The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English Read Free Page B

in matters of property, in all probability the partial concealment of personal possessions, earned exclusion from ‘purity’ for a year and a cut by one quarter in the food ration (IQS VI, 25-7). The penal code of 4Q265, which closely resembles that of IQS, prescribes for deceiving a companion an exclusion for six months and a halving of the guilty person’s food portion. Disrespect to a companion of higher rank, rudeness and anger towards a priest, slander and deliberate insult, all earned one year of penance and exclusion from ‘purity’ (IQS VI, 25-7; VII, 2-5). After this, the sentences decrease to six months, three months, thirty days and ten days of penance.
    For lying deliberately and similarly deceiving by word or deed, for bearing malice unjustly, for taking revenge, for murmuring against a companion unjustly and also for going ‘naked before his companion, without having been obliged to do so’ - a curious proviso - the sectary was to atone for six months. For failing to care for a companion and for speaking foolishly: three months. For falling asleep during a meeting of the Council, for leaving the Council while members were standing (in prayer?), for spitting in Council, for ‘guffawing foolishly’, for being ‘so poorly dressed that when drawing his hand from beneath his garment his nakedness has been seen’: thirty days. The penal code contained in another of the Cave 4 manuscripts of the Damascus Document (4Q266) mentions also ten days’ penance, in addition to the thirty days’ expulsion inflicted on someone who has fallen asleep during a meeting! And for leaving an assembly three times without reason, for interrupting another while speaking, for gesticulating with the left hand: ten days (IQS VII, 15). A fascinating fragment (4Q477) has preserved in writing cases of misbehaviour by named sectaries: ‘Yohanan son of ...’ was ‘short-tempered’; ‘Hananiah Notos’ led astray ‘the spirit of the Community’ and either pampered himself or showed favouritism to his near kin(?); and another ‘Hananiah son of Sim[on]’ ‘loved’ something no doubt prohibited.
    That the common table was of high importance to Qumran daily life is evident from the fact that only the fully professed and the faultless, that is to say those who were ‘inscribed ... for purity’ and not subsequently disqualified, were allowed to sit at it. There is no explicit mention of a ritual bath preceding the meals, but from various references to purification by water, as well as the presence of bathing installations at Qumran, it is likely that the sectaries immersed themselves before eating as did the Essenes according to Josephus ( War 11, 129). But little more is learnt of the meal itself from the Community Rule than that when the table had been ‘prepared for eating, and the new wine for drinking’, the priest was to be the first to bless the food and drink (IQS VI, 4-5). The implication would be that after him the others did the same, an inference supported by the Messianic Rule, where a similar meal is described attended by two Messiahs (IQSa II, 17-21). Some uncertainty surrounds the meaning of ‘new wine’, but it would seem from the use in the Scrolls (with the exception of the Temple Scroll), of the alternative Hebrew words for wine - tirosh and yayin - that the latter often has pejorative connotations. More likely than not, the ‘wine’ drunk by the sectaries, ‘the drink of the Congregation’, was unfermented grape-juice.
    Another topic to be considered under the heading of communal life and institutions is the crucial one of induction into the sect. And if it should seem strange to place it towards the end rather than at the beginning, the explanation is that with an idea, however sketchy, of what was entailed by adherence to the movement, the process by which it admitted a Jew into its company