New Light on the Pharisees

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The texts from Qumran lead us to a new understanding of the history of Judaism in the Second Temple period. Initial research on the scrolls naturally concentrated on the Dead Sea Scroll sect. But the full corpus will teach us a tremendous amount about other Jewish groups as well, as I argued in an earlier article in these pages.^a

Judaism in all its modern manifestations ultimately derives from rabbinic Judaism, the religious system of the rabbis of the Mishnah (compiled in about 200 C.E.^b) and the Talmud (compiled between about 400 and 600 C.E.). First codified in the Mishnah, rabbinic tradition claims to be the continuation of the teachings of the Pharisees, a group of lay teachers of the Torah who arose in the years following the Maccabean uprising (168–164 B.C.E.) and who continued teaching up to the time of the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. The Pharisees were succeeded, in a sense, by the tannaim, the teachers of the Mishnah.¹ (The texts from the period of the Mishnah are known as tannaitic literature.)

Modern critical scholarship has challenged much of what talmudic sources (including the Mishnah) say about the Pharisees of the pre-destruction period on the grounds that the scant evidence preserved in these texts actually comes from the post-70 period. Many scholars have simply rejected out of hand the claims made in post-destruction rabbinic literature that the Pharisees were the dominant religious group in the affairs of the Temple as early as the Maccabean period and during the reign of the Hasmonean dynasty that succeeded the Maccabean uprising.² Yet ultimately, rabbinic Judaism’s claim to authority rests on the 031continuity of the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition from pre-destruction to post-destruction times. For the rabbis, the traditions of the Pharisees had been transmitted orally to the tannaitic masters of the Mishnah and in this way had formed the basis for post-destruction tannaitic Judaism. But to the modern critical historian the evidence was sparse.

Accordingly, any light that might be cast on the history of the Pharisees and their teachings in the pre-destruction period would be critically important. With new evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls it is now possible to demonstrate that for much of the Hasmonean period Pharisaic views were indeed dominant in the Jerusalem Temple. In short, the reports of the religious laws, or halakhah,^c attributed to the Pharisees in later talmudic texts are basically accurate. Moreover, we can now prove that some of the teachings attributed to rabbinic sages who lived after the Roman destruction of the Temple actually go back to earlier, pre-destruction, Pharisaic traditions.

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Most of the Qumran material that sheds light on the Pharisees is in the form of polemics against their views. The Qumran sect virulently disagreed with Pharisaic teachings on a wide variety of theological and halakhic matters. When we evaluate this material carefully, however, and then compare it to later statements of rabbinic tradition, we can reconstruct a great deal about the pre-destruction Pharisees.

Let us begin by looking at the so-called Damascus Document, two copies of which were found nearly a century ago in a Cairo synagogue.^d (At that time they were called the Zadokite Fragments.) Fragments of at least eight other copies of the Damascus Document were found a half century later in the caves of Qumran.

The first part of the text as preserved in the Cairo manuscripts (designated by the siglum CD) is known as the Admonition and, among other things, includes a list of legal transgressions. These transgressions were committed by “the builders of the wall who followed [literally, walked after] the ‘commander.’ The ‘commander’ is the preacher about whom He [either God or the prophet] said, ‘They shall surely preach’” (CD 4:19–20).

Who are the builders of the wall? who is the commander or preacher? For the sect, they are the villains; that is for sure. Buried in the text are two scriptural allusions that make this clear. One is Hosea 5:10–11:

“The commanders of Judah have acted

Like shifters of field boundaries.

On them I will pour out

My wrath like water.

Ephraim is defrauded

Robbed of redress.”

The other allusion is to a passage in Micah 2:6:

“‘Stop preaching’ they preach.

‘That’s no way to preach.’”

The key to the identity of these villains is the content of the laws that the Damascus Document condemns. In a series of laws listed there, the views of the preacher (the “commander”) and of the builders of the wall turn out to be laws associated in tannaitic sources with the Pharisees. With these laws the Qumran sectarians violently disagreed.

The designation “builders of the wall” is apparently an adaptation of the concept, known from the Mishnah (Avot 1:1), which teaches, “build a fence around the Torah.”³ According to this rabbinic maxim, laws not found in the Bible may be created in order to make certain that those laws that are in the Torah are not transgressed; that is the “fence” around the Torah. Tannaitic sources consider this fence (siyyag) a positive feature of rabbinic halakhah; the authors of the Damascus Document, on the other hand, opposed this approach—apparently not only because they disagreed with these non-biblical laws but also because they rejected the idea of expanding the biblical commandments. In short, they objected to such laws because, in their view, these laws had no biblical basis.

That this difference of views between the Qumran sect and the Pharisees went to the heart of many halakhot is clear from another passage from the Damascus Document:

“They [whom we have now identified as the Pharisees] even rendered impure their holy spirit and in revelous terms opened [their] mouth against the laws of the covenant of God, saying, ‘They are not correct’” (CD 5:11–13).

Later in the Damascus Document, the Pharisees are again called “the builders of the wall” who lack understanding:

“All these things the builders of the wall and the plasterers of nothingness did not understand. For one who takes wind and preaches falsehood preached to them, for which reason God became angry with his entire congregation…Since He hated the builders of the wall He became angry” (CD 8:12–13, 18).

Because the Qumran sectarians objected to Pharisaic halakhah not based directly on Scripture, the Pharisees are referred to in the scrolls as dorshe halaqot, literally “seekers after smooth things.” The phrase draws on the biblical usage of halaqot as lies or falsehoods (Isaiah 30:10; Psalms 12:3–4, 73:18; Daniel 11:32). But halaqot is also a pun on halakhot, the plural of halakhah and the term for religious laws known to us from later rabbinic usage. This pun indicates that halakhah as a term for religious law was already in common Pharisaic 033usage as early as the Hasmonean period. Indeed, a study of the rabbinic sources regarding this term shows that the word’s original reference was to a law that did not have a direct basis in Scripture—for example, a law based on the “tradition of the fathers” or “the elders.”

The Damascus Document clearly refers to the Pharisees when it speaks of those who “interpret false laws” (darshu behalaqot) and choose falsehoods, seek out opportunities to violate the law, choose luxury, declare innocent the guilty and declare guilty the innocent. They violate the covenant and annul the law, and band together to do away with the righteous (CD 1:18–20).

The entire corpus of the Pharisaic laws thus constitutes, in the view of the sectarians, “annulment” of the Torah, because it replaces biblical laws with the Pharisees’ own rulings.

A passage in the Thanksgiving Psalms (Hodayot) Scroll from Cave 1 at Qumran may also refer to the Pharisees:

“They planned evil [literally, Belial] against me to replace your Torah which taught in my heart with smooth things [that is, false laws which they taught] to Your people” (1QH 4:10–11).

The Qumran sectarians objected to the Pharisaic laws because they regarded these Pharisaic halakhot as replacements for the biblical laws given by God Himself. The very notion of laws to be added to those of the Bible was anathema to the Qumran sectarians. They countenanced only laws derived directly from the Torah by what they regarded as inspired biblical exegesis.⁴

The Pesher Nahum—a sectarian commentary on the book of the prophet Nahum—from Cave 4 at Qumran states:

“[Its] interpretation [that is, a Nahum 3:4] [con]cerns those who lead Ephraim astray, whose falseness is in their teaching [talmud], and whose lying tongue and dishonest lip[s] lead many astray” (4QpNah 3–4 II, 8).

“Ephraim” is a code word for the Pharisees. This designation results from the similar sound of Ephraim and the Hebrew word Perushim, Pharisees. “Manasseh,” on the other hand, designates the Sadducees.⁵ The author of the commentary clearly intended to refer to the Pharisaic teachers—that is, those who lead Ephraim (the Pharisees).

It is these people that the text likens to those who commit the harlotry mentioned in Nahum 3:4.

Note that the word used for teaching is the Hebrew word talmud, the same word used to designate the massive commentaries on the Mishnah—the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds.

The presence of the word talmud in this text was, in the early years of scroll research, used to argue for a medieval dating of the scrolls.⁶ The scholars who used this argument mistakenly took the word talmud as a reference to the rabbinic text by that name. The matter is much more complex, however. In early tannaitic literature, talmud already refers to a method of study—namely, the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition that permits laws to be deduced logically from the biblical text. This method is what the Qumran sectarians are excoriating. The text proves, however, that this method of legal argument was already being used in the later half of Hasmonean period.⁷

From the Pharisaic viewpoint, this method was intended to derive laws from the Torah. Why, then, was this considered illegitimate by the Qumran sectarians, since they too practice legal exegesis? The method used by the Pharisees, designated here as talmud, made no claim to divine inspiration. For the Qumran sectarians, it was therefore illegitimate—a falsehood.

What do we know of the content of these supposedly false, illegitimate Pharisaic laws? A number of Pharisaic rulings are alluded to in polemical parts of the Damascus Document—for example Pharisaic rulings permitting remarriage after divorce (CD 4:20–5:1) and marriage to one’s niece (CD 5:7–11).

Recently, our knowledge of these laws has been greatly increased as a result of the accessibility of the widely discussed, but still unpublished, text known as MMT (4Q Miqsat Ma‘aseh ha-Torah). In MMT’s diatribe against the views of their opponents, the Qumran sectarians often describe the views of the Pharisees. From this it is possible to reconstruct specific halakhic material that can be reliably dated to the early Hasmonean period.

MMT contains 22 laws the authors claim were the cause of the schism that led to the founding of the Qumran sect. I believe the sect was formed when a group of Sadducean priests left the Temple 054service in the aftermath of the Hasmonean takeover of the Temple soon after the Maccabean revolt, probably by about 152 B.C.E.⁸ In any event, the laws espoused by the Qumran sectarians in MMT are phrased so as to stress the views of the authors and to present approaches drawn from Sadducean tradition.⁹ In my earlier BR article, I explored in greater detail the Sadducean background of these laws. Here we are concerned with what we can learn from MMT about the Pharisees.¹⁰

The text of MMT—and also of the Temple Scroll—on several occasions opposes a principle known in tannaitic halakhah as tevul yom, which literally means “one immersed on that day.” According to the concept of tevul yom, if a person completes all the purificatory rites—including immersion in a ritual bath (mikveh)—but still awaits the setting of the sun on the last day of his purificatory period, he is considered pure for purposes of coming into contact with pure food. The authors of both MMT and the Temple Scroll oppose this view, however. We are specifically told that their opponents—those who follow the Pharisaic approach—accept the concept of tevul yom and consider such people ritually pure even though the sun has not set on the last day of their purificatory period. MMT specifically requires the priests who slaughter and who gather and burn the ashes of the red heifer to be completely pure—that is, they must have completed the entire purification period and the sun must have set on the day that concludes that period.

According to the Mishnah (Parah 3:7), this same issue was the subject of controversy between the Sadducees and the “elders of Israel,” apparently the Pharisees. The Pharisees would purposely defile the priest so as to make him perform the ritual involved in a state of tevul yom in order to contest the Sadducean view that prohibited such a priest from officiating because of his impurity.

MMT demonstrates that this was an issue hundreds of years earlier, at the time of the founding of the Qumran sect. The Pharisaic sages, therefore, took this position early in the Hasmonean period. Examples like this could be multiplied. In each case a Pharisaic view known from later rabbinic sources can be shown to have existed at a much earlier period.

A number of other laws referred to in MMT do not explicitly match disputes between the Pharisees and Sadducees as recorded in later rabbinic literature, but the view opposed by the Qumran sect is attributed in rabbinic literature to the tannaitic (Mishnaic) period. MMT thus proves that in some of these cases the tannaitic views are in fact those of Hasmonean-period Pharisees that continued into the tannaitic period.

MMT is a foundation text of the Qumran sect. It was written in the early Hasmonean period when the Temple was managed and its rituals conducted in accord with Pharisaic views. The Hasmoneans made common cause with the Pharisees in order to cleanse the Temple of the excessive Hellenization that they blamed to a great extent on the Sadducean priests who had become, in their view, too Hellenized.¹¹

Various elements in MMT and in the Temple Scroll represent the polemic of those who continued piously to hold fast to Sadducean views against the Hasmoneans and their Pharisaic allies. In the this way, we learn that pre-destruction Pharisaic views are indeed to be found in later tannaitic sources, both in passages specifically labeled as Pharisaic and elsewhere where tannaitic laws are discussed.

Thus, evidence of the ideological underpinnings of Pharisaism and its halakhic Principles can be found in the Qumran corpus. Sensitively read, the Qumran corpus reveals the role of the Pharisees as allies of the Hasmoneans.¹² More importantly, it can no longer be claimed that there is no evidence for the Pharisees earlier than the tannaitic materials and the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. In fact, the scrolls provide extensive and wide-ranging testimony about the pre-destruction history of the Pharisees and about their ideology.

MMT and the Temple Scroll provide evidence of Pharisaic dominance over the Temple ritual in the early days of the Hasmonean Period. These Pharisees held views similar to those claimed for them in rabbinic literature. Moreover, they also expressed many positions—substantive and theological—later found among the tannaim of the Mishnah.

In sum, the broad outlines of the Pharisees that emerge from the Dead Sea Scrolls are much closer to those described in later rabbinic literature than many of us would have thought possible a few years ago. It is now clear that we cannot look at rabbinic Judaism as a post-70 C.E. invention, a consensus brought about by the vicissitudes of the Temple’s destruction. Rather, rabbinic Judaism must be seen as a continuation of the pre-destruction Pharisaic tradition. Much more of the rabbinic tradition has its roots in Pharisaic teachings than had been thought by some. Indeed, the testimony of the rabbis about the Pharisees turns out to have been accurate in most details. Many specific laws and teachings first attested in the tannaitic (Mishnaic) period can be traced back at least to the Hasmonean age. In these years Pharisaic views dominated Temple procedure most of the time. It was only natural that the successors of the Pharisees would assume the mantle of national leadership after the devastation of 70 C.E. In short, we must now abandon the model of discontinuity between pre-destruction and post-destruction Judaism and return to a model that takes account of the continuities we have observed.

From this perspective, we are now on the verge of a new era in research on Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls will allow us to uncover much of the early history of this approach to Judaism, which attained—already in the days of the Temple—the dominant position in the Jewish community of the land of Israel. The Qumran corpus thus provides a background against which to understand many aspects of rabbinic Judaism.

The texts from Qumran lead us to a new understanding of the history of Judaism in the Second Temple period. Initial research on the scrolls naturally concentrated on the Dead Sea Scroll sect. But the full corpus will teach us a tremendous amount about other Jewish groups as well, as I argued in an earlier article in these pages.a Judaism in all its modern manifestations ultimately derives from rabbinic Judaism, the religious system of the rabbis of the Mishnah (compiled in about 200 C.E.b) and the Talmud (compiled between about 400 and 600 C.E.). First codified in the Mishnah, […]