George Foot Moore

“ And so shall the judgment be of all who enter into his covenant and do not hold firmly by these statutes, they shall be visited even with extermination by the hand of Belial. This is the day in which God will visit, as he spoke, “The princes of Judah are become like men who remove the boundary; on them will I pour out my fury like water” (Hos. 5 10) . For they entered into the covenant of repentance, but did not turn aside from the way of faithless men, and wallowed in ways of fornication and in unrighteous gain, and avenging themselves and bearing a grudge against one another. ”

“ If we consider that the Essenes, notwithstanding their wider divergence from the common type of Judaism, seem to have regarded themselves as within the pale of the church, and to have been so regarded by others—enjoying, indeed, with the people the reputation of peculiar sanctity—the schismatic character of our sect appears in a still stronger light. ”

“ Every one who enters into the covenant pledges himself not only not to rob the poor and make widows his spoil, but to love his neighbor as himself, to seek the welfare of his fellow, and to sustain the poor and needy. As regards the relations of the members of the sect to gentiles, it is forbidden to shed the blood of a gentile or to take aught of their property, “in order to give them no occasion to blaspheme” (12 6 f.) ”

“ The severance of the Egyptian Jews from the Palestinian influence (though they did not entirely give up their loyalty to the Jerusalem Sanctuary) , prepared the ground for the doctrines of such a Sect as the Zadokites in which all allegiance to Judah and Jerusalem was rejected, and in which the descendants of the House of Zadok (of whom indeed Onias himself was one) represented both the Priest and the Messiah. ”

“ The moral teachings of the sect have been frequently touched upon above in speaking of their rules of life. Man is led into sin not only by the snares of Belial, but by his own sinful inclination and adulterous eyes (2 16; seemingly the yeṣer hara' of the rabbis) . It was through these that the Watchers fell; by them the generation of the flood sinned, and the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt and in Canaan, and brought judgment upon themselves (2 14 ff.) . We have seen that the sect insisted upon monogamy, and perhaps rejected divorce altogether. ”

“ No scholar who has made an independent study of the texts published by Dr. Schechter can have failed to consider the question whether these schismatics, with their “unique teacher,”103 their “new covenant,” their “Supervisor,” whose name and functions might be compared with those of a bishop ἐπίσκοπος, their loyalty to their dead leader, God's Anointed one (Messiah) , who made them know his holy spirit, and their expectation of an Anointed one in the last times, their hostility to the Pharisees, can have been a Jewish Christian sect. ”

“ God confirmed his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them the secret of things in which all Israel was in error, his holy Sabbaths and his glorious festivals and his righteous testimonies and his true ways and the pleasure of his will, things which if a man do he shall live by them. ”

“ Jews and Samaritans not only lived in many of the lands of their dispersion among peoples who used the thirty-day month, but encountered this calendar in commercial centres on the very borders of Palestine with which they had close relations. The advantages of a system in which the festivals came on fixed dates, instead of shifting within wide limits, as they must in the lunar-solar year with its irregular intercalation, are obvious,79 and an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar accordingly may have been made more than once and in more than one region. ”

“ In this state of the evidence it is obvious that no argument can be based on the coincidence in time between the origin of the Dositheans and that of our sect. When the Fathers bring the names of Dositheus and Zadok into conjunction, it means no more than that they attributed certain errors to both Dositheans and Sadducees ”

“ Thus, at the beginning of the legal part of the book, the delivery of a fellow Israelite to the gentiles so that he is condemned by their law is said to fall under this prohibition, and further, “any man of those who enter into the covenant who brings up against his neighbor a matter not in the nature of a reproof before witnesses, but which he brings up in anger, or tells it to his elders to bring the man into disrepute, he is one that takes vengeance and bears a grudge.” ”

“ To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,62 but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded [pg 354] of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the “statutes and ordinances” of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to as perush ”

“ On the other hand, no man may sell to gentiles clean animals or birds, lest they offer them in sacrifice, nor grain, nor wine—naught of his possessions; nor shall he sell to them his slave or maid servant who have come with him into the covenant of Abraham (12 9 ff.) , He may not pass the Sabbath in the neighborhood of gentiles. They are unclean, and garments they may have handled require purification.
No record of a schismatic body such as reveals itself in our texts is preserved in the early catalogues of Jewish heresies, nor have references to it been discovered in rabbinical sources. ”

“ The Christian Jews of the first century in Palestine, so far as we know anything about them, conformed in the matter of observance to the authority of the scribes and Pharisees, and alleged the express command of Jesus for this practice (Matt. 23 2) . Early Christian heresies sometimes exhibit ascetic features reminding us of the Essenes; but none of ultra-legalistic tendency is known.
As our sect is very zealous for things which have no connection with Christianity, so on the other hand the texts disclose no trace of specific Christian beliefs or conceptions. ”

“ So, again, in a house in which a death has occurred, fixtures, such as nails and pegs in the walls, are unclean; and wood, stone, and dust are capable of contracting and communicating various kinds of uncleanness (12 15-18) . The sect sees in these stricter distinctions between clean and unclean the superiority of its ordinances over those of other Jews, whom they regard as sinfully lax. ”

“ He narrates that a son of the Samaritan high priest, named Zar'ah, a man preëminent for learning in his time, having been expelled from the community for immorality, betook himself to Dositheus, who made him the chief of his sect. This man “wrote a book in which he vituperated all the Samaritan religious heads and set forth heresies.” The words are, haja fīhī kul al' a'immetin wa'abda'a fīhī. Inasmuch as the Arabic hajwun formally corresponds to the Hebrew hagu, the Book of Hagu in our texts might be identified with this controversial writing of Zar'ah, the disciple of Dositheus. ”

“ Points in which their teaching is particularly assailed are that they allow polygamy and the remarriage of divorced persons during the life of the other party, and hold it lawful for a man to marry his niece; [pg 345] that they defile the sanctuary by the laxity of some of their rules and practice about sexual uncleanness; they presume blasphemously to impugn the “statutes of the covenant of God” (the legislation of the sect) , declaring that they are not right, and saying abominable things about them (4 20-5 14) . ”

“ Dr. Schechter quotes Epiphanius further as saying that the Dositheans “have no intercourse with all people because they detest all mankind,” in which he thinks “we may readily recognize here the law of our Sect requiring the washing of the clothes when they were brought by a Gentile (because of the contamination) , and the prohibition of staying over the Sabbath in the vicinity of Gentiles” (Introduction, pp. xxiii f.) ”

“ The Fathers generally agree in describing the Dositheans as a Samaritan heresy, though Epiphanius and Philaster have it that the author of the heresy was by extraction a Jew. They frequently bring him into connection with Simon Magus, in the time of the Apostles. According to Origen, he gave himself out for the Messiah foretold by Moses; his followers had books of his, and legends pretending that he had not died, but was still alive somewhere. ”

“ No one may testify against the accused in a capital case who is not a god-fearing man old enough to be included in the census (that is, at least twenty years of age, Exod. 30 14) ; nor shall a man's testimony be credited against his neighbor who is himself a wilful transgressor of any of the commandments, until he has come to repentance (9 23-10 3) . A peculiar provision is made for the case that a single witness (on whose testimony therefore conviction could not be had) sees a capital offence committed. He is to make known the facts to the Supervisor, who records the testimony in writing. ”

“ It is, however, the obvious argument, if the principle of analogy be admitted in the interpretation of the law; it is common [pg 367] in the Karaite books, and is ascribed to the Samaritans also.89 Kirkisani also says that the Zadokites absolutely forbade divorce, which the Scripture permitted, agreeing in this with the Christians and with the Isawites, whose founders, Jesus and Obadiah of Ispahan,90 had likewise forbidden it. We are not told expressly that our sect prohibited divorce, but their prohibition of remarriage during the life of the divorced wife would have the same effect. ”

“ What Epiphanius says is that the Dositheans agree with the rest of the Samaritans in the observance of circumcision and the Sabbath, and in avoiding contact with any one because they feel that all men (that is, all gentiles) are unclean. He had already described the customs of all the Samaritans: They wash themselves and their clothes in water when they come in contact with a foreigner ”

“ A man shall not pass the Sabbath in a place near the gentiles.
18. A man shall not profane the Sabbath for the sake of gain.
19. If a human being fall into a tank of water or into a place of ... no man shall fetch him up by means of a ladder or a rope or any implement.
20. No man shall bring upon the altar on the Sabbath anything except the Sabbath burnt-offerings, for so it is written, “aside from your Sabbaths.”
The dietary laws afford other examples of the strict rules of the sect.43 Fish may be eaten only if, while still alive, they have been split open and drained of their blood ”

“ The chief of the evil spirits is Belial: he is “let loose” during the whole of the present dispensation; he lays snares for men and entraps them, especially in the three sins of fornication, unrighteous gain, and the defilement of the sanctuary (4 15 ff.) ; his spirits rule over men and lead them to apostasy (12 2 f.) ”

“ Upon all those who reject the commandments and the statutes, the deserts of the wicked shall be requited when God visits the earth, when the word comes to pass which was written by Zechariah the prophet, “Sword, awake against my shepherd and against the man that is my fellow, saith God ”

“ The author is almost exclusively interested in the sect itself, in the division which had rent it, and in polemics against laxer interpretations of the law. This limitation of the horizon is characteristically sectarian, and may suggest, moreover, as has been said above, that the writer is not far removed in time from the split in the new organization.
The polemic is especially pointed against certain opponents who are described as “those who build a wall and plaster it with stucco” (4 19; 8 12) .33 They follow a commandment (ṣau) ”

“ Votive sacrifices are also mentioned; [pg 356] it is forbidden to vow to the altar anything that has been procured by compulsion; the priest shall refuse to receive such offerings (16 13 f.) . There is nothing to indicate where this sanctuary was situated, further than the natural presumption that it was in the region of Damascus, where the sect had established itself. The priests have the precedence of all others in the community ”

“ A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect ”

“ Moslem influence can here hardly be questioned; in a later chapter Elia describes the postures of prayer quite after the Moslem pattern, alleging Biblical authority for all of them.65.The opinion that after Josiah's reform, or after the restoration of the temple by Zerubbabel and Joshua, Jerusalem was the only place where Jewish sacrifices were offered is refuted by an accumulating volume of evidence from various regions. ”

“ In the context of the covenant formula, in contrast to Jewish orthodoxy no less than to Christianity, the neighbor is not the fellow man, nor even the fellow Jew, but the fellow member of the schismatic church.106.See above, p. ”

“ Jubilees 5 27) , while for the Karaites thirty days was only the extreme length of a lunar month. See Poznanski, Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. x, p. 241.99.See above, p. 359 f.100.In “Belial is let loose,” Mr. Margoliouth finds a witless pun on Paul's apostolic claims.101.Mr. Margoliouth is led to the opinion that they were Boëthusians by the obscure passage in 2 13, which he interprets, “in the explanation of his name (sc. the Messiah's) are also their names,”—the name of the sect points mysteriously to the name of the Messiah. ”