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

58 QUMRAN AND THE ENOCH GROUPS
accepted the Mosaic Torah as part of the common religious heritage,
while exegetical interpretation allowed them to understand the once-rival
tradition in light of their own principles.
In the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt, the movement was marked
by a deep crisis. The Enochians failed in their political attempt to replace
the Zadokite leadership. Internally, the followers of the Righteous
Teacher failed in gaining the leadership of the movement. The double
experience of failure brought about, with a sense of impotence and frustration,
an outburst of fanaticism that led to the foundation of the
Qumran community. The chosen among the chosen became the accusers
of their own people. In their view, Jews and Gentiles alike were under
the dominion of Belial, and there was neither atonement for evil nor
purification for impurity except for those individuals whom God had
selected to step aside and enter the new community. “Anyone who
declines to enter [the covenant of Go]d in order to walk in the stubbornness
of his heart shall not [enter the com]munity of his truth.…He shall
not be justified.…Defiled, defiled shall he be…” (1QS 2.25–3.5).
The existence of a large body of non-Qumranic documents of
Enochic Judaism and the many references to “traitors” in the literature of
Qumran testify that the sectarians did not achieve what they sought;
their call for leadership was fiercely challenged within their movement.
The Qumran chain split into two divergent lines, and the schism would
neither be absorbed nor overcome. After the first polemical phase
attested by the reworking of the Epistle of Enoch (with the interpolation of
chs. 94:6–106:6) and by the composition Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
on the basis of material also known by the sectarians, the two branches
of Enochic Judaism ignored each other. The Qumranites developed the
sectarian mentality of the despised, rejected, and abandoned outcast and
became more and more predeterministic in their approach to the problem
of evil and salvation. By contrast, the non-Qumran stream never lost
contact with Jewish society; its theology staged the drama of responsible
human beings torn between divine deliverance and the temptation of
Satan, and eventually focused on a message of salvation for the “poor”
at the end of times. The decreasing influence of Enochic literature on the
sectarian texts and the absence of Similitudes from the Qumran library—
two mysterious phenomena that so much have troubled modern scholars—are
nothing but logical consequences of the schism between Qumran
and Enochic Judaism.
From this point on, interaction of ideas and exchange of documents
between the two groups cease. None of the major concerns of the later
Enochic tradition make any sense in light of the Qumran sectarian theology.