Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

Secrets', 'secret Truth', 'Treasure house of Understanding', and 'Miraculous Mysteries'. There are also
'the Fountain of Understanding' and 'the Fountain of Discovery', which have interesting reverberations
with allusions in medieval Jewish poetry, as well as with the title of a treatise, the Fons Vitae (The
Living Fountain) by its most celebrated practitioner, the famous eleventh-century Judeo-Arabic mystic
poet of Spain, Solomon Ibn Gabirol.
We have already seen a variation of this imagery in the Demons of Death (Beatitudes) in Chapter 5.
This 'Living Fountain' imagery will recur later in this Chapter in further hymns, this time 'to the Poor',
terminology also important for early Christian history in Palestine. It will be developed to its fullest
degree in the Children of Salvation (Yerha') and the Mystery of Existence, with which we close this
Chapter.
The use of the word 'Glory' in texts such as these is not only interesting because of parallel New
Testament usages, but also because of allusions like those in Josephus' description of the beginnings of
the Zealot movement. He describes two Rabbis in the disturbance of 4 BC, just preceding the death of
Herod, who encourage their followers to strike a blow against Rome and the Herodian family by
pulling down the Roman eagle Herod had erected in defiance of all tradition over the entrance to the
Temple. They do so in terms of the glory and immortality such zealous acts will gain for their
practitioners (War 1.650).
Finally the first line of this manuscript begins with allusions to 'the footstools of the feet of your Glory'
from Gen. 49:10. The reader will recall this as the Shiloh Prophecy. It was subjected to exegesis in the
Genesis Florilegium in Chapter 3, which interpreted the 'Shiloh' in terms of 'the Messiah of
Righteousness who would arise at the end of days'. Between these same 'feet' (those of 'the Shiloh') is
the Mehokkek or 'Law-giver', not to mention 'the Sceptre', which were also interpreted in this context.
This 'footstools'/'feet' imagery is carried further in A. 1.1 to 'standing' and 'walkway' allusions. The
image of 'standing' to great heights is known in Pseudo-clementine tradition - those fourth-century
Jewish Christian novellas. One of these, called the Recognitions (in which a figure meant to represent
Paul attacks James in the Temple) describes someone it calls 'the Standing One', a great redeemer
figure which 'stands' to a fantastic height.
But the one surviving line from Manuscript A Fragment 3, which refers to 'the Holy Spirit settling
upon His Messiah' has truly remarkable implications, particularly in the setting of the text's rapturous
imagery previously. By quoting Isa. 11:2, 'the Spirit of the Lord would settle on him', which it
rephrases slightly, it recalls the Messianic Leader (Nasi) text from Chapter 1 which quoted Isa. 11:1.
The rephrasing, however slight, is worth noting. 'Him' is now transmuted into 'His Messiah'. But this
was the term we encountered in the first line of the first text from Chapter 1, the Messiah of Heaven
and Earth. Lest anyone doubted it, Isa. 11:2's 'the Spirit of the Lord' now becomes the more imposing
'the Holy Spirit'. A text of this kind, paralleling the scriptural presentation of Jesus' baptism in the
Gospels and related discussions in Hebrews, while at the same time binding all these texts together
into a homogeneous whole, reconfirms the basically single, Davidic Messiah ideology at Qumran. It
also once more confirms - if such confirmation were by now necessary - the total Messianic thrust of
the entire corpus.