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

GABRIELE BOCCACCINI 59
Why should God warn people to convert and offer them divine help, if God’s
choice makes the individuals what they are? Why should God be removed
from any relationship with evil, if God is the creator of both good and evil?
At Qumran, the freedom of God’s decision annuls any other freedom,
including God’s own freedom to be merciful toward God’s creatures.
Enochic Judaism explores a different path; while confirming the superhuman
origin of evil, it allowed them to preserve the freedom of Satan to
rebel, the freedom of human beings to choose, and the freedom of God
to bring deliverance. Evil is against God’s will and is the unfortunate
result of an act of rebellion, which only the joint efforts of God, humans,
and the heavenly messiah can successfully defeat.
The parting of Qumran from its parent movement was a bad bet; withdrawing
in the desert, the community may have still hoped to become the
headquarters of a larger movement, but they were just as likely to turn
themselves into a marginal fringe. The faith they had in predestination
probably made them totally indifferent to such alternatives; they simply
did what they believed God had preordained them to do. Their salvation
did not depend on their being the majority or the minority.
Literary evidence does not leave any doubt about which branch was
more successful, however. The popularity of the Enochic stream in
Second Temple Judaism and its persistent influence in Christianity and
rabbinic Judaism shine in comparison with the grim isolation of the
Qumran stream. Apart from the sectarian literature, no document whatsoever,
written after the end of the second century B.C.E., managed to
find its way into the Qumran library; and no sectarian document whatsoever
managed to find its way out of Qumran. A community that lives
isolated in the desert, during two centuries neither importing nor exporting
a single document, can hardly be considered a leading group.
Addendum: January 2005
I wrote this paper more than seven years ago, in the fall of 1997. At
Princeton, for the first time, I was given the opportunity in an international
conference to present what was to become known as the “Enochic-
Essene Hypothesis” of Qumran origins. 40
40. I had already presented this hypothesis two years before the 1997 Princeton
Symposium in my paper “Configurazione storica della comunità di Qumran,” at a
meeting of the Italian Biblical Association at L’Aquila (Sept. 14–16, 1995). See
Gabriele Boccaccini, “E se l’essenismo fosse il movimento enochiano? Una nuova
ipotesi circa i rapporti tra Qumran e gli esseni,” RStB 9, no. 2 (1997): 49–67.