Law & Freedom

Historian Jeremy Prince exposes some highly enlightening historical artifacts about the evolution of the Covenant in the last two centuries before the Common Era, in his article: What Was the Early Church? An excavation of the historical ekklesia active in the long first century. An excerpt is quoted below. Text in blue boxes are added notes that are not part of the original article.

Beginning in 1947, the caves near Qumran gave us the libraries of a Yahwist movement from the last two centuries before the Common Era. Among those manuscripts are two documents that work as operating manuals for communities. The first is the Community Rule, catalogued as 1QS. The second is the Damascus Document. Scholars knew it from the Cairo Genizah decades before copies turned up in the caves. A third charter, the Didache, surfaced in a monastery library in Constantinople in 1873. Its full title calls it the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Nations.

For a long time, scholars read these texts in separate rooms. The Scrolls belonged to one field, and the Didache belonged to another. When you set them on one table, a pattern appears. They read like three stages of one tradition of covenantal charters. Each adapts what came before to new members and new circumstances. The door to membership widens at every stage. The treasury stays guarded throughout.

The Academy

The Community Rule describes the national aspect of the Covenant, based on group needs and dynamics, a legal system (penal code), and delegated authority through concensus or majority vote. Equates to the Sea and Air jurisdictions.

The Community Rule is the most radical of the three, and its core is probably the earliest. It governs a body that calls itself the yahad, “the union.” Its members handed their property to the community. They surrendered their wages. They ate together and prayed together. They studied the Torah in shifts through the night.

The yahad admitted no one quickly. A candidate spent roughly two years on probation before full membership. The first stage examined his understanding and his conduct. Only later did his property merge with the common fund. An officer called the mevaqqer, the overseer, kept records of the property of the Many. “The Many,” ha-rabbim, was the yahad’s name for its full membership sitting in session. The Rule sets out an order of business for those sessions. Members spoke in rank. Nobody interrupted a fellow member. A member who wished to speak rose and announced that he had a word for the Many.

The Rule also carries a penal code. A member who lied about his property lost access to the pure meal for a year and had his food ration cut by a quarter. A member who slandered the Many was expelled. The discipline was strict because the treasury was the community’s life.

Here I want to press a thesis.

I think the yahad of the Community Rule trained leaders, and its structure looks like an officer academy.

The evidence begins with the muster. When the Rule describes the annual renewal of the Covenant, it arranges the members by thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. That is the administrative structure Moses sets up in the eighteenth chapter of Exodus. It is also a military formation. The same arrangement appears in the Damascus Document and in the Rule of the Congregation, a short charter for the assembly at the end of days. The War Scroll, another Qumran text, shows what such a muster was for. It imagines the sons of light arrayed against the sons of darkness in a final war, company by company, with trumpets and standards. A community that ranks its members, tests them for years, disciplines them precisely, and organizes them in military units is preparing cadres.

That explains the hierarchy readers rightly notice in the Rule. In its pages, the sons of Zadok, the priests, hold final authority. Members sit and speak by rank. An academy ranks its cadets. The yahad still opened its door wider than the Temple aristocracy did. Its members included ordinary Israelites who were neither priests nor Levites. Membership turned on commitment to the Covenant.

The Federation

The Damascus Document describes the personal aspect of the Covenant which includes marriage and family. It is based on personal sovereignty (not delegated authority like the Academy), a lawful system (fairness and mercy) and personal free will instead of a right to vote. Equates to the Soil and Land jurisdictions.

The Damascus Document governs something larger and looser. Its members live in “camps,” settlements of households spread across the land. They marry, raise children, and keep their own property. A mevaqqer oversees each camp, and the Document describes him in tender terms. He teaches the Many. He cares for them as a father cares for his children. He carries them in their distress as a shepherd carries his flock. No member may buy or sell without his knowledge.

The franchise is wider here. When the Document describes the muster of the camps, it names four orders: priests, Levites, the sons of Israel, and the ger. The ger is the resident foreigner who has bound himself to the Torah. He stands fourth in the order. He also stands on the roll, and that is the point.

The Document also describes a treasury built for mutual aid. Every member contributes two days’ wages each month. The funds go to the mevaqqer and the judges. They support the poor and the needy, the elderly and the stricken, and the captive taken by a foreign people. They also support the girl with no kinsman to redeem her and the young man with no one to look after him. That is a levy with a rate, a collector, and a list of beneficiaries. It is social insurance written into a covenant charter.

If the Community Rule reads like an academy, the Damascus Document reads like a federation.

It governs many communities at once and organizes mutual aid across them. Its members serve one another in the middle of ordinary life. The discipline remains real. Now, though, the charter serves households, and the treasury serves the vulnerable in every camp.

The Adaptation

The Didache stands in the middle between the Academy and the Federation. Equates to the Interface (bar) between the Soil/Land jurisdictions and the Sea/Air jurisdictions.

The Didache stands at the far end of the arc. Most scholars date its final form somewhere between the middle of the first century and the early second, and some of its material is probably older. It governs assemblies that gather under the teaching of Yehoshua, whom they receive as the legitimate Davidic claimant, the Mashiach. It carries the marks of both earlier charters.

It opens with a teaching on the Two Ways, the way of life and the way of death. Scholars have long compared that teaching to the treatise on the Two Spirits in the Community Rule. There the spirits of truth and falsehood contend within every person. The Didache’s version is gentler and more practical, but the family resemblance is plain.

Its economy shows the same resemblance. The Didache tells members never to turn away the one in need. They must share everything with their brother and call nothing their own. It directs the first fruits of bread, wine, oil, money, and clothing to the prophets, whom it calls “your high priests.” If a community has no prophet, the first fruits go to the poor.

Its hospitality is generous and careful at once. A traveling apostle may stay a day, or two if necessary. If he stays three, he is a false prophet. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet. A traveler who wants to settle must work for his bread if he has a trade. If he has none, the assembly must find a way for him to live among them without idleness. The Didache even has a word for the man who uses the faith to eat for free.

It calls him a christemporos, a “Christ-moocher”.

These limits are the reflexes of a working economy protecting its treasury.

Then comes the fifteenth chapter. The Didache tells the assembly to appoint for itself episkopoi and diakonoi. The verb is cheirotonein, to choose by a show of hands. The officers must be gentle, truthful, and tested. They must also be aphilargyroi, “not lovers of silver.” In the Community Rule, the mevaqqer kept the property of the Many. In the Damascus Document, the mevaqqer oversaw the camps and their levy. In the Didache, the whole assembly elects its overseers. After gentleness, the first quality it asks of them is freedom from the love of money.

Josephus supplies a telling link. Describing the Essenes, he reports that they chose the managers of their common property by the same kind of vote, and he uses the same family of verb. Philo adds that the Essenes handed their labor wages to an elected steward. A method for choosing trustworthy treasurers was already moving through this world before the Didache wrote it down.