In the last two centuries before the common era and the first century of it, the Jewish people were divided among several ways of being faithful. The ancient historian who knew them best counted three principal schools: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Of the three, the Essenes were the smallest, the strictest, and in some ways the most admired. A Roman writer who never met them called them a people alone in the world and marvelous beyond all others. A Jewish philosopher who had met them said they had become, through virtue alone, free men in a world of slaves.
Then Jerusalem fell, and the Essenes vanished from history. For eighteen hundred years they were known only through the words of outsiders. Then a shepherd threw a stone into a cave above the Dead Sea and heard pottery break.
The Name
No one is certain what Essene means. The Greek and Latin writers spell it two ways and explain it not at all. Scholars have proposed Aramaic roots meaning holy ones, pious ones, healers, doers of the Law, and the silent ones. The scrolls themselves never use the word; the community calls itself the Yahad, the Unity, or the Sons of Light, or the men of the Covenant, or simply the Way.
The fellowship uses Essene as the ancient writers used it, for the whole movement in all its branches, and is content not to know its etymology. A name is a door, not a house.
Where They Lived
The Roman naturalist places them on the western shore of the Dead Sea, far enough from the water to avoid its vapors, in a settlement of palm trees without women and without money. The philosopher and the historian both say otherwise: that Essenes lived in many towns and villages of Judea, in groups large and small, keeping their own common houses and their own rules while living among their neighbors.
Both are probably right. The ruins at Qumran, with their great cisterns and stepped pools, their long common hall, and their cemetery of over a thousand graves, fit the picture of a desert center. The Damascus Document, with its rules for members who marry, raise children, own property, and trade with outsiders, fits the picture of the towns. A single movement with a desert heart and a wide body is what the evidence suggests.
How They Lived
The historian, who claimed to have spent time among them as a young man, gives the fullest account. They rose before the sun and spoke of nothing worldly until they had offered certain ancestral prayers toward the dawn. They worked at their trades until the fifth hour, then gathered, bathed in cold water, put on white linen, and entered the common hall as into a sanctuary. A priest blessed the bread and the single dish of plain food, and no one tasted anything before the blessing. They ate in silence. They worked again until evening and then supped the same way.
They held all property in common. A newcomer handed his goods to the community's steward, and from then on no one was rich and no one poor. They despised oil on the skin and finery on the body. They kept their garments until they fell to pieces. They did not swear oaths, except the one great oath of entry, which bound them to piety toward God, justice toward humanity, hatred of the wicked, love of the truth, and the keeping of the community's books and the names of the angels.
They studied. The philosopher says they spent the seventh day in their synagogues, hearing the ancient books expounded by allegory. The historian says they searched the writings of the ancients for whatever would profit soul and body, and were expert in the properties of roots and stones for healing. The scrolls confirm a community of relentless readers, copying the scriptures, composing hymns, writing rules, and interpreting the prophets as if every verse were a letter addressed to them.
What They Believed
The historian says they held the soul to be immortal, imprisoned in the body as in a cage and released at death to a place of rest beyond the ocean, or of punishment in a dark and stormy pit. He says they held that all things are in the hands of fate, which the scrolls express as the teaching that God knows and appoints all things before they are, and that two spirits, of truth and of perversity, contend in every human heart until the appointed end.
They expected that end soon. The scrolls look for a final war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, for the coming of a prophet and two anointed ones, of Aaron and of Israel, and for a new temple in a renewed Jerusalem. They believed that the priests of that temple had gone astray and that they themselves, the Sons of Zadok, kept the true calendar, the true purity, and the true covenant in exile until God should act.
And they believed, in the words of one of their hymns, that God had opened their ears to wonderful mysteries and given them to stand in the company of the holy ones. This is the Essene note that the fellowship hears most clearly across the centuries: the conviction that the divine is not only to be obeyed but to be known, and that a life of discipline is the way to that knowledge.
The Essenes and the Way
Were John who baptized and Jesus of Nazareth Essenes? The question has been asked since the scrolls were found, and the honest answer is that we do not know. The scrolls never mention them. The gospels never mention the Essenes. Yet the parallels are many: the baptism in living water, the common meal, the community of goods in the first Jerusalem church, the language of light and darkness and of the poor in spirit, the reading of Isaiah's voice in the wilderness, the expectation of the kingdom. The differences are many also, and the fellowship explores both in its articles.
What we say with confidence is this: the earliest followers of Jesus called their movement the Way, and so did the community of the scrolls. Both believed they were preparing in the wilderness the way of the Lord. Whatever the historical relationship, they drank from the same well. The fellowship drinks there too.
The End and the Finding
The settlement at Qumran was destroyed by the Roman legions, probably in the year 68 of the common era, as they moved to encircle Jerusalem. The scrolls had been hidden in the caves, perhaps in haste, perhaps as a long-planned storage of a sacred library. Jerusalem fell two years later. The historian says that Essenes were tortured by the Romans and died smiling, refusing to blaspheme or to eat forbidden food. After that, silence.
In the winter of 1946 or 1947 a Bedouin shepherd found the first jars. Over the following decade eleven caves yielded the remains of nearly a thousand manuscripts. The community that had expected God to vindicate it before the whole world had instead been vindicated by time, its voice preserved in the dry air while the empire that destroyed it had long since turned to dust. The fellowship does not read this as proof of anything. We read it as an invitation.
Continue with the Timeline, or go deeper into Qumran and the Desert.