Word: sects
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...desert rock holes, or repose in battered cigarette boxes with such labels as Gold Star and Friends, are not the only puzzle pieces that need gathering and fitting together. There are also human and historical fragments from which scholars are trying to reconstruct the story of the Qumran sect itself-one of the great dramas of the Judeo-Christian tradition...
...assumed as almost certain that they were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect hitherto known chiefly from the accounts of Josephus and Philo. Much information about the Dead Sea covenanters is contained in the original scrolls (now in the Hebrew University just across the bristling boundary from the Jordanian Scrollers in the Israeli half of Jerusalem). Those first seven scrolls included, in addition to two versions of the book of Isaiah and a collection of apocryphal stories based on Genesis, four documents relating to the Dead Sea sect itself: 1) the Rule of the Community (also known as the Manual...
Study of the Law was so important to the Essenes that in each group it was pursued day and night (the membership was divided into three shifts). Government of the sect was in the hands of twelve elders and three priests, "perfect in all that is revealed of the whole Torah, to practice truth and righteousness and justice and loving devotion and to walk humbly each with his neighbor, to guard faithfulness in the land with a strong purpose and a broken spirit." The punishments they administered were severe: for speaking brusquely "so as to undermine the composure...
...that established his descendants, the Hasmonean dynasty, as High Priests in perpetuity, also gave them permission "to stamp out, indeed to persecute, those who refuse to recognize the full legitimacy of his office. This program seems to give the appropriate occasion for the crystallization of the Essene sect." Cross finds further evidence for this identification in a Qumran document that quotes Joshua's curse upon Jericho and follows it with a curse on an unnamed man and his sons who fortified a "stronghold of wickedness." Simon, while drunk, and later two of his sons were assassinated at Jericho...
...founded by Eleazar under John Hyrcanus, the Man of the Lie might be the leader of the Pharisees who had sought to remain in Jerusalem instead of facing ascetic hardship in the desert. In any case it is reasonable to assume that many Pharisees joined the Dead Sea sect at this time...