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

62 QUMRAN AND THE ENOCH GROUPS
refer to themselves as “sons of Zadok,” the classical Essene hypothesis
maintained that the leadership at Qumran was provided by members of
the priestly house of Zadok. Once they lost the power and the Maccabees
became the new dynasty of high priests, they would have retreated into
the wilderness in protest.
The problem with such a reconstruction was that all ancient sources
agree that the descendants of the Zadokite high priests fled not to
Qumran, but to Egypt, where they built a rival Temple at Heliopolis. We
should in the first place have more properly spoken of a split within the
Zadokite family.
The Enoch literature provides yet another major difficulty. If the
Qumranites were indeed a Zadokite movement, why did they preserve not
only Zadokite texts (like the Mosaic Torah) but also a large collection of
anti-Zadokite texts? Why did they share the Enochic idea that the Second
Temple was since the beginning a contaminated Temple, led by an illegitimate
priesthood? No member of the house of Zadok would ever have dismissed
the legitimacy of the Second Temple without losing their own
identity and undermining their claim to be the only legitimate priesthood.
Furthermore, it is the Enochic idea of demonic origin of evil, not the
Zadokite covenantal theology, that provides the foundation for the trajectory
of thought from which the Qumran predestinarian theology
emerged. What would have been the point of maintaining that the angels
are in fact responsible for the behavior of human beings, if only in order
to stress that it was God who created both the good and the evil angels,
and so indirectly admitting that God was ultimately the one who predetermined
the destiny of each individual? Why was it necessary to state
the presence of angels in the chain of cause-and-effect elements that determine
the destiny of each individual? Only if the myth of the fallen angels
was in fact the starting point upon which the Qumranites built their predestinarian
system of thought—only thus would such a twisted theology
about the origin of evil make sense.
In spite of any other influence, the relationship between the Enochic
literature and the sectarian scrolls is so close that it seems appropriate to
describe the Qumran community as “a latter-day derivative of or a successor
to the community or communities that authored and transmitted
the Enochic texts.” 49 While calling themselves the “sons of Zadok,” the
Qumranites seemed to despise everything the Zadokites had done, and
they held in great esteem the literature of their Enochic enemies. Should
we then face the impossible paradox of a Zadokite movement, rooted in
49. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch, 65.