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I. The Men of Qumran
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
It is an age-old commonplace of spiritual writers that God is mysteriously nearer to those who would flee ‘the world’ and seek him alone in solitude. Such writers can justifiably point to the orgins of monastic life in the deserts of Egypt, as also to the constant renewal of a monastic ideal by a return to the desert as can be seen in Cîteaux's efforts. In our own day a Père de Foucauld lived and died like an eremite of old; and that precious life and death would seem to have begotten a thriving new spiritual movement in the Church. That solitudes and deserts can foster and nurture spiritual realities is certainly a traditional and valid theme. We can always retain the doggerel-like text ‘O beata solitudo, O sola beatitudo’ ('Blest solitude, our solitary bliss’).
1 Thus Professor C. Rabin argues that the Qumrân community maintained the pharisaic haburah of the first century B.C., etc. (Cf. Qumrân Slorits, O.U.P., 1957.)
2 Skeletons of women have been found in the outskirts of the cemetery at Qumrân Josephus tells us that some Essenc groups had families (B.J. 2, 8, 13), and the Zadokite document (several copies found at Qumran) allows for the married (vii, 6a-9). Fr Milik likens these married Essenes to Tcrtiarics of a religious Order. (Dix Arts de Déouvertes dans le Déert dejuda, pp. 44 and 111.)
3 Citations from the Scrolls arc mostly in the rendering of T. H. Gaster, in The Scriptures of the Dead Sea Sect (Seeker and Warburg, 1957).
4 Which, if we may accept the findings of the latest scholarly work, was contemporary with the later period of Qumrân A.D. 50-57. (J.P. Audet, O.P., La Didache, Etude Bibliquts, 1958).
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