Dead Sea Scrolls: Damascus Rule
Presented on: Tuesday, April 25, 1989
Presented by: Roger Weir
Dead Sea Scrolls
Presentation 4 of 15
Damascus Rule
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, April 25, 1989
Transcript:
I've made out a sheet, and this will carry us through July, listing the lectures. And you can see that a month from tonight Sidney Lanier will definitely be here to be the elder for the Hermetic wisdom liturgy. And I'll invite some other people from the community of Los Angeles for that event.
Most of these lectures will be running through this edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pelican Edition. This is the 3rd revised and Augmented edition. The 2nd edition was in a little Pelican like this and has been completely redone. And this was done in 1987 I believe. Yeah, 3rd edition 1987. So, if you want to follow through you might get yourself a copy of this. it was $6.95 and is generally available. You can take it **inaudible word**.
I'm going to try and go through in the order in the book except putting The Damascus Rule before The Community Rule. Because The Damascus Rule or sometimes as it's known The Damascus Document. And occasionally it's called The Damascus Covenant. But this document is very special. And so, I'm going to take it first.
I'm also using an old collection from about 25-30 years ago The Essene Writings from Qumran. DuPont Summers edition of this. Translated by Giza Vermes from the French. So, I have several different translations here as well as the translation that appears in the R.H. Charles Volume, Volume 2 of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha the Old Testament. And the R.H. Charles work is the best edited presentation. Although the best translation is in Vermes.
Now what is so peculiar about this particular document, The Damascus Rule, is that it is the only Dead Sea Scroll that we had before The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. That is to say, we did not know that it was a Dead Sea Scroll in quite the precise idea that we have had for the last forty years. But it has had a very strange history in Western civilization.
I'm going to read you a quotation here. this is translated from a letter by a certain Timotheus, who lived in the 800s, the early 800s A.D. We have learned from trustworthy Jews who were then being instructed as catechumens as Christian converts under instruction before baptism. In the Christian religion that some books were found 10 years ago in a rock dwelling near Jericho. Now Jericho is about 10 miles from Qumran. Very near to the Jordan River. And Jericho as you might know is the, one of the oldest cities in the world. Jericho has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years.
The story was that a dog of an Arab out hunting while in pursuit of game, went into a cave and did not come out again. Its owner went in after it and found a chamber in which there were many books in the rock. The hunter went off to Jerusalem and told his story to the Jews. Who came out in great numbers and found books of The Old Testament and others in Hebrew script. And since there was a scholar well read in literature among them, I asked him about many passages which are quoted in our New Testament from The Old Testament but are not found anywhere in it. Neither in copies amongst the Jews. Nor and those found amongst Christians. He said that there are, that they are there and can be found in the books discovered there. When I heard this from the catechumen and had also interrogated the others without him and heard the same story without variations, I wrote about it to the eminent Gabriel. And also to Sepal **inaudible word**, metropolitan of Damascus, asking them to search those books and see whether the passage, quote he shall be called a Nazarene unquote, and other passages quoted in The New Testament as being from The Old Testament but not found in the text could be discovered anywhere in the prophets. I also asked him if the following words namely have pity upon me God according to thy mercy, sprinkle me with the hyssop of the blood of thy cross and cleanse me should be found in these books.
And then he goes on to write about it in this way.
Now it turns out that around the 790 A.D. mark that a whole cache of Dead Sea Scrolls were found much in the same way that they were a whole cache of them were found in 1947. The central book in that cache of Dead Sea Scrolls was by a certain Alexandrian, Judah the Alexandrian. And this ascription is given by two medieval Jews. One named Saadian Gayon and the other named Jacob Al Qirqisani. And Jacob al Qirqisani is the founder of the Karaite community. A community of very strict Jews. More strict than conservative Orthodox Jews. The Kara, Karaites are so strict that they have always been set aside by Jewish communities for the thousand years that they've been in existence. In fact, today all of the karaite Jews that live in Israel live in one suburb of Tel Aviv. They do not mix with other Jews. They consider the other Jews who have gone astray a long time. Ago now
Now the term karaite comes from kar, which means gourd. and the central karaite community was in Egypt, very near to Old Cairo. The Arab name for the place is **inaudible word** the tent. Old Cairo sometimes also called old Babylon. Not the Babylon in Mesopotamia but the, an old Babylon. And it's also the site of the ancient Egyptian Memphis. It's modern day Cairo. So, the karaites are associated with Palestine and with Egypt around old Cairo.
Now central to the karaites is this first discovery of The Dead Sea Scroll material after some very long period of time. That is to say the last people to inhabit the Qumran area with any kind of consciousness of what it really was about, of its history, of its significance was in the 130s A.D., the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans was quashed by Roman military might. And the last of those rebels had taken refuge in the ruins of Qumran. The Romans in killing off the rebellious militant Jews also destroyed from Qumran and it was left in ruins from around 130 A.D. So, by 790 A.D. it had been abandoned for about 660 years.
Now that first group of Dead Sea Scrolls spawn not only the Karaite sect in Judaism but was the basis of what eventually came to be a commentary, visionary commentary, which is known as The Zohar, The Book of Splendor. And The Zohar as you must know is the basis of The Kabbalah. So that this Dead Sea Scroll material has influenced Western civilization in particular Jewish mysticism very heavily over the last eleven hundred years. It's the central glorious psychic rediscovery of an intense mystical understanding.
Now what is peculiar about this is that central to those Dead Sea Scrolls of 1200 years ago were the writings of Judah the Alexandrian. It was considered the basic book. In his volume on the temple scroll Yigael Yadin, who was a general in the Jewish army during the six-day war. Also, one of the great archaeologists. Has come to the conclusion that it may very well be that this Alexandrian was Philo of Alexandria. And I would think that the work of Philo that would have been central to their sect was the missing volume. He wrote a two-part volume. We have part two, but the first part is missing. The first part is about the Essene community. about the active spiritual life. The second part on the contemplative life, on the passive spiritual life, we have, and we've been using for some time here.
Those two works together give the two sides of the same coin. That the Essenes in Palestine were one side of the coin. The other side being the very powerful mystical group in Alexandria. Initially on the outskirts of Alexandria in the Therapeutae community. But with the around 25 A.D. that group moving back into the city, back into Alexandria, spurring a considerable revolution in the life, the spiritual life of the city. It became such a challenge, we've talked about this several times, that the Emperor Claudius considered it a personal threat to his divinity and to the religion of the Roman state. So, it was quite some movement.
This work when first found was lost to history except for the Jewish mystical tradition. That is to say these works were so profound and their nature appealed to an inner quality of transformation, that the works themselves became esoteric and not passed among people. And in fact, they were copied many times through the Middle Ages. But finally, even the copying of the documents was let go and the material was passed on only in mystical oral tradition. now the last time that the de
the documents were copied was probably sometime around the 11th century A.D. At that time the last copies in Egypt, in Cairo, in the Ezra synagogue the Karaite synagogue in Cairo, the last copies were filed away in a catch-all compartment called the Ganesa. Those documents remain for a thousand years untouched gathering dust on the shelves of this Ganesa. It was not permissible to destroy holy right ripped. And instead of destroying it one simply put it away on shelves to molder until it would by natural process decay.
In 1896 a European Rabbi, Solomon Schechter, looking in among the fragments of things in the Cairo Ganesa discovered two manuscripts. Both of them frayed. Both of them incomplete. But took them out of the Ganesa and took them to England and made a present of them to Cambridge University, 1896. He then spent some long while making a translation and in addition of these two manuscripts. And he collated the two together to make one fairly complete text and published it in 1910. And it was published under the title Fragments of the Zadokite Work. Because the individuals referred to themselves as the sons of Zadok. A very strictly worthy high priest.
So, The Fragments of the Zadokite Work were published in 1910. It wasn't until 9, the early 1950s when the translations of The Dead Sea Scrolls began to be published in scholarly journals, that individuals began to notice that The Fragments of the Zadokite Work was in fact one of The Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact, was The Damascus Rule Document. That is to say it was the document which gave the history of the sect. The origins. And the reasons why it had been formed. And the Messianic expectations. And the fact that the document in fact was being written at a time when the Messianic expectations were rising to a culmination.
Now the great editor R.H. Charles with his great band of scholars. And you have to understand that these works even though they were down 70 years ago we're done at the time that the great 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was done. Cambridge University had people like Bertrand Russell and Sri Aurobindo and G.E. Moore. And a whole host of others. Alfred North Whitehead. It was a it was a who's who of intelligent highly professional refined scholars. So, this work is still quite useful.
Last week I used the update done about two years ago by J.H. Charles book from the Princeton Theological Seminary but I'm using the R.H. Charles this week.
Now says in here that this document evidently dates from a time when the expectations were rising to a crescendo. That the original work was probably composed sometime around 60 B.C. -55 B.C., somewhere in that time period. So that it dates from about two generations before the birth of Jesus. That the feeling was, the mystical insight was, that the sacred calibration of the calendar was reaching a maturity. That the cycle of the festivals, the seasons of the weeks, was rounding out and completing itself and that they were coming to what was called the final days.
Now the final days are all positive around an endpoint a particular final day. The Jewish term for that particular final day was Yom Yahweh, the day of the Lord. Yom Yahweh was the period, the end, the final punctuation to a whole cycle of time. That time would fulfill itself. That whatever meaning had been engendered in this particular cycle of time would come to a close. Now the idea here is that surely of cyclic epochs. And notice here that there is a parallel with the Pythagorean notion of the transmigration of souls. as individuals are renewed expressions of a soul passing through. So, to enlarge history every epoch housed the Spirit of God moving through it. And when the life of an epoch comes to a close, there is a death and there is a transmigration.
Notice here it's not so much a birth but a transmigration. What transmigrates? The Spirit of God. Therefore, the day is called the day of the Lord. Man's expressive capacity of living out history comes to an end. And on that day the Lord then closes the book of that historical epoch and opens another and moves, from the old to the new. So that the presence of the Lord which gives the only reality exits from the old-world ways to the new world way.
So that the point of The Damascus Document is that a time is approaching, very quickly now, where there will be a new covenant. That the old covenant will be not abrogated but fulfilled to a closure. That all of its promise will be fulfilled. All of its meaning will be integrated. All of its purposes will be achieved. And then new purposes, new meaning, new developments will begin.
So that the Yom Yahweh is sandwiched in between two kinds of parenthesis. One parenthesis closing out the old and another opening and as yet unknown new. That the new because it no longer has any connection. I think we, if I can use this colloquial term it has no karmic collection, connection with the old. The old will be completed. That's that. But the new starts again in its own way. So that Yom Yahweh is like an interface, an articulate interface, of eternity within time. That the appearance of eternity within time demarks the old from the new in such a way that the new is now mutually exclusive from the old. That is to say this would be the case if one would be able to be accurate and exacting in one spiritual appreh
apprehension.
But for the worldly they do not experience God. They do not experience eternity. And so, to them there is no new. And there is no old. It's simply that the world continues. So that the world becomes profane radically. Not just in a kind of a metaphorical sense that the world was profane before, but the world now is profane in a radical sense. The world does not recognize that eternity has occurred. That God's presence has particulately demarked the old from the new.
And this is why as the 1st century goes on, the 1st century A.D., you find more and more the rise in this visionary apocalyptic sense of the future. That the future is an apocalypse. And of course, The Book of Revelation in The New Testament is the greatest of all the apocalypses. It presumes and a cataclysm kleh, cataclysmic view of the future. Why? because all of the imagery is carried over from the old. That imagery carried over from the old can only end in a cataclysm. It has nowhere to go. It has no further development. But it can end only in two ways. Either to be integrated within in a quality of God's presence. Or to be integrated without in a quality of the world ending. So, there's a double sense here. There's a sense that God comes, the inner sense of it. And there's a sense that the world ends, the outer sense of it. Both of them happen together. Both of them are concomitant.
Now in The Damascus Document when the editors were working on it in, in 1913, puzzling over this they have this interesting paragraph.
Our book was most properly written to reflect conditions between 18 B.C. and 70 A.D. Or possibly between 18 B.C. and 8 B.C. The grounds for these dates are as follows: Part 10 section 1 does not seem to imply political subjugation on the part of the Jews. Hence our author wrote it after 63 or 57 B.C. The phrase man of lies receives its most easy explanation as applied to Herod the Great, who reigned 41 years. The phrase man of lies is eminently fitting for a prince who was wholly devoted oh Holy
My Xerox hasn't got the whole phrase here. I'm missing phrase, wholly devoid of principle and religion.
The man of lies is a fitting epithet for a prince who was wholly devoid of principle and religion. The men of war who were with him were his fierce soldiery. All mercenaries. Galatians, Thracians, Germans and so forth. And what they're speaking of here is the fact that the Jewish army under Herod the Great was not made up of Jewish soldiers but was made up of paid mercenaries. They were largely Germanic Celts. Thracian or Macedonian irregulars and so forth. Because the whole power of the state at that time under Herod was a Roman power. Herod was like a vassal of Roman power. They let him do whatever he wanted within his own confined. But he had absolutely no say in terms of foreign policy. Or in financing. Or in raising of money and so forth. So that it was really a section of the Roman Empire that was staffed by foreign mercenaries.
Now if these identifications are valid our book was written either during Herod's life 37 B.C. to 4 B.C. or after Herod's death. Accordingly, as we take the 40 years in our text as a prediction or as recording a fact already passed. And he goes on with this kind of an evidence and finally comes out to say, That it is probable then our book was written between 18 B.C. and 8 B.C. Now there's one emendation on this date. It should be 7 B.C.
The terminus for their speculation was the death of the two fine sons of Herod. He had 15 children and many of them were sons. But in particular two of his sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, were extremely popular beautiful young men. Their mother Mariamne was descended from royalty, from the Hasmonean dynasty. The Maccabean and so forth. And it was through marriage with her that Herod became royal himself. He had an in to becoming King in the first place. Her two sons were sent when they were young to Rome to be given the best education that money or circumstance could provide. They were both very handsome young men. They were both exceedingly refined in their manners. Highly intelligent. And when they were brought back after receiving about 10 or 12 years of training in Rome, they were spectacularly popular with, with the populace. so, these two sons of Herod who finally, were killed and put to death. They were strangled. The father had them strangled in a town in Samaria in 7 B.C. It was like the ultimate act of his madness.
Now the killing of his two sons coincides with the account in The New Testament that we have of the massacre of the innocents. That is to say in Herod's last diseased days, the last few years of his life he was suffering from advanced arterial sclerosis. And his body was ulcerating inside and out. And he was literally covered with sores that wouldn't heal. Along with the calcification of course the blood pressure goes up and all kinds of psychotic symptoms begin to show themselves. The massacre of the innocents, we generally understand from The New Testament was that only babies, only male babies, were killed. But this is not so anyone who was challenging the throne in the sense that they were potential messiahs were killed. Including Herod's two fine sons.
Now the war scroll, or the, of The Damascus Scroll, Damascus Rule, tells us that this time may come. and that this would be a sign of the final day. And predicts that this event will trigger the new covenant, the new age.
Now in the, in The Damascus Rule we have a peculiar kind of a symbolism for the leader of the community. He's referred to as the lawgiver. And we've talked about this before. That this is a new Torah. This is not the Torah of Moses. This is the new Torah for a period of transition. The old Torah was for the old law, for the old covenant. This community are people of the new covenant who have not to confirm a new covenant but to prepare themselves to receive the new covenant.
So that the particular quality of the Qumran community, and of the Essene movement as a whole, was that they were willing to step off to be the first, the chosen remnant, to be the first to step off the temporal historical cultural orientation that the world was going by. That is to suspend their whole quality of participation in the world. To go out into retreat. To go into deep meditation. To go into deep ascetic, a deep ascetic cocoon to prepare themselves to receive the new. And since the new would be unknown there would be nothing to indicate what it might be like. Except the promise from God that at an appropriate time he would send his Messiah the Messiah of Israel and Aaron would, would come to the people. And initiate an, a new era, a new age of paradise on earth.
So, the community had a very peculiar sense of being abstracted from history. Abstracted from culture. Abstracted from the world. And in order to sustain them, because they understood that this was going to take some while. In fact, it took almost 200 years. But to sustain them they needed a new law.
And this new lawgiver, the Teacher of Righteousness, is also referred to as the star. And we're given to understand that the sense is that he is the guiding star. The word that they use in The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew word, the qiyan. The qiyan of your images. the qiyan is the star but its the star of your images. Where do we have images? We have images in our imagination.
And we've talked about this in the Saturday class enough so that most of you will be prepared for this. The image base is the foundation of the mythic horizon of culture and language. So that the qiyan, the star of your images, is the symbolic self which constellates as the center of your image base, of your mythic horizon of capacity.
So that the Teacher of Righteousness became the temporary self for those in the community who abrogated their own selves. You understand that the community was knit together in such a way that no one had their own integration to lean on. So that the Teacher of Righteousness became the surrogate self for everyone in the community for those two hundred years. He was a star in that sense. He was a guiding star. He was the symbolic self that guaranteed that the community, though each individual would be selfless, would not be disoriented. Would not be subjected to chaos. but rather would be open. And that only in this condition would they be able to recognize the Messiah when he came.
Why? Because the Messiah would be the new self of the community. And if the community were selfless as individual but knit together as a community, the community would recognize the Messiah. Because he would function in perfect complement. He would be the self they lacked. They would be the community he was looking for. He would be the key and they would be the lock.
So that their whole difficulty was to maintain themselves for 200 years. They didn't know exactly how long it was going to be. But they were able to compute and come up with a fairly accurate figure. The figure that they came up with was somewhere around 190 years. Now the figure was derived from The Book of Daniel. It was 70 weeks of years. The 490 years.
But notice that the time was given not in terms of years. Not in terms of, of the world's sense. But only in terms of strict religious ceremonial demarcation of the passing of duration. So, they were not dealing with time, but they were dealing with ceremonial cycles. And the ceremonial cycles had spaces of 50 days in between. And seven of these would occur during an annual solar cycle. So, the sense of duration that the Essenes had was different from the worldly sense of time. The sense of duration was that these are motions of God's presence spiraling down to the day when it would be at the center. That they were not demarking any kind of linear sense of time. Nor any kind of circular sense of time. But a slowly involving spiral that as it grew closer and closer to the center would become more and more powerful until on the Yom Yahweh, on the day of the Lord, the Messiah would appear at the exact center of the ceremonial transformation that had gone on. The only people who would recognize that this had occurred were those who were selfless but knit together in a community strong enough to receive the impress of that unique and particular impact.
Now you can see from this that when we read the description of John the Baptist, the head of the Qumran community around 30 A.D., baptizing people in the Jordan River. And sees Jesus come forth and sees him. And sees the spirit of truth descend upon the man. That is the exact center, the deep self-occurrence of that community at that moment. The descent of the Holy Spirit. The person who sees that is John the Baptist. Who was the inheritor of The Dead Sea scroll community, the Qumran community, Essene community. He's one of the follow-ups to the Teacher of Righteousness. He is not the star. He is not the lawgiver. He's the one who keeps the community together in their openness to receive. Jesus is the new star. He is the new lawgiver.
But as we'll see later on this fall, there's a very particular kind of a transformation that Jesus brilliantly achieves. He sets the whole Torah of the Old Testament symbolically set up in a kind of a Pythagorean kind of Ted Trakus as The Ten Commandments. He sets that aside and brings a single pair of laws for the new covenant. Shall love the neighbor thy neighbor as thyself. And love the Lord thy God with all my heart. the two sides of love. The individual give, still giving up himself for another. And still giving up himself for God.
And it turns out as we'll see that the whole preparation time, that 200 years of preparation time, was not a preparation for something other than what they were actually doing during that preparation time. The preparation time was like practice for the new covenant in the first place. They had never understood that. It was not possible to understand it. And we'll see that this is one of the great brilliant strokes of genius that Jesus shows. That the preparation was exactly the new dispensation.
Now this, this is Zadokite work, this Damascus Document, talking about the star identifies from the old Torah, from Numbers chapter 24 verse 17, that this star will be, will be in the words of the language of numbers which is traditionally ascribed to Moses, will be a prince of the congregation. Will be as a scepter to the people.
Now notice here that there's a slight difference from being a king. a prince of the congregation not a king of the congregation. The Prince is either the King to be or is the son of the king. And specifically, in the sense here the Prince of the congregation is that God is the king. And the person one is looking for is either the Son of God or will become God. That only God is the king. And the other sense, the scepter of the people, is again this kind of a play. it's an obbleakness. It isn't the person on the throne, it is what is wielded by the person on the throne to rule. So, the sense that this figure, this star, will be the Prince of the congregation and the scepter of the people this is the description mystically in numbers of the Messiah.
Now in The Damascus Rule this is alluded to specifically as the first indication that this is God speaking to Moses deeply and Moses just accurately giving it out again. That he could not, Moses himself, could not have understood the full significance of what he was saying. Nevertheless, he spoke truthfully. He spoke what he heard. He was the conduit of God's voice speaking. And at the time of Numbers it simply was a mystery. It was a seed unraveled as yet not grown. But with The Damascus Rule they say we now have received that seed and the seed is growing. It is growing in us. In our community we are preparing ourselves to receive he who will be the scepter of the people. He who will be the Prince of the congregation. He who will be the Messiah.
Now in this whole preparation, as I've talked about before,
But let's change the cassettes. We have a chance here.
END OF SIDE ONE
It reads like this. This is the Dumont, DuPont Sommers translation. After going through the sense of history, which it seemed to be cyclic. It had seemed that The Torah had been complete in and of itself. So that there was only the sense that one needed to conform to the pattern of the law. You didn't evolve the law. You didn't change the law. You didn't add to the law. You didn't detract from the law. But you tried to live up to the law. And it was like the rim of a circle. And if you followed the pattern of the law in completeness, you would at best perfect the circle.
But The Damascus Document in presenting the Torah saying yes this is accurately so. This is exactly the way the old law was. But that there was a movement in the old law which was a line of historical development that went towards the center of the circle of the law. And at the very center of the circle of the law we will find the Messiah. He fulfills the law in himself because he is at the center of the circle of the law. He changes it not by variation. Not by addition. Not by subtraction. Not by multiplication. There is no, if I can use this phrase, there is no arithmetical procedure that he does to change the law. What he does is collect it all within himself and transform it in a mathematical operation. He converts the old law to a new covenant. It's an implosion of meaning to the center. And a re-radiation of that imploded integration back out again in terms of a new world order.
Now this form of massive radical transformation was alien to the Jewish mind up until the time of the Second Temple. There never would have ever have been any kind of ability to conceive in this kind of a way. The first indication that we have, the very first indication that we have, is in the writings and The Books of Enoch. And in the Enochian writings, The Book of Enoch, we have the first beginnings of a sense of a new image that has come into play in the imagination of the Jewish mind. The image is of a man who has transcended the earth. Transcended the world. Has gone to the heavens and seen the structure there.
Now there have been sketches towards this. Elijah is a great prophetic figure did not die but was taken in a chariot of fire up to heaven. So, we have precedents for this. We have preludes for this. But Elijah is quite different from Enoch. Enoch goes and returns. he sees what is beyond enables and is able to come back and bring images from the beyond here. So that from the Enochian literature on you begin to get this sense.
Now after the history, after the history lesson, after showing that the line of the patriarchs moves towards the center. It's not just a lineage which wraps around the law in a closed cycle of unchangingness, but he is moving towards the center. So, here's the institution of the new covenant in the words of The Damascus Document.
But because of those who clung to the commandments of God and survived them as a remnant, God established his covenant with Israel forever. Revealing to them the hidden things in which all Israel had strayed. His holy Sabbaths and his glorious feasts. His testimony of righteousness and his ways of truth. And the desires of his will, which man must fulfill. That he may live because of them. He opened this before them. And they dug a well of abundant waters.
Now this well that they're digging is this new law from the lawgiver. Not a new Torah but a temporary Torah as it were a temporary law to hold everything in abeyance. To expect the unknown. To expect the new.
And whoever despises these waters, these waters shall not live. But they, they defiled themselves by the sin of man and by the ways of defilement and they said this is ours. And God and his marvelous mysteries forgave their iniquity and blotted out their sin. And he built for them a sure house in Israel such as did not exist from former times till now. They who cling to it are destined for everlasting life. And there shall be the glory of the man. That God has assured them by the hand and the prophet Ezekiel.
And they go on to get this vision from Ezekiel.
It's then that this kind of language begins to be stressed in The Damascus Rule. The Anointed. The Anointed who will make a visitation this will be God making the visitation. And the man who makes the visitation, the Messiah, will be the anointed of God. Now this, this notion of the anointed carries with it the sense of a blessing. And we have to use our imaginations a little bit here in order to understand that the power of the idea. When the Teacher of Righteousness who was the star for the, the community. He was the unique teacher. He was the lawgiver. When he was taken from the community. When he died. Where did he go? He went to God's presence. And while with God's presence he is anointed. And when he returns to his congregation he will return with God's anointing. So, there's a very peculiar, deep sense here which incidentally is consistent with the idea of metempsychosis. That is to say the Messiah will be the return of the Teacher of Righteousness.
Now the whole idea of the second coming of Jesus is not true of Jesus at all. But is certainly true of the Teacher of Righteousness. The fact that it was transferred to Jesus is a grave psychological error. It's a mythic misunderstanding of enormous proportion. There is no sense at all that Jesus will **inaudible word**. That's not it at all. But the primordial realization at the very foundations of that experience is that the Teacher of Righteousness by his very nature will return as the Anointed One. When he comes back, that is to say not the person the Teacher of Righteousness. But that Spirit of God moving through the Teacher of Righteousness, which has gone back to the heavenly center and become anointed when it comes back again it comes back with this extra added quality. Which one refers to symbolically what is that extra added quality? That, that presence coming back into life again is able to make manifest what was only promised before. The Teacher of Righteousness promises that the Messiah will come. And when he comes, he will bring the kingdom of God and make it happen. The Teacher of Righteousness can only issue that guarantee. When he returns with that anointed quality, that essence of him come into another man, a new man. That man will be able to make real that kingdom. Will make it happen. Will have the power of, as they would have said will have the power of making it live. making it happen.
When will the Teacher of Righteousness return? At the end of time. at the end of time. Now notice here that there's a concomitant with the end of time and the sense that this is Yom Yahweh. This is God's day. So that the end of time is a day of eternity. Where worldly time is suspended. Its abrogated. It will happen again the next day, but it is abrogated. And while it is abrogated a new structure is instituted. So that the next day it's the new structure that's working. Time is going on again, but it has a completely new structure.
And I have to give you a graphic image here because this is the result of long, long year. the way that symbolic consciousness integrated in the B.C. centuries was to weave a pattern like a fabric with a warp and a **inaudible word**. In the A.D. centuries increasingly the way of integration was to weave it into towards a center. In the B.C. centuries the way that consciousness came out was that it was a fabric of the essence of the world. But in the A.D. centuries the way that consciousness came out was that it was a self-centered world. So that there is a different feeling. A different intellectual process. A different life manifestation. In the first quality nature is of the essence and natural patterns. In the second magical patterns are more real. The supernatural is more real than nature. I don't mean to say phantasmal super nature, but I mean to say supernatural in that above, transcendent. So that spiritualized nature is more real than the than the earth nature. In the B.C. centuries the earth nature is, is the final arbiter of meaning. It's the final referent of all intelligibility. In the A.D. centuries it's a transcendent centralizing symbolic capacity that is more real.
As you can see one of the difficulties that we have inherited is that it's very difficult for us to tell whether the reality is in our minds. Or if it is occurring and our minds are just in concordance with it. Or whether our minds have projected it upon. This is a problem which was almost unheard of in B.C. centuries. In the B.C. centuries, I think the psychological phrase would be a fixed idea. Someone with a fixed idea would not be able to resuscitate themselves. But in the A.D. centuries the very essence of a spiritual transformation is to go through a fixed idea to its resolution. The very maturing of consciousness for us is to have gone through that kind of a threshold. It would not have been possible in the B.C. centuries at all. No one did this.
The closest that we have of any report is from individuals like the Buddha, who found nothing there. They did not find a self .they did not find a center. But in the A.D. centuries, even in Buddhism, in advanced Buddhism, one finds a deep mysterious kind of a center. You don't have to call it an ego. And it most certainly isnt an ego. And you don't have to call it a self. But there's a sense that all of this comes together. And if it comes together with the void it still comes together. In, in, in basic Buddhism there's almost no sense of the void as being the center. There's only the practice of unraveling the complications of the world.
But the point is, is that in the A.D. centuries there is a different form of integration for consciousness than in the B.C. centuries.
The first indication of this, the very first indication of this, is in The Dead Sea scroll material. Including The Book of Daniel and The Book of Job. So that the apocalyptic archetype of the self is the final projection outward of the old worldview. The old world which comes to the end of time can only imagine that end as an apocalyptic war. That is to say if one still carries the old habits, if one has not interiorized and made that transformation, the projected sense from the old mind view that just makes a pattern of things is that the pattern will come to an apocalyptic in in a final war.
And one of the last The Dead Sea Scrolls written about 50 to 60 A.D. is the war of The Scrolls of the Son of, Sons of Light Against the sons of darkness. When we get to it, you'll see that this scroll, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, is very much like certain qualities of a The book of Revelation.
And when we get to it later this fall, well see that The Book of Revelation is two documents that have been grafted upon each other. One of them is an apocalyptic vision of the end of time of the old thinking. And the other is the new revelation that will come out. One of them is from John the Baptist and the other is from Saint John. So that the apocalypse is by two John's and not by one. And it's the juxtaposition of the two together to show by juxtaposition exactly what the difference is. The seven seals as an apocalyptic ending of the world is the only possible projection left for the old way of looking at things. That image base ends in that, I guess the symbol is armageddon. Whereas the new begins exactly in the figure of man transcending this conflagration of what before had been the ultimate extension of powers to their angelic exponentials. Nature and natural powers extended to their exponential ends, are angelic powers. one literally has no the Armageddon on earth but Armageddon which includes a battle between fallen angels and angels that are still there. War in heaven as **inaudible word or two**. It is a picture of the ultimate extension of an old habit of conceiving of reality. Juxtaposed as we will see with a completely radical new way of appreciating reality.
To give you an image here, it's like man walks into a conflagration. And when he walks through the conflagration, the conflagration becomes highlights of his personality but does not destroy him. And the first time that that image of that man is seen, that symbolic person, is in The Book of Daniel. And in The Book of Daniel, it's like a, it's like a press agent a hypnotic mode that the writer staring in his mind's eye, his spirits mind's eye, with his third eye, staring into the image of the furnace the fiery furnace sees that the pure people are not consumed by the flames. Shadrach Meshach and Abednego were their Babylonian names. But there is also another person there who was not put into the furnace but who was there with them. Who has the hair like white wool. And the eyes like fire. And the skin like bronze. and that same figure will be seen by Saint John two hundred and fifty years later and put into the apocalypse also. That figure is not consumed by the Armageddon, the conflagration.
Now the Pythagorean term for an assembly of the people with synedria. Synedria. Out of which we finally get various derivations like synagogue and Sanhedrin and all of these words come from assembly of the people. An assembly of the people is collecting people together as they are. But the sense in the Pythagorean synedria is that the people are assembled first and through their discipline are transformed. The assembly of the people are those who are able to hear but those who are able to be doers of the word as well as hearers of the word transform themselves into a mathematically transformed community called the congregation. The congregation is a patterned assembly. But at the core of this congregation is not some traditional sage like Pythagoras, or the Buddha for that matter, but the center of this congregation is an open space. An opening in the shape of an expected person of which no qualities whatsoever are projected forth. No images from the old are carried over. And the whole knack, if you will, the whole magic trick of it if you will, is that the teacher of righteous has taught them how to be open to whatever the Messiah will be. That's what he will be.
And the key from that is a phrase from Exodus the burning bush. And Moses says of God who shall I say sent me. And the phrase is I am that I am. Or better translated from the Hebrew I will be what I will be. You cannot predicate anything of me prematurely. However, I occur to you that's how I am. However, I will occur to you, that's how I will be. And that same sense is taken over by the teacher of righteousness for the openness kept for the Messiah. Do not predicate inequalities upon him. He will be radically mysteriously different. And the only thing that we can do is prepare a space within us, to prepare an opening within us, to accept him as he is.
Now this is extremely difficult. And The Damascus Rule gives us the example from The Book of Daniel and tells us that it's all in the phrase, Melted in the midst of the furnace. This is a metaphor in Daniel which later on incidentally will become part of the alchemical process. What is melted in the midst of the furnace? What is melted in the midst of Armageddon? All of the energy of all of the images in their old form of the currents. What is new? A new integration. A new center. Which is transformed from those images into new symbolic presentation. The Teacher of Righteousness makes clear that the Messiah will not come in the old forms at all. Will come only in completely new way.
So that the new covenant that the Essene communities have is a covenant of open expectation for what is certainly to come but cannot be described prematurely or in any kind of projected way.
Now notice here that the whole technique of maintaining themselves as a community is posited upon this peculiar criteria of inner openness. What interferes with inner openness? The primary thing that interferes with inner openness is to think that something from the world can satisfy any kind of an openness which you would have. So, you become ascetic not from some kind of puritanical ethos but from a methodological technicality. You disengage yourself from the world in terms of expectation. So, that you can keep open that quality and not have it surrogatelly fulfilled prematurely by some kind of worldly quality. So, the discipline of the Essenes was extremely precarious and difficult.
And for the Jewish population it was very near an impossibility. It just wasn't a part of the tradition that had been lived with for 2,000 years. In fact, it was exactly the obverse of the tradition. Instead of having things in the world proved to you that God was with you. You now had to not have any kind of response to things in the world to prove that God was with you. Instead of having many children and many crops and many animals and this and that and the other thing. It was not having a necessary relationship to them, not having them at all which was proof that God was with you. It was the obverse of the process.
So that psychologically the technique that they were using turned themselves inside out. There were exactly the negatives from what pictures they had been before. Their psychic reality was like a photographic negative. Only it was an emulsion that had no image on it when it was perfected. the perfect person was someone who was ready to receive the Messiah on a blank emulsion which he kept available, his inner psyche. Now this is extremely difficult to do. In any age at any time. At this time for the Jewish people it was almost impossible to do.
The primal Qumran value then was fidelity versus apostasy. Fidelity. Fidelity to tradition, so that one could keep the obverse qualities in perfection. This was known as purity. So, you had fidelity towards the tradition to give yourself an accurate context within which to develop your purity. The sin was apostasy from tradition which didn't give you any kind of a context in which you could practice your purity. You had no way to know if you were, if you'd given up on tradition. Or if you followed the wrong tradition, you would have an impaired context and would not be able to achieve your purity.
So that there was a double bind for the Essenes. They had to find what was the right tradition. What is our accurate tradition? And two to use that accurate tradition in a obverse way. So, the Essenes found themselves increasingly out on the limb in a crossfire of precariousness.
For those who were out to hold on to the purity of the tradition as it had evolved, they were the ones who were the high priests in power in Jerusalem in the temple. And they said look things have come down in a straight lineage to us and we're continuing. Yes, there have been changes. Yes, there have been developments. There have always been changes. There have always been developments. And there always will be. You people are fanatics by trying to find an abstract pure tradition. And the Essenes reply is that is exactly right. We want to find the exact abstract tradition because that's the only context in which we can do what we have to do. To not only have an abstract tradition of fidelity to it but to use it then in this obverse way to create a sense of purity of openness within it.
So that the Essenes were twice removed from the Judaism of their time. once in terms of strict abstraction. And the second in terms of radical transformation within. And they found themselves increasingly caught in a crossfire. Because on one hand they were strict purists for tradition. And yet on the other hand they were using the tradition in ways that were never thought of before.
Jesus is the perfection of these two currents coming together. He is exactly the pure abstractness of the tradition imploded and turned inside out into a completely radical new configuration. which is why he did not register for anyone who wasn't in this particular double mode, he didn't register as a person at all. He registered if he registered at all as a crazy worldly reformer. Or he registered as an attempt for too much perfection that just doesn't fit in this world. Those two resonances registered. Only a very, very few, the elect they call themselves, did he register as a person. Did he come through? This is he. This is the one. It took a stereoptic vision of ascetic purity and of radical transformation to be able to see him at all as a person.
Now the only people in history who have ever done this are those who have made that double change. It's a, it's a double transformation. Not a, not just a transformation but a double transformation. It's like transforming space and then transforming time. You transform them both.
In Qumran we find that there is then the beginnings of a new technique. In Qumran this new technique is based on a, a double approach to scripture. The double approach to Scripture parallels the double approach to the sense of person. The first approach is, can be given under the title of a kind of a, the methodological grouping of the laws together. This whole methodological grouping of the books of The Old Testament eventually reached its culmination and thinking of The Old Testament as a cosmic person. The book itself became a person. In certain books, in The Old Testament became the head and the arms and legs and the vehicles and so forth. But the principle was the methodological grouping of the books into sections. And this prefigures the structure that The Mishnah would have in the A.D. centuries. The Mishnah as a, as the new law, the new code. Yes, there's still the Torah from Moses but now we have The Mishnah which is a new code. And it's actually the code by which Judaism is structured. Judaism is not structured as a religion on the Torah of Moses. It is structured on The Mishnah and The Talmud. The religious experience is structured by them. And in fact, The Mishnah is the oldest Jewish code extant.
The center of this methodological grouping of the statues, statutes is that the Feast of the renewal of the covenant became the ceremonial pacesetter. The celebration of the Feast of the renewal of the covenant became the ticker, as it was, that marked the articulate passage of duration. It wasn't the reoccurrence or in a time of a year so much as the fact that the spiral was heading towards the center. And the way of keeping track of it was to keep the festivals of weeks and the Jubilees accurately in view. And the great punctuation of the year was the Feast of the renewal of the Covenant. And we'll see that this, this becomes the, the central symbolic time during the lifetime of Jesus.
The second quality is the exhortation. Now the Greek term exhortation this eventually, this represents a literary genre adopted by both Jewish and Christian religious teachers. the exhortation is the seed technique of what later on would become a Midrash. That is to say it's an explanation. Or to use the Greek term it's a hermeneutic. It gives you a new meaning based on a symbolic understanding. The new meaning in symbolic understanding is not based on the imagery and the reference to the images but is based on the integration of the images into ideas. And so, when one has the idea one is able to restructure the image base. Accordingly, as the idea grows and matures one retrospectively is able to rearrange the images into a new order. Into a new pattern. Emphasizing some deemphasizing others.
So, that this hermeneutical quality is new. And the hermeneutical quality is exactly that radiating out of the new way from the individual. The new way of seeing. The Gospel According to Thomas begins with the very first saying of Jesus, He who understands the hermeneutic of these words will not death. It is such a penetrating bullseye of a statement that we just haven't been able to hear it with all of its oomph because we haven't recognized that it hits a bull's-eye in an enormous target of significance. When one hears it naively in a natural way it seems like a puzzling quirky kind of a thing. Almost like a Pythagorean type of a statement. He who, he who understands the hermenea of these words will not taste death. Well our tendency naturally in an imaginative limitation is to say well what, what is the hermenea of this? What is that say not to know? Whereas the insider is one who knows. And so, the whole gnosis that comes out of this is someone who has prepared themselves to participate in this new way.
So that The Damascus Rule develops for the first time the grouping together into new arrangements of the old. And then the symbolic explanation of those new patterns, which retrospectively give a completely new meaning to what was there. Now the polite literary term for this is allegory. But because allegory has been so ruined by English classes and universities, I almost hate to use this term. So, I used the Greek term hermenea because it hasn't been ruined yet. And for most of us it still has the qualities of kind of like a closed silent insightfulness. Hermeneutic. Hermenea. that kind of a quality. Although at the time Philo's writings on the development of allegorical technique would have been the way that they would have talked 2,000 years ago. The person who talked about Herminia was Jesus. Who was, I keep hearing in my mind the phrase from the 60s who was right on. Who when he spoke, spoke with the accuracy of doing it. Not just hoping for a new realm but actually making the new realm happen as he went on.
So, The Damascus Covenant then has this sense. The Teacher of Righteousness is a new Moses. Who will return from the dead at the end of days. And the old Jerusalem, the old site of the old temple will be transformed into a new Jerusalem, a new temple.
And we'll see the traditional Christian understanding from millennia now has been that the church is the new Jerusalem. And we'll see that that is misunderstanding. It isn't the church that's the new Jerusalem, but it is the congregation of the people who are able to do this among themselves who constitute the New Jerusalem. Wherever they are under whatever conditions they occur, they are a part of that city. The City of God is not an empire projected out as a universal Church. That is parallel to a universal state, which is clearly the Roman Empire Augustine principle idea. So, the Teacher of Righteousness does a new Moses who only turn from the dead at the end of the days becomes the focus in The Damascus Rule.
Now next week will go to The Community Rule because it's important for us to try and understand what was the shape of the community. It wasn't a theoretical shape. It was the shape that they lived with for 200 years. What was that shape? And how did this high faluten function ever come to be accepted as daily life? You can see from what I've given you tonight, if you really understand it, understand the, the accuracy of what I've given you this is a very difficult thing to do. And to be able to do it daily, year in and year out, generation after generation, and not lose your taste for it. Not lose your accuracy of compiling the momentum. This was really something. And The Community Rule gives us the bird's-eye view of this process and answers these questions.
And thanks very much for coming.
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