The Essenes Series

The New Testament does not mention them. The accounts given by Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and Pliny, the Elder, sometimes differ in significant details, perhaps indicating a diversity that existed among the Essenes themselves.

The Essenes separated from the rest of the Jewish community in the 2nd century B.C., when high priests conferred secular and religious authority. Simon felt compelled to persecute Jonathan Maccabeus and, later, Simon Maccabeus usurped the office of the Essenes, who opposed the usurpation. Hence, they fled into the wilderness with their leader, the Teacher of Righteousness.

Until very recently, the association of the words “women,” “Dead Sea Scrolls,” and “Qumran” in the same title would have seemed like an oxymoron. From the beginning of Dead Sea Scrolls research, the people who lived at Qumran and stored the manuscripts in the eleven surrounding caves were identified with the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes. This identification was based on the descriptions of the Essenes provided by the ancient writers Josephus, Philo, and Pliny, the Elder. Philo and Pliny are unequivocal in their description of the Essenes as an all-male, celibate group. Josephus also focuses his description of the Essenes on those members who shunned marriage and embraced chastity; therefore, it was almost uniformly assumed that the Qumran site housed an all-male, celibate community.

This situation began to change in the early 1990s through such scholars as H. Stegemann, L. Schiffman, E. Qimron, and especially E. Schuller. The change came about not so much because new evidence came to light. However, the pool of evidence became deeper and wider as more and more manuscripts were published. However, these scholars broadened their focus to take in the references to women and try to understand these references in the broader context of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. In this paper, I will attempt a somewhat systematic look at what information the Qumran Scrolls can give us about women. This attempt is fraught with several procedural difficulties.

The Qumran documents are the library or collection of the Jewish Essenes in the late Second Temple period. Qumran was a study center for the Essenes, inhabited mainly by males pursuing a rigorous standard of purity and adhering to the Rule of the Community. However, the majority of the Essenes lived throughout Judaea, following the regulations of the Damascus Document. This thesis allows us to place women back into the setting of Qumran studies and resolves the question of so-called Essene “celibacy.”

The Essenes included women, and its members married, but a subgroup within the Essenes avoided marriage for purity reasons.

About 150 years before the birth of Jesus the Messiah, some of God’s people — the Essenes — established a community in the Judea Wilderness near the northern end of the Dead Sea. We know it as Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Not all scholars agree that Essenes lived at Qumran, wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, or were the people the scrolls portray, so study and debate about the nature of the community continue. However, given the lack of other significant theories about Qumran, the scrolls, and the Essenes, we will take the position of mainstream Bible scholars that the Qumran ruins are those of the Dead Sea Scroll community that was part of a religious movement that included the Essenes.