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Re: orion Sadducees
Stephen Goranson wrote, regarding Qimron and Strugnell's position of that
MMT involves two varieties of Sadducees:
>I find this argument not persuasive--in other words, not demonstrated.
"Not demonstrated": I can basically understand this.
>MMT
>is more probably written from an Essene perspective to a
>Sadducee-inclined reader and about Pharisees ("they").
After an extremely long time asking for and looking for evidence to attach
Essenes to the dss, I've come to the conclusion that noone has ANY evidence
to sufficiently link them to the dss to allow Stephen to make the above
comment. There is no probability about it. Stephen's Essene argument is "not
demonstrated". So, any analysis based on it will not be very safe.
He goes on to make the following supposition:
>Perhaps if we had old Sadducee texts, we might find Essenes and Pharisees
>mixed together and called misled separatists.
This is based on an interpretation of a passage in MMT that deals with
separation, that for some reason many people want to read as something
outside the temple cult situation. If we look at Ezekiel's ideas about the
temple cult, we can see that the idea of separation is clearly to be found.
The sons of Zadok (44:17) "enter the inner court (of the temple) they shall
wear linen garments... (44:19) And when they go out into the outer court of
the people, they shall put off the garments in which they have been
ministering... lest they communicate holiness to the people with their
garments." A separation existed in the writer's mind for those performing
the temple cult: he is describing a separation inside the temple, the
physical constraints of which were knocked down during the time of Alcimus.
The writer's portioning of land imagines a physical separation of living
quarters for the priests who were to live around the temple (45:4).
MMT seems only to reflect the status quo as indicated in Ezekiel. ("They
shall teach my people the difference between holy and common, and show them
the difference between the unclean and the clean." (44:23) MMT is about
maintaining such separations.)
>They do, on the other hand, call themselves 'osey hatorah, the self-designation
>from which, in my view..., the name Essenes derives.
The link between 'osey haTorah and Essenes is nowhere near as clear as
Stephen maintains. They do, on the other hand, call themselves ebionei
hesed, the self-designation from which, Stephen may also conclude, the name
Ebionites derives.
Serendipity is not useful to us here.
Ian Hutchesson
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But grasp this writing so that you know how to preserve the books which I
will give you, which you will put in order and anoint with cedar oil and
place in vessels of clay in the place which he made from the beginning of
the creation of the world... (TMos 1:16-17)