Far to the north of the Dead Sea, where the coastal plain meets the hills of Galilee, a long wooded ridge runs out into the Mediterranean and ends in a headland above the bay. The Hebrew scriptures call it the Carmel, the garden or the vineyard of God. It is green when the rest of the land is brown. Springs run from its flanks. Caves open in its limestone. For as long as there have been records it has been a holy mountain.
Elijah on the Mountain
Here, in the books of the Kings, the prophet Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal and called down fire from heaven on a drenched altar. Here he bowed himself to the earth with his face between his knees while his servant watched the sea for a cloud the size of a man's hand. Here, tradition says, he and his disciple Elisha gathered the sons of the prophets, the guilds of the inspired who lived in community, ate at a common table, and went out to speak the word of the Lord.
The Essenes reverenced Elijah above all the prophets save Moses. The scrolls expect a prophet like Moses to come before the anointed ones, and the gospels show the people of Jesus's time expecting Elijah to return before the end. A mountain where Elijah had lived and where the sons of the prophets had kept a common life was exactly the kind of place a community of the covenant would honor.
The Northern Branch
Here the evidence thins and tradition thickens. Later writers, both ancient and modern, have spoken of a northern branch of the Essenes centered on Carmel, as distinct from the southern branch of the Dead Sea. The northern branch, in these accounts, married and raised families, lived in the villages of Galilee, and was known as the Nazarenes or Nazoreans, the keepers or the watchers, from a Hebrew root that means to guard. The southern branch, celibate and severe, was the one the Roman writer saw and the one the scrolls describe.
The historian does say that there was a second order of Essenes who agreed with the rest in all things except that they married, holding that those who did not marry cut off the chief part of human life. A later Christian writer places a Jewish sect of Nazarenes in the north and east of the land, Jews who kept the Law but would not sacrifice or eat flesh, and sets beside them a sect of Ossaeans whom he connects with the Essenes. These scraps do not prove a Carmel community. They permit one.
What the Fellowship Holds
The fellowship holds the tradition of Carmel lightly and gratefully. Lightly, because we cannot prove it, and we have promised our students not to pass tradition off as fact. Gratefully, because the tradition preserves something the desert alone does not: the picture of a mystical community of families, of men and women and children, living among their neighbors in green country, keeping the hours and the purity and the common table without fleeing to the wilderness to do it.
Most of our students are not celibates in the desert. They are householders on the mountain. If the Essene way is to be lived today it will be lived mostly on Carmel, not at Qumran, and the fellowship has shaped its practices accordingly. The Morning Watch takes twenty minutes. The common table can be a family's supper. The white garment can be a clean heart.
The Later Mountain
Carmel did not cease to be holy when the Essenes vanished. Christian hermits lived in its caves from the earliest centuries, drawn by the memory of Elijah. In the age of the crusades a company of them gathered near the spring of Elijah and asked for a rule, and from them descends one of the great contemplative orders of the Western church, which still honors the prophet as its father. The fellowship takes this as a sign that the mountain remembers, and that a way of life planted deeply enough in a place will grow again whenever the conditions allow.
Continue with the article The Two Branches, which examines the Nazarene and Ossaean traditions in more detail.