Dating the Teacher of Righteousness and the Floruit of His Movement

JBL 122/1 (2003) 53-87 (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Shortly after the first fruits of the discovery later known as the Dead Sea Scrolls left the hands of the Bedouin, scholars began trying to explain the ultimate origin of the deposits. Eliezer Sukenik was the first to propose their origin with the ancient Jewish sect known as the Essenes.1 This view immediately attracted other proponents, and by the middle of the 1950s, the theory known as the "Essene Hypothesis" was regnant in the new discipline of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. Nor was it long before the Essene Hypothesis took its most recognizable modern form.2 Supported today by a broad consensus, this form of the theory holds that Khirbet Qumran is the place where, in the reign of either Jonathan or Simon Maccabee (i.e., in the period 161-135 B.C.E.), a dissident group of Jews took up a monastic lifestyle. These Essenes had departed from Jerusalem in protest of the current high priest. Leading them was a man their own texts later styled ..., conventionally translated "the Teacher of Righteousness." The group then lived out their lives in this sere setting overlooking the Salt Sea. Six or seven generations followed them and did likewise, until a Roman army destroyed Khirbet Qumran in 68 C.E.3 The scrolls represent the library of the Teacher's followers, hidden in the caves to forestall destruction at the hands of the enemy. Thus the consensus locates the Teacher of Righteousness and the beginnings of his movement in the early to mid second century B.C.E. Advocates of this chronology have defined its parameters by appeal to three types of evidence: (1) the archaeology of the Khirbet Qumran site; (2) the paleography of the writings produced by the Teacher and his followers; and (3) certain statements in the manuscripts. In the 1950s, these approaches seemed to lend themselves to easy combination. Like the three intertwining cords of a strong rope, they appeared mutually supportive. But it may now be seen that the strength was perhaps more apparent than real. Today we know substantially more about each of these elements than was known when the consensus chronology first took shape; the new information has tended to render that chronology less secure rather than more. In the pages that follow I want to suggest that the totality of the evidence now available offers at best only ambiguous support for the chronological framework of the traditional form of the Essene Hypothesis. Another synthesis is at least equally viable, one that places the Teacher late in the second century B.C.E. and early in the first, fifty or sixty years later than the consensus view.4 As the centerpiece of this reformulation, I propose to focus on a method of dating that is, in certain respects at least, more precise than any other we have. Scholars have employed it but little because until recent years they lacked much of the relevant material. Before I take up that method, however, it is important to consider very briefly why none of the three conventional dating techniques necessarily supports the consensus chronology-why, therefore, none stands in the way of a first-century dating. I. Earlier Methods of Dating Recent studies of the archaeology of Khirbet Qumran argue that the original investigator, Roland de Vaux, was mistaken in some of his dating for the site's habitation phases. He concluded that after an Israelite-period settlement, the site was reinhabited and expanded during the reign of Simon Maccabee or John Hyrcanus I.5 In reaching the latter conclusion the French archaeologist had placed more weight on numismatics than the sparse findings for the earliest period could bear. As Magen Broshi has observed, "a coin of John Hyrcanus cannot be used as a proof that the site was settled during his reign-coins can only be used as a terminus a quo but not as a terminus ad quem."6 The detailed, recent reassessment by Jodi Magness, in particular, argues that the proper date for the refurbishing of Khirbet Qumran, the "foundation date" for Stratum I of the Second Temple period, is somewhere between 100 B. …