The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect

by George Foot Moore

Each man according to his spirit, shall they be judged by his holy counsel, and all who have broken through the bounds of the law, of those who entered into the covenant, when the glory of God shines out on Israel, shall be cut off from the midst of the camp, and with them all the evil-doers of Judah, in the days when it is tried in the fire. But all who held firmly by these precepts, going out and coming in in conformity with the law, and listened to the voice of the teacher, will confess[31] before God.... “We have done evil, we, and our fathers also, when they went contrary to the statutes of the covenant, and faithful are thy judgments upon us.” And they will not act presumptuously against his holy statutes and his righteous judgment and his faithful testimonies. They will be instructed in the ancient judgments by which the followers of the unique one were judged, and will hearken to the words of the teacher of righteousness. And they will not controvert the righteous statutes when they hear them; they will rejoice and be glad, and their heart will be strong, and they will show themselves mighty against all the people of the world.[32] And God will atone for them, and they will see his salvation with joy, because they trusted in his holy name.

Here the fragment ends. The destruction of those who fall away from the sect is threatened in other places; it will suffice to quote the most important (19 5 ff.):

Upon all those who reject the commandments and the statutes, the deserts of the wicked shall be requited when God visits the earth, when the word comes to pass which was written by Zechariah the prophet, “Sword, awake against my shepherd and against the man that is my fellow, saith God; smite the shepherd, and let the sheep be scattered, and I will turn my hand against the little ones” (Zech. 13 7). But those who observe it (sc. the obligations of the covenant) are “the poor of the flock” (Zech. 11 7). These shall escape at the end of the visitation, but the former (sc. those who reject the commandments) shall be given over to the sword when the Anointed of Aaron and Israel comes, as it was at the end of the first visitation, of which God said by Ezekiel that a mark should be made on the foreheads of them that sigh and cry, [pg 344] and the rest were delivered to the sword that executes the judgment of the covenant. And so shall the judgment be of all who enter into his covenant and do not hold firmly by these statutes, they shall be visited even with extermination by the hand of Belial. This is the day in which God will visit, as he spoke, “The princes of Judah are become like men who remove the boundary; on them will I pour out my fury like water” (Hos. 5 10). For they entered into the covenant of repentance, but did not turn aside from the way of faithless men, and wallowed in ways of fornication and in unrighteous gain, and avenging themselves and bearing a grudge against one another.

It is possible, of course, that the judgment of the heathen world, which looms so large in most of the apocalypses, may have had a place in parts of the book now lost, but if it had been a very important feature in the expectation of the sect we should hardly fail to find at least allusions to it in the pages in our hands. The author is almost exclusively interested in the sect itself, in the division which had rent it, and in polemics against laxer interpretations of the law. This limitation of the horizon is characteristically sectarian, and may suggest, moreover, as has been said above, that the writer is not far removed in time from the split in the new organization.

The polemic is especially pointed against certain opponents who are described as “those who build a wall and plaster it with stucco” (4 19; 8 12).[33] They follow a commandment (ṣau); probably connoting, as in Hosea 5 11, from which the phrase is taken, an arbitrary rule of their own, a commandment of men.[34] God hates them, his anger is kindled against them (8 18). These “builders” are false teachers; Biblical denunciations of the false prophets are applied to them. (See especially 8 12 f.) Points in which their teaching is particularly assailed are that they allow polygamy and the remarriage of divorced persons during the life of the other party, and hold it lawful for a man to marry his niece; [pg 345] that they defile the sanctuary by the laxity of some of their rules and practice about sexual uncleanness; they presume blasphemously to impugn the “statutes of the covenant of God” (the legislation of the sect), declaring that they are not right, and saying abominable things about them (4 20-5 14). The positions so hotly denounced, especially in the matter of marriage and divorce, are those of the Palestinian rabbis as we know them in the Mishna and kindred works, and in so far as the Pharisees had a dominating influence in the schools of the law they may be regarded as in a peculiar sense the object of this invective, which is, however, sweeping enough to include all rabbinical Judaism. Such verses as Isaiah 50 11 and 59 4 ff. are hurled at them; they are compared to Johanneh and his brother, whom Belial raised up against Moses (5 17 ff.).[35]

The sect prohibited polygamy, which they stigmatized as fornication, arguing from the creation—“a male and a female created he them” (cf. Matt. 19 4), and from the story of the flood—“by pairs they went into the ark,” and from the law which forbade the prince to multiply wives unto himself (Deut. 17 17), that is, as they understood it, to take more than one wife. To forestall an objection, it is added: “But David had not read in the sealed book of the law which was in the ark, for it was not opened in Israel from the time of the death of Eleazar and Joshua and the elders who worshipped the Astartes, but was hidden and not brought to light until Zadok arose” (5 2-5; see below, p. [359]).

Marriage with another woman while a man had a divorced wife living was apparently put in the same category with having two wives at the same time (4 20 f.; cf. Matt. 5 31 f.). Marriage with a niece (brother's or sister's daughter) they treated as incest, reasoning that marriage between a woman and her uncle stood on all fours with marriage between a man and his aunt, which was expressly forbidden as within the prohibited degrees of kinship.[36] The three snares of Belial by which he ensnared Israel [pg 346] are fornication (that is, plural or incestuous unions), wealth (that is, unrighteous gain), and the pollution of the sanctuary (4 15 f.; cf. 5 6 f.).[37]

The same rigorous tendency which appears in the attitude of the sect in regard to marriage pervades the whole legal part of the work before us. The rules for the observance of the Sabbath (10 14-11 21) will make this clear.

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 portal[38] by its diameter (?); for this is what he said: Observe the Sabbath day to hallow it.