148 A History of Judaism
and to the settlement site at Qumran, which was excavated primarily in
the 1950s but continues to reveal new information. Were the scrolls
written in Qumran or brought from elsewhere, perhaps from Jeru-
salem? Should the finds in some of the caves, like the Greek documents
found in Cave 7, be treated as separate caches, or should all the scrolls
be understood as the ‘library’ of a single group? Would the archaeology
of the Qumran site suggest its use by pious Jews even if its occupation
was unrelated to the find of the scrolls near by? Amid all this uncer-
tainty, one fact seems indisputable. At some time in the late first century
ce these scrolls were deposited in jars in the caves, for safekeeping, by
pious Jews. Something went wrong, since these Jews never came back,
probably because of intervention by Roman forces, and the scrolls were
undisturbed for nearly 1,900 years.^63
The clearest indication of the existence of a distinctive separate com-
munity as the origins of at least some of the scrolls can be found in the
wording of part of the Community Rule:
The Master shall teach the saints to live(?) {according to the book} of the
Community [Rul]e, that they may seek God with a whole heart and soul,
and do what is good and right before Him as He commanded by the hand
of Moses and all His servants the Prophets ... He shall admit into the
Covenant of Grace all those who have freely devoted themselves to the
observance of God’s precepts, that they may be joined to the counsel of
God and may live perfectly before Him in accordance with all that has
been revealed concerning their appointed times, and that they may love all
the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s design, and hate all the
sons of darkness, each according to his guilt in God’s vengeance ... All
those who embrace the Community Rule shall enter into the Covenant
before God to obey all His commandments so that they may not abandon
Him during the dominion of Belial because of fear, terror or affliction. On
entering the Covenant, the Priests and Levites shall bless the God of salva-
tion and all His faithfulness, and all those entering the Covenant shall say
after them, ‘Amen, Amen!’The Community Rule, which seems to have been intended for the Mas-
ter of the community, provides instruction on entry into the Covenant
of the Community, statutes for the community’s Council and ‘rules of
conduct for the Master in these times with respect to his loving and hat-
ing’. The text is known from some twelve manuscripts, of which one
(from Cave 1) preserves eleven columns, and the others (from Caves 4