Bibliography
| Title: The Essenes and History Pages: 18-31 Type: Generic Year: 1981 Abstract: "Topics treated in this article include the arguments for maintaining that the Essenes were responsible for the Qumran scrolls, the Qumran sources for the history of the Essenes, the historical hypotheses proposed to explain the references to the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest, and the place of the Essenes in intertestamental Judaism and the scrolls in relation to ancient Jewish historiography. - D.J.H. // Vermes argues that the Dead Sea Sect was one of the Essene movements, one branch of the movement lived outside among the people, and one was the conventicle at Qumran. These were two branches with different economic practices, but they remained in close contact. Reviewing the historical hypotheses for dating the community, Vermes prefer to identify the wicked priest as Jonathan and to place the Teacher of Righteousness in his time. Noting that Josephus thought the historian of his time to be a prophet, Vermes argues that the Qumran historiography is a transitional phase from prophecy to ""quasi-prophetic exegesis of biblical texts in the form of the Dead Sea pesher literature."" Both the approach of Josephus and the DSS dies out perhaps because the Sages saw a fundamental conflict between prophetic authority and rabbinic tradition." Keywords: Groups and Religious Movements in Palestinian Judaism |