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

280 RESURRECTION: THE BIBLE AND QUMRAN
support a belief in an immortal soul entombed in a body, which serves
as its prison and from which it will be liberated upon death in order to
rejoice and to be reunited with the celestial realm beyond the ocean (for
the just) or to tumble into a pit of eternal punishments (for the impious).
This is certainly foreign to the Qumran texts and Semitic texts in general
which all insist upon divine judgment at the end of the eschaton, the
renewal and the purification of all things and the glory of Adam for the
just. Flavius Josephus certainly has revised his source, distorting it and
imputing to the Essenes non-Semitic beliefs in contradiction to prior evidence,
biblical and otherwise, and the evidence of archaeology. We must
seek the contradiction in Josephus, not in a source common to the two
accounts, quite faithfully followed by Hippolytus despite the adaptation
to Greek idiom.
As the inheritors of these same texts before their separation, it is not
surprising that Essenes and Pharisees professed the same belief in this
important point, a belief accepted already through the Hasidic milieu.
Furthermore, it appears clearly that Daniel 12, which only treats this subject
briefly and in passing, is not the first and most ancient biblical witness
concerning this belief, which goes back, as we have shown above, to
at least the third century in Isaiah 26, Visions of Amram, 1 Enoch, and
Sapiential Work A. For its part, Pseudo-Ezekiel (or Deutero-Ezekiel) confirms an
ancient rereading of Ezekiel 37 at work in the notion of resurrection. It is
not, then, the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, as is frequently
said, that is therefore at the origin of this belief, in trying to account for
the hope of the martyrs for the laws (2 Maccabees). On the contrary, the
persecution and deportation under Nebuchadnezzar II in 587, which
deeply marked the consciousness, were probably the true origin of this
development, perhaps and even probably through Iranian influence, partially
adopted and adapted to the Yahwistic faith of pious circles of
Jerusalem sages, psalmists, etc. The Messianic Apocalypse (or On Resurrection
[= 4Q521]), which witnesses to this influence in an irrefutable fashion, is
integrated perfectly into the Essene conception of eschatology expressed
by other Essene compositions—in particular, the Thanksgiving Hymns, the
Rule of the Community, the War Scroll, and the Pesharim. Without doubt it
gives, despite its very fragmentary state, more detail than the latter, but
that should not surprise given the subject treated in the preserved fragments:
the expectations of the messiah(s), of the messianic kingdom and
final judgment.
The appearance of this belief rooted in the Canaanite cultural milieu
is the work of religious circles reflecting upon divine justice confronted
by the death of the just of the people of God. It is inscribed within a