156 A History of Judaism
The number of sectarians in the Yahad at any one time is unknown,
and attempts to make an estimate, on the basis of the size of the Qum-
ran settlement and the number of skeletons in the adjoining cemetery,
are too hypothetical to be of any value, since it is not known how many
(if any) of the sect lived at Qumran and it is not certain how the ceme-
tery, which included female and child skeletons as well as adult males,
related to the settlement. The Rules themselves divide the community
into tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands, but these numbers may be
fanciful. Whatever the size of the community or communities, it is clear
that these Jews cut themselves off in some psychological way from the
rest of Israel: ‘We have separated from the mass of the people.’ Unlike
the haireseis described by Josephus, the members of the Yahad seem to
have viewed their interpretation of the Torah as the only valid one, leav-
ing in ambiguity the status of those Jews – the majority – who did not
share their views. Sometimes, as in the War Scroll, the sectarian writings
categorize Jews who sin as Sons of Darkness, condemned along with
gentiles to damnation after defeat by the Sons of Light.
The writings of the Yahad, especially some of the biblical comment-
aries, contain many references to the events which had formed the
background to their separation, but they are couched often in obscure
and allusive terms, such as ‘the Wicked Priest’, ‘the Men of Lies’, ‘the
Scoffers’, ‘the furious young Lion’. It is thus easier to recover the con-
structed memory of their past shared by the sectarians than what really
happened. On the other hand, there are enough clear references to known
political figures (‘King Jonathan’, ‘Aemilius’ and a few others) to render
plausible a history of the Yahad which began during the Maccabean crisis
of the 160s bce but which first took shape (perhaps under the leadership
of the Teacher of Righteousness) after a quarrel with the Hasmonaean
High Priest Jonathan (the ‘Wicked Priest’?) in the mid- second century
bce. It is possible that the issue which divided the sectarians from Jon-
athan was his presumption in assuming the high priesthood despite not
being of the Zadokite line, which would explain the prominence of the
‘sons of Zadok’ in the Damascus Document and in the text of the Com-
munity Rule from Cave 1, and why the sect by contrast emphasized their
own Zadokite credentials. If so, Zadokite influence may have died away,
since the ‘sons of Zadok’ are conspicuously absent from the parallel pas-
sages of the Community Rule in the copies found in Cave 4.^77
The Community recalled with venom the hostility of these past
opponents: ‘This concerns the Wicked Priest who pursued the Teacher
of Righteousness to the house of his exile that he might confuse him