RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 57ancient Judaism—admittedly, as an understandable and decent reaction to
the hostility that used to prevail—it is a factor often ignored.
Imperial (and native royal) sponsorship meant in practice that radical dis-
sent and public displays of extreme deviance were not tolerated, unless the
authorities were too weak to control them or considered them harmless. Both
were probably true of the Qumran community at different stages of its history;
at any rate, the sect itself recalled an episode of persecution, obviously in the
long term ineffective, apparently by an early Hasmonean ruler.^21 Clearly, later
rulers could easily enough have eliminated the sect (which had settled, admit-
tedly in rough terrain, only a fe wmiles south of the Hasmonean-Herodian
winterpalaceatJericho)butprobablyconsidereditunthreatening.^22 Likewise,
intolerance of radical dissent or deviance is probably the historical reality be-
hind Josephus’s tale of the flight from Judaea of the high priest Manasses and
his associates, after the former had married the (non-Israelite?) daughter of
Sanballat, Achaemenid governor of Samaria (Ant11.306–12); whether it was
the historical reality of the fourth centuryB.C.E., when the tale is set, or the
first centuryC.E., when Josephus recorded it, is of little importance for my
concerns. Intolerance of radical dissent also explains the nearly complete ab-
sence of any evidence for clearpublicviolation of Jewish law—by Jews—in
post-Maccabean and (pre-70) Roman Judaea and Jewish Palestine. Private
violations have different implications and will be discussed below. We hear of
nopaganshrines,andexcavationshaveyieldedlittlestatuaryandaremarkably
small amount of representational decoration, given its importance for Pales-
tinian Jews later on. The most prominent pre-Destruction example of such
decoration is, significantly, from the walls of the Herodian palace in Tiberias,
Galilee, and we know about it only from Josephus.^23 It is also significant that
synagogues, whatever actually went on in them, were not called temples, but
proseuchai(prayer houses) orsynagogai(gatherings), indicating at leastnomi-
(^21) See 1QpHab (= Pesher Habakkuk), col. 11, on Habakkuk 2:15, “Woe to him who causes
his neighbors to drink; who pours out his venom to make them drunk that he may gaze on their
feasts.” The sectarian commentator writes (trans. Vermes): “Interpreted, this concerns the
Wicked Priest who pursued the Teacher of Righteousness to the house of his exile that he might
confuse him with his venomous fury. And at the time appointed for rest, on the Day of Atone-
ment, he appeared before them to confuse them, and to cause them to stumble on the Day of
Fasting, their Sabbath of Repose.”
That is, the high priest used force to compel the sect to abandon their peculiar calendar; see P.
Callaway,A History of the Qumran Community: An Interpretation(Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press,
1988), pp. 160–1.
(^22) This “official” attitude was perhaps adopted by Josephus, who viewed the Essenes as a harm-
less group of pious exotics rather than a threat to public order or a band of sinners.
(^23) Life 65–67. And note also the pre-Hasmonean Tobiad palace (the “Qasr el-‘Abd,” according
to the most recent excavators, probably not a temple, as used to be thought) at ‘Araq el-’Amir,
near Amman, with its animal friezes; seeNEAEHL, sub s.v.