—enjoying, indeed, with the people the reputation of peculiar sanctity—the schismatic character of our sect appears in a still stronger light.

The language of the book is not inconsistent with the age to which the contents would seem to assign it. The vocabulary is in the main Biblical, but there are a number of words which otherwise occur only in the writings of the Mishnic age or later. Some of these belong to the technical terminology of the law schools, some of them appear to be peculiar to the sect. A few of the Biblical words also are used in later senses and applications. [pg 337] It is proper to bear in mind, however, that the Hebrew originals of the works with which it would be most natural to compare our text, such as Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Gospel, are not preserved; in fact, between the last books of the Old Testament and the rabbinical literature of the second Christian century there is a hiatus in the history of the Hebrew language, so that words which appear for the first time in the Mishna and kindred works may have been, and in many cases probably were, in use much earlier. It is unnecessary therefore to suppose that such words were introduced into our texts by later scribes, though the possibility of such changes must of course be admitted. The particular instances in which Dr. Schechter thinks that late and foreign influences are most clearly to be recognized—the title of the “censor” and the peculiar name for a house of worship—are discussed elsewhere.[15] More remarkable than the vocabulary of the book is its syntax. The consecutive constructions of the perfect and the imperfect are regularly employed, not only in imitation of Biblical models in narrative and prophetic passages, but in the legal part of the book; and in spite of some irregularities, which may in part at least be laid to the charge of scribes, the use of these tenses is generally correct. In this respect the Hebrew of the book differs entirely from that of the Mishna and the contemporary and later Midrashim, in which the characteristic features of classical tense-syntax have entirely disappeared, under the influence, it is generally supposed, of the Aramaic vernacular. In comparison with these writings the vocabulary also is notably free from foreign admixture. There are no words borrowed from Greek and Latin, and only one or two instances where an Aramaic term seems to have been adopted. The orthography also, in its more sparing use of the semivowels to indicate the vowels u and i, resembles that of the Bible.