The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

ÉMILE PUECH 279
otherwise would merit explanation. But in turn the burial practices confirm
the identification of the inhabitants of the place with the Essenes.
The simple belief in the immortality of the soul does not account for the
Essenes’ texts recovered in the caves as well as the biblical texts and
Apocrypha present in abundance. Further, it does not explain the particular
care taken at Qumran with the corpse of the dead—unique in
Palestine—a practice that could not have been understood in isolation
from any belief system, 45 and would on this score conflict with the evidence
of one classical notice (Hippolytus) which deserves the same attention
as its parallel, that of Flavius Josephus.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion then, the Essenes obviously did not adopt a realized
eschatology, as certain scholars have claimed, neither did they assume an
immortal soul. They awaited the arrival of the messianic kingdom at the
end of the eschatological war at the finish of the final Jubilee, the Day of
the Lord or the Last Judgment. The latter assures the resurrection of the
just dead and the transformation of the living just into the glory of Adam
upon an earth purified by fire and renewed, in the company of angels in
the presence of God, but also eternal damnation of the impious vanquished
and coagulated in eternal fire of hell with Belial and his angels.
It is finally possible to respond to the question occasioned by a comparison
of the accounts of Flavius Josephus and Hippolytus of Rome.
The archaeological evidence and the manuscripts (biblical, pseudepigraphical,
and Essene) confirm the Essene belief in a future life such as
Hippolytus or his source presents: immortality of the soul separated from
the body in an intermediate state, the Final Judgment, the universal conflagration
and the renewal of earth, and the eternal punishment of the
impious, resurrection of the body (of the flesh) of the just Essene in glory,
in the image of Adam, incorruptible as before the Fall. But they do not
45. Except the south-north orientation, the tombs of Khirbet Qazone cemetery
(Jordan) show a lot of peculiarities: graves dug in the Lisan marl containing grave goods
as iron, copper, silver, gold earrings and bracelets, beads, scarabs, wooden staffs, pottery,
glass, funerary stelae inscribed in Greek or engraved (Dusares betyles), and a proportionately
normal number of men, women, and children; see Konstantinos D. Politis,
“Rescue Excavations in the Nabataean Cemetery at Khirbet Qazone 1996–1997,” ADAJ
42 (1998): 611–14. The booklet of Robert Donceel, Synthèse des Observations faites en fouillant
les tombes des nécropoles de Khirbet Qumrân et des environs: The Khirbet Qumran Cemeteries: A
Synthesis of the Archaeological Data (QC 10; Cracow: Enigma Press, 2002), has to be read
with a lot of critical observations that cannot be discussed here.