Comments on: Qumran’s True Purpose Discovered? https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/qumrans-true-purpose-discovered/ Sun, 08 Jan 2023 07:31:57 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 By: Stephen Goranson https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/qumrans-true-purpose-discovered/#comment-2000125844 Fri, 08 Oct 2021 11:28:21 +0000 https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=66615#comment-2000125844 J. T. Milik (translated from French by John Strugnell) wrote in Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (1959) pages 116-7: “Entry into the sect took on a special importance; it took place on the day of the feast of the Renewal of the Covenant….At this festival, probably, Essenes from the most distant communities gathered together at the mother-house at Qumran….Our oldest manuscript of the Damascus Document places the ceremony of the renewal of the Covenant in the third month of the year.”

William H. Brownlee, “The Ceremony of Crossing of the Jordan in the Annual Covenanting at Qumran,” Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Band 211, 1982, 295-302, offers discussion.

Shemaryahu Talmon, after supporting the Essene identity (“A Further Link Between the Judean Covenanters and the Essenes,” HTR 1963, 313f), preferred to call the group the Community of the Renewed Covenant (book of the same title, ed. E. Ulrich and J. VanderKam, U Notre Dame P, 1994).

Several others also wrote about the annual ceremony.

Philo and Josephus both estimated the Essene population as “more than 4000” and that they “got some of their reports on Essenes from Strabo, who in turn drew on Posidonius.” See S. Goranson, “Posidonius, Strabo and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as Sources on Essenes,” Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 45 no. 2 (Autumn 1994), pp. 295-98, at 295-96.

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