The road down from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea descends nearly four thousand feet in twenty miles, through hills that turn from olive and vine to bare rock and finally to the gray marl of the lowest place on the face of the earth. At the bottom, on a terrace above the shore where a seasonal stream has cut a gorge through the cliffs, stand the ruins the local Arabic name calls Khirbet Qumran. Behind them, in the cliff face and in the marl itself, are the caves.
The fellowship has stood there, two of us, on a morning in early spring. The silence is complete. The sea is flat and pale. The heat comes up from the ground before the sun has cleared the mountains of Moab on the far shore. It is not a place anyone would live by choice. It is a place one would live by vow.
The Settlement
The ruins are not large. A tower, a long hall with a pantry beside it holding the stacked remains of over a thousand bowls and cups, a room with long plastered benches and inkwells that may have been a writing room, kitchens, workshops, a pottery kiln, and everywhere water: an aqueduct from the gorge feeding a chain of great cisterns and at least ten stepped pools of the kind used for ritual bathing. The settlement could not have housed more than a few hundred people. Many may have lived in the caves and in tents on the terrace.
Beside the settlement is a cemetery of more than a thousand graves, laid out in neat rows, each marked with a heap of stones, the dead placed on their backs with heads to the south. The few that have been opened held mostly adult men, with some women and children at the edges. The graves are poor. No one here was buried with gold.
The Caves
Eleven caves within a few miles of the settlement held manuscripts. The first, high in the cliff to the north, held the seven great scrolls in their jars. The fourth, in the marl terrace within sight of the settlement, held the fragments of over five hundred manuscripts, scattered and decayed, perhaps the main library hidden in haste. Others held a copper scroll listing treasure, a scroll of the psalms, fragments of Enoch in Aramaic, fragments of nearly every book of the Hebrew scriptures.
The dry air and the darkness preserved what in any wetter land would have rotted in a generation. Nineteen centuries passed. Empires rose and fell above. The scrolls waited.
A Day in the Settlement
From the historian's description and the Community Rule, the fellowship has pieced together what a day may have been. We offer it not as history but as a picture to hold in the mind.
Before dawn the community rises. No one speaks. They go out to the terrace and face the east, where the sky is paling over the mountains across the sea, and they recite the ancestral prayers, asking, as the historian puts it, that the sun may rise. Perhaps they recite the Shema, the great confession that the Lord is one. Perhaps they sing one of their own hymns of thanksgiving. The sun clears the ridge and the first light strikes the white of their garments.
They work: in the pottery, in the fields of the oasis to the south, at the copying desks, at the loom, with the herds. At the fifth hour, mid-morning, they stop. They go down into the stepped pools and immerse themselves in the cold water that has come from the winter rains through the aqueduct. They put on white linen. They enter the long hall and sit in order of rank, priests first. A priest stretches out his hand over the bread and the new wine, which is probably unfermented grape juice, and blesses them. They eat in silence, a single dish, enough and no more. They lay aside the linen and return to work.
At evening they wash and eat again in the same way. Then, says the Rule, the many shall watch together a third of every night of the year, reading the book and studying the law and blessing together. In the dark, by lamplight, the voice of a reader. The stars over the sea. Sleep.
The Discipline
The Rule is exact about the life. A candidate was examined by the overseer, instructed for a year while keeping his property, examined again, admitted to the purity of the many but not yet to their drink, examined a third time after a second year, and only then fully admitted, his property merged with the community's. Members were ranked each year according to their understanding and their deeds, and a man might rise or fall.
The penalties were small and precise. For speaking foolishly, three months of reduced rations. For interrupting a companion, ten days. For falling asleep in the assembly, thirty days. For laughing aloud foolishly, thirty days. For bearing a grudge, six months. For slandering the community, expulsion. The fellowship does not keep these penalties and does not recommend them. We note them because they show a people utterly serious about the small conduct of common life, who believed that the way one spoke at table was part of the way one served God.
What the Desert Taught
Why did they go there? The scrolls answer with Isaiah: a voice cries, in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord. The Rule says that when these things come to pass in Israel the community shall separate from the habitation of the men of iniquity and go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him, and that this way is the study of the Law. The desert was not an escape. It was a workshop in which a people was being prepared.
The fellowship's article The Desert as Teacher asks what that preparation means for a student who will never live in a desert. The short answer is that the desert is a condition of the heart before it is a place on the map. The Essenes went down to the lowest place on earth to be emptied so that they might be filled. Any kitchen at five in the morning can be that place.