Los esenios, la comunidad de Qumrán y las sectas en el judaísmo | Adolfo Roitman

Good afternoon everyone, it is a true pleasure and honor to be here at the foundation, thank you Lucía for giving me this opportunity and thanks to Professor Julio de Onion Barrier for inviting me here to give this conference, which, as you can see, the title is half a conference in which I am going to discuss In the next 10 hours, that's not what I have, more or less something like that. I'm going to try to present a fascinating but complex topic at the same time where I'm going to try to combine the academic with the informative without presuming that they really are experts on this topic. but I can already say that if you are confused you are going to come out even more confused after this presentation, then let's start.

The phenomenon is sectarian. It is one of the most important social and religious phenomena of ancient Judaism and in order to understand the Dead Sea community, the phenomenon It is Zen I have to see it in a context and with that purpose then to contextualize this community we have to go back now to the Persian era where we can find the beginning of this phenomenon and as you see here in this first part the phenomenon present I in Judaism Persian for these purposes then I want again without presupposing knowledge and I want to focus on a very important point and that is in the pentateuch of Moses the fifth book is the author or not mine and without going into academic products we can say that the deuteronomy is probably the first of the texts that in some way is formed as a book back in something like the second half of the seventh century of our era, probably in a pre-more holistic version than the one we have, but the important thing is to point out that we can find from the point of view seen from a religious perspective, a concept that is the concept of religious centrism where the author of Deuteronomy sees the concept of election of the people and coming out with a central concept in the theology of Deuteronomy, I mark here the phrase of Deuteronomy, I feel that it can characterize it. because you are a people set apart especially for the lord your god the lord has chosen you from among all the peoples of the earth to be a special people that is to say here the concept appears where the people of Israel are a people separated from the rest of the peoples seen from a non-centric perspective, as I said, if we now from this time, as I said, at the end of the biblical era, we now enter the post-biblical period of the Persian era in the book of Ezra and here simply to not presuppose biblical knowledge The book of Sidra Cine Mias is a work from the Persian era.

The edition that we know will be something like that for him in the year 400 BC. In the Book of Ezra, an event or moment in the history of ancient Israel is alluded to. where the returnees from the Babylonian exile begin to marry women from the land of Israel and the text says like this at 9 o'clock the Israelites, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves apart from the people of the country, that is, from the Canaanites. Hittites Perez Eos Jebusites Ammonites Moabites Egyptians and Amorites despite their hateful pagan customs they and their sons have married the daughters of these people and therefore the holy race and the technical expression in Hebrew is to be consistent and that is why one Literal translation would be the sacred seed has mixed with the people of other towns and the first to commit this sin have been the chiefs and rulers, that is, as you clearly see here the ideology in the book of Ezra, these cases of mixed marriages among those who returned of Babylon with the women of the place with the people, no, but the people of the country call it and this text is not only in theory but as you see later in these 10 it says let's commit to sending all our foreign women away to their children and let it be fulfilled the law just like you and those who respect the commandment, the Lord advises us, that is, the ideology here is clearly a separatist ideology where it is taken to the extreme, as we say, this position or this ethnocentric perspective.

Now what is fascinating is if we compare the text from 9 with the ideology of central thrones that appears for example in all the bride and groom 7 where it is clearly spoken where from verse 1 the lord your god is going to make you enter the country of which you must take possession In the literary context it is assumed that they are the ordinances of Iab the god of Israel to Moses before entering the promised land and expelling it from your presence seven nations greater and more powerful than you the Hittites the Desires the Amorites the Canaanites the Pharisees the Serbs and those who museums and when the lord your god has made these nations fall into our power and we have defeated them will destine them towards destruction and you will not make any pact with them nor will you have compassion for them nor will you be related to them or marry our sons and daughters with the young men and boys of those people because they will make your children turn away from the lord and worship their gods and then the lord will sit down and set fire to you and they will destroy you in the blink of an eye, that is, we see clearly here that there is an ideology of separatism where when we compare the reasons expressed in doctor or not 97 against these nines they clearly see that there is a different ideology the reason why this separatism is fixed in deuteronomy 7 is the fear of idolatry is that the people of Israel does not fall into the worship of the gods, assuming that women, in this case, mixed marriages can lead to religious perdition for the people of Israel, while in these seven the reason is no longer religious, but in this case it is biological, it is to avoid mixing.

In this case racial as I said or the contact of the amendments pleases considering that the Israeli seed is sacred compared to a seed of the pagans as you see it is a totally different perspective if someone did not know that I am talking about these nine I think I am talking about a Goebbels' ideology, that is, we are talking about a perspective where the entity of Israel has a biological basis that obviously accepted us in Israel, but at this moment we see this struggle between two ideologies and it is worth mentioning that this separatist ideology with a biological basis probably It originated in the Babylonian exile and this difference in ideology, which is a development in extremis of what already appeared in Deuteronomy and seems to have developed exegetically, theologically, socially in a situation of Babylonian exile, is also very interesting when we compare the list of peoples, notice. in the list of towns in these nine in front of the author or boyfriend 7 and notice what happens those in red are the towns that appear in the two lists in deuteronomy 7 in blue the desires and desires do not appear in extras and in extras In green they do not appear in Deuteronomy, which are the Ammonites, Moabites and Egyptians.

Now, if you keep in mind the people, the land of Israel, first, the doctor or not, was talking to me about seven Canaanite dusts, while the Moabites and Ammonites are located in the current Jordan, which in the sky of the land of israel while egypt the egyptians is southwest of israel is what we see that the circle after they banned them says see it is expanding which shows this again is an ideology that is based precisely saving separatism we still do not talk and this It is an important point, we are not talking about sects, but we see that it is the beginning of an ideology of separation.

Not only that, but I want you to see at this point, one of the people that appears is the people of the Moabites, as you can see, and it is no coincidence that We have a biblical story that precisely points to the opposite. We have Ruth's little novel where it tells of a Moabite woman who will ultimately be the one from whom King David is derived and that is how the story ends. Not where Ruth lives there, they marry her. with one of the Israelites Boas and from that relationship will finally emerge in the family of ten who is David's grandfather and obviously the messiah will also have to be born from the Davidic lineage, that is, we see two lines that are being formed in Israeli ancient world that we can clearly establish a separatist line versus a universalist line.

We can see this tension already in ancient Israel in the next point. In these four it is said that when these exiles arrive back to Israel, what they do first is rebuild or they propose to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem and we have a very interesting scene in these four that goes like this when the enemies of Judas of Benjamin learned that those who had returned from exile were rebuilding the temple the lord god of Israel went to see steel Babelia Joshua ice head of the family play a role is usa babel descendant of the lineage of david and joshua joshua their son attacked the great priest and told them to allow us to help you in the construction because we the same ones that we have turned to our god will offer sacrifices since the time of the Savior king of Assyria who brought us here but it was a role Joshua the other heads of Israelite families answered him we cannot rebuild together with you the temple of our god we have to rebuild it ourselves and in Hebrew the term in Hebrew is ya hat which in Hebrew also means that only we not only as adverbs but the concept appears, we are not a different group and I can tell you from now on that it is very interesting that the term appears travels here because centuries later the community of the sea dead in the dead sea scrolls is called elia hat which means that we are beginning to see a use of a term that will finally have a sectarian use and they can only build the key temple we still do not see that these exiles who have returned is a separate sect but we see the beginning of what will finally be the sectarian phenomenon, a group that remains a group of chosen ones and only they have the responsibility of building the key temple compared to all the others who do not have that right now We can also see this separatist line in another very clear way and it is in the last chapters of the book of Ezekiel the prophet of exile between chapters 40 and 48 we have the restoration plan of the future Israel with the future temple the eschatological temple and after having described in very precise tones that eschatological temple in chapter 44 the prophet Ezekiel of the first third of the sixth century before our era says who will serve in the temple and notice I marked the key phrases for that reason I the Lord say he will not enter my temple no foreigner who carries in his mind on his body the mark of my covenant not even a foreigner who lives among the Israelites but who if the Levitical priests descended from states who continued to serve in my temple when the Israelites turned away from my ways If they can approach me to serve me, they can appear before me to offer me grace and blood in sacrifices, that is to say, on the one hand, the text alluded to those who are not foreigners and who are the descendants, priests who are Levites of health and it is precisely in front of To this text, those who do not have access to the temple, which in ancient Israelite terms defines the identity of those who are in and those who are out, look at what Elisa says and to 56 that we biblical scholars decide that it is that of the bull, Isaiah, or the cry and Sai, that is to say.

It is not Isaiah from two thousand eight hundred years in the eighth century in Judea if it is not an anonymous prophet already from the time of exile or post-exile and 656 where he says this and to the foreigners who give themselves to me to serve me call me to make my servants If you respect the Sabbath and do not profane it and remain firm and my covenant I will bring you to my holy mountain and I will make you happy in my house of prayer I will accept my altar your burnt offerings and sacrifices because my house will be declared a house of worship for all peoples That is to say, what we clearly see that I already did 56 does not coincide with Ezekiel 44 we can find a controversy between prophets and although those present here do not believe me, there was also controversy in Israel in the ancient world I say this because in modern Israel what we have left over are controversies and think that we have just come out of elections so controversy is what characterizes Israel since ancient times and here we see two clear lines many years ago a great Assyrian logo of what will be seen is crucial in Professor Moshe Bai pnv He wrote a classic book called Separatism and Universalism at the beginning of the Persian era and in this case some of the texts that I worked on show two lines that are guidelines for understanding the tension in Israel in the ancient world that We can say that it characterizes Israel until contemporary times and once this pre-sectarian phenomenon has been presented, we are still not talking about sixth but we see that there is already an incipient seed of separatism and a tension between the in-group and the out-group that takes a lot of attention and goes to increase in tension in the following era which is the Hellenistic period in this case I want to begin with one of the key moments in the history not only of ancient Israel but of the ancient world and in fact in the history of the West which is the arrival of Alexander great 'alexander the great' are the great generals of history, the great conquerors who, in the space of ten years, conquered a good part of the known world from Europe to the Ganges in India and from Bacterial in central Asia to Ethiopia in the south. from Egypt, even today it takes several hours by plane to be able to travel through these territories and Alexander the Great is not only a great conqueror because obviously in the active world we also have other great conquerors already in the time of the Persians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and even also the empire.

Persianbut 'alexander the great' brings a new civilizational concept and in this sense and carries out one of the great intellectual, sociological, economic, political and even religious revolutions in the history of humanity, which is with a new concept that we can define with the concept of today cum The term must sound familiar to you because the final derivation of this term is the term ecumenism that we use today in a context of interprofessional religious dialogue but today thing in Greek means house and in reality we can say that the concept developed by 'Alexander the Great 'is what we moderns would call today, the concept of the global village where two civilizations, the East and the West, unite, creating a new civilization that is not only a summary of the two but is something new, which is precisely the Hellenistic world that Finally it will be inherited by the Romans and the Greco-Roman civilization and it is a civilization that functions as different paradigms from what was known in the ancient world.

What characterizes that world is a world where what was previously Greek is now part of the entire world. known world where, for example, the Olympic games are no longer just for the Greeks, but we are also going to have Olympic games in the east where, for example, the polis, which is the Greek city, is not only the city of state for the Greeks, but they are going to be created. city-states in the east more than 350 city-states were created in the east in the Hellenistic era starting in the last third of the fourth century where, for example, Greek philosophy is no longer only of the Greeks but is a new one. way of thinking that is beginning to be known in the East and thinks about the great exponents of the history of philosophy in man is the Jew Philo of Alexandria who is a Jew who was born in the intellectual centers of the East who bears the name of the city Its founder, who was fresh, precisely Alexander the Great, is and we do have a world that functions differently because the ancient world functioned with two central concepts, the concept of territory and this day and therefore in that way the identity of a person or an entity was defined. people was the relationship with a specific land and with a specific people and what characterizes the Greco-Roman world and here we can see that characterizes modernity, the ancient or traditional barriers of identity are not broken that now works with another with another paradigm that is precisely the break the relationship with the biological and the territorial and then in the ancient world in that world that I travel Manolo that defines my work identity is not the family or the territory but the education in the ancient world from the Greeks and Romans who form part of that civilization those who think speak dress and behave like greeks and therefore to be greek I only have to be born greek and I don't have to be born in greece I can also be born in persia or in syria or in egypt or in the land of Israel and I am going to be part of the Greek world as long as I speak the lingua franca of that world, which is join, it is a Greek that allows me to communicate and travel from Europe to India with a single language that is no longer classical Greek but it is a Greek that allows me to communicate and therefore I can travel changing geographical regions using a single language where, for example, in the East and the West, in the same books, they attend the same plays, they live in cities that are typical of the Greco-Roman world. and in that sense then I live, as I said, not in global day, which makes us also global men and we no longer simply have to buy products in New York or San Francisco if they cannot buy them here in Madrid but they can also buy the bank that are the same not everyone eats berger 58 fried chicken no matter where you are on the globe and that is the global world but it is a global world that obviously also generates identity problems and if now we continue quickly in this story in a presentation It has to be so fast, two centuries jump to Alexander the Great's death, as always happens, the generals have the war of those of the crazy days who are the successors of Alexander and then the empire is dismembered and finally on earth they say that it was controlled from the 3rd century by the Ptolemies which is the royal house of everything first the ruling house in Egypt and from the 2nd century onwards the house of the chosen ones the descendants of the general were placed first in Syria and the land of Israel is now in the middle of this world forgiveness of this world as I said surrounded by this Hellenistic world and then what is going to happen with the land of Israel and with the Jews of Judea in the land of Israel who are accused by this global world as we said this document in where again the issue of identity is a problem that plagues not only the Israelites but the entire East but obviously in this presentation I do focus on Israel and that is why it is no coincidence that in the apocryphal book of the Maccabees in 1 Maccabees 1 the text says the following at that time renegades appeared in Israel who deceived many by telling them that is to say one Maccabees of the second the second half of the second century before our era when he wants to explain why that revolt of the Maccabees happened he wants to explain that the revolt had a context and the context is this controversy that some said let's make an alliance with the nations that surround us because since we separated from it many calamities have come to us, it means that there is a controversy in Israel facing that global world, what strategy were those who wanted to integrate to adopt? to the global world while others say that it has brought us calamities and what we have to do is separate ourselves, as you see, it is the same controversy that we had already encountered in the Persian era, but the political, economic, social, religious reality of the Greco-Roman world is what is going to be to accelerate this controversy that already existed in Israel where we have to take a position, we are going to integrate into a global world or we are going to separate and it is in that context that it is no coincidence that the persecutions of the ruler of the house are gone antiochus epiphanes Fourth, precisely that they see the separatist groups as warlike groups, that is why for the first time in the history of man we know of religious persecutions in the pagan world.

They did not know of religious persecutions because they have no problem that the subject peoples believe in other gods because they all believe in different gods while the Greeks here understood that judging them and having practices so different from the rest is precisely what leads them to that bellicose attitude towards the pagans and that is why look at what the content of these persecutions is. He says this through messengers. The king sent Jerusalem and other Jewish cities decrees informing people to follow strange customs in the country and prohibiting the offering of burnt offerings, sacrifices in the sanctuary, causing the festivals to be desecrated on Saturday, the sanctuary and everything that was sacred, ordering the construction of altars, temples and chapels for the idolatrous worship as well as sacrificing pigs and other impure animals, leaving children unraised and staining themselves with all kinds of vulgar and profane things, forgetting the law and changing all the commandments in other words, the elected rulers understand that if they really want to contain these jurists war or what they have to do is attack the problem of identity and the Jews want to be different and therefore they have a day of rest that no one has such as Saturday and they practice circumcision and they have different food regulations the others that obviously separate them from everyone else is to say that once again we have particularism in the face of this integrationist and universalist attempt and then what happens is that many Israelites had the strength and courage to refuse to eat impure foods and preferred to die rather than profane by eating such foods and thus violating the sacred pact and in fact they died like this, well, sometimes we have the history and concept of religious martyrdom, that is, the first martyrs in this nationalization are these Jews who suffer these religious persecutions and prefer to die before actually profaning the Seleucid regulations and ordinances, but other Israelites, instead of submitting to the presumption, what they do is rise up and that is the immediate context of the uprising of the Maccabees and the Maccabean uprising finally leads to an uprising that originally had a reason religious and finally it has a political object and then we have that after centuries where the Jews in the general's land were subjected first to the Persians and then to the Greeks they now have independence for a period of more or less 100 years and the Maccabees Over time they began to conquer new territories and compared to what was previously simply the very small Jewish territory, there were countless territories that were taken because the house of the Maccabees believed that they were now the heirs of the old house.

From Vidic to them they will be descendants of Suso Total not David and here we do not see heirs of the ancient and glorious Israel of the biblical era and in this case what we have is the paradox and that on the one hand the Maccabees finally ended up creating the kingdom Maccabees The Maccabees rulers assumed the title of king and on the other hand the ruler Maccabees was also not only king but also high priest something that had never happened in the history of Israel that the king is also the high priest and we can later say the example With these two coins they show that the Maccabees had to live in two worlds in a political reality.

On the one hand, for example, we have a coin from the time of Alexander Jane or the great king of Judea, where, for example, the symbol is an anchor that was a typical iconographic symbol of the Hellenistic world while other descendants of the Maccabees nuanced ancient what will end up killing him Herod the great uses in this case the seven-branched candelabrum that is a typical symbol of the Jerusalem temple a Jewish title That is to say that we live in two worlds. The proof is that even the rulers of Israel have two names. The name day of each proof that they live in two worlds.

Alejandro Sanz is the name in Greek and the name in Hebrew when he functions as high priest is Jonathan Sir. lives in two worlds and in this sense then the importance is capital because that means that once again we return to the issue of identity and that is why it cannot be coincidence that when we understand this tension between separatism and universalism in the narrative of Flavio Josephus The first time he speaks that there are sects with Greek, he speaks it with the term Aires. Now I am going to explain it among the Jews. It is when he arrives at the time of the government of Jonathan, Jonathan the Maccabee, and then he says the following.

At this time, there were three Jewish sects. who had different opinions, those of the Pharisees, those of the Sadducees, and those of the Essenes and the Pharisees said that some things are not all seen in destiny and others depend on our will, whether they are fulfilled or not. The Essenes affirmed that everything is fulfilled. destiny must and that men can do nothing to escape destiny in terms of resolution, they will suppress destiny saying that it is nothing and that it does not intervene at all in matters but that everything is submitted to our ministry so that we are authors both of the goods as well as the evils that befall us through our imprudence, that is to say that when in Spanish we talk about sixths, it is not actually the sociological usage that uses it, Max Weber is going to use it, the English term is actually what it means is a school of thought or philosophical school that is to say that Josephus who is writing to the Jewish antiquities at the end of the first century extra era in Rome' trying to explain to intellectuals and Romans this phenomenon of elite social groups in Israel tries to place it in One category in the category is the philosophical schools, as you know that there are the Pythagoreans and there are the Cynics and there are the Stoics, so there are also these types of sects among the Jews and that is why look precisely at the topic that according to him divides these groups is precisely philosophical topics.

In this case, the controversy surrounding the concept of providence versus the free choice of historical point of view, we can say that what Jews always say distinguished from ancient times to the present day is not orthodoxy even though we speak today of Jewish orthodoxy. but orthopraxis, the problem is a problem of praxis because today the Jewish civilization works with the central concept of law and not so much of doxa, but in any case in this context the important thing is that he tells us that there is a fragmentation of groups of elite precisely in the time of the Maccabees, that is to say, it is a time that produced an emergence among intellectual groups in error of the question of what attitude to assume towards the outside world as we preserve from the entity whether it is by separating ourselves or actually integrating and that we find, as always happens in the history of societies, we have different strategies, we have conservative strategies and we have liberal ones, we have some that we temporize and others that try and are much more radical and it is in that context that I have to arrive at how this is not an academic seminar where I have a year to develop the topic and the topic of the Essenes entered directly now here it is very important to understand the following what sources we had about this group is in I where we know the term only in Greek how it came out is in today or in Latin It is in that that we have the terms we have a total of three sources plus one that I am now going to mention we have three sources the first and oldest the vein ofAlexandria, one of the sources of every good man, a good man is free and another in the hypothetical, which is an apologetic text.

I remind you, Philo of Alexandria, is the great Jewish philosopher of the end of the first century before our era, at the beginning of the first century of our era, Philo. He was only once in the land of Israel and speaks here of a Palestinian group in Se, which in many cases means that many of the traditions must have come to him orally, but in any case the oldest source we have writing about the Palestinian Essenes from the land of Israel in those years because I took them as models of holy men and I only brought you as an example something from this text at least so that you have a certain idea that Philo tells us about the Essenes and not without noble descendants is Silvia Palestinian inhabited not a small part by the dome the group 'the highest race of Jews some of them are called designs and their number exceeds four thousand this is an important point because it is the same number 4 you will know it josephus and it is probably from one or philo or a common source his name is related in my opinion although not with a pure form of the greek language with the word holiness since they are the most notable worshipers of god in other words joseph was also not known why it is called in the designs and tries to explain it associated connect -7 of the saints in Greek and not through animal sacrifices but by their resolution to keep their thoughts in harmony with the sacred the first thing worth mentioning is that these men dwell in villages and avoid the cities due to the disorder and immorality of the citizens and then quickly there is a topic that seems to be very fascinating and we are going to see it as moles in other texts cases are the only men who adopted life without money imagine in the Hellenistic world Roman living without money or property voluntarily more than due to lack of assets and they consider themselves very rich and rightly so because they have few needs of their spiritual content is abundant if what Josephus catches is that it is a group of almost utopian characteristics that live in community who are dedicated to the spiritual life and then, for example, in the apology I try to bring up other topics, obviously we cannot read everything but to get an idea, look at what it says.

Also, avoid marriage because you clearly understand that it would be the only one. The main reason for breaking up is Her brotherhood, another reason was her truly exceptional practice of continence, which is why no teacher takes a wife for women. A selfish creature. Please, I want it to be clear that Philo says this. His charms are but they did not create marital or relationship problems. In fact, he uses flattering words and other arts as he will act on the scene and when he has bewitched eyes and ears and these, as subordinate faculties, are fooled, he dominates the main faculty, that is, the spirit.

When my son is born, she shows herself proud and daring in her language, where before she spoke with false composure, now she does so with restraint and insolence and shamelessly insists on hostile pretensions in the brotherhood because the man, whether he has submitted to the amorous charms of the woman or is worried Due to his instinct towards care and children, he is not the same in his dealings with other men, little by little he transforms into another man who, already in the book, is not a slave, as you can see, it is clearly a misogenic position that from here I have to clarify. one a theme that we find a lot in the ideologues in the men and in the intellectuals of the Greco-Latin world, for example we also find it in the work of the acid psir, that is, it is not something original only in vein but in this case we have written it to the Essenes then we have, for example, Josephus Josephus is the great late Jewish historian of the first century AD where in several sections he talks about the Essenes but the most extensive text we have about the designs is in the war work of the Jews in book 2 In chapter 8 we have the most detailed description and here I want you to see once again simply the beginning of Joseph, it was a coincidence.

Joseph here is functioning not only as an integrator but in reality committed no graph of the point seen. The literary genre among the Jews there were three philosophical sects, the followers of the first are the Pharisees, those of the second, the Sadducees, and those of the third, who have the reputation of greater holiness, are called dreams. These are Jews by birth. They are united by ties of affection stronger than those of the others. sects reject the pleasures, look again at the issue of sexual continence, esteem continence and consider it a virtue of mastering the passions, remain celibate and choose the children of others while they are variable and are at points for teaching the a present in their own and the instructed in their customs, they do not deny the convenience of marriage nor do they intend to end the human generation, but they are kept in feminine lust, convinced that no women have only one man, that is, they take the issue of women and sexual continence as we saw Josephus and then he took Once again the theme of group life expresses wealth and their way of life in community is extraordinary among them no one is richer than another since according to their law those who enter the sect hand over their property so that it can be common to the entire order so much so that there is no poverty or wealth in it but everything is mixed as a heritage of brothers now a contemporary of Josephus Philo and Josepha write in Greek and now the old man is going to be awarded in natural history and is the only one text from the sources that we have so far where the designs are geographically located instead of mentioning that they live in village cities as Josefa says or outside the cities as Filón says, he is the only one who places them in a certain area, the land of Israel which is the dead sea to the west the dead sea the essenes stay apart on the shore to avoid its harmful effects they are a solitary race the most surprising in the world without sexual commerce again the topos without money and with no other company than palm trees quite boring Their group maintains a constant number of members even as time passes because they receive many men tired of existence whose way of life pushes the journey of fortune and thus over the course of thousands of centuries and no matter how incredible it appears, the number of said people remains. constant thinking that no one has conceived so prolific is for them the repentance of other men and to the south was the city of in each engel and which you only surpass that they do not come out in fertility and palm groves currently converted into another monument of the dead since there amassed a fortress chosen in the rock that also did not see much of the asphalt lake that is the dead sea.

If this text is exceptional, in a moment they will see, but before reaching the importance of this text there is a source that is often not found. It is mentioned because we do not have it in the direct text but only in a quote from Dio Chrysostom in a work by Synesius of Cyrene here from the fourth century where it seems to be a tradition of an independent pagan writer I Chrysostom from the beginning of the second century our era where it says and also he synesius quotes chrysostom praises the essenes a very prosperous city located near the dead sea the interior of palestine next to sodom and if they are the only two texts precisely the pagans not the jews who locate the designs in a specific place on earth of Israel which is the area of ​​the dead sea now because these texts are important because now we obviously arrived so that you arrived you arrived to talk not only about the Essenes and the phenomenon of sectarians but about this very important discovery that the community discovered as an Essenes sect and In this case, for example, the scroll to the dead sea that some of you already heard the July presentation on these manuscripts found between 1947 and 1956 in the vicinity of Qumran on the northwestern coast of the dead sea, in 10 caves these manuscripts were found that have changed the history of ancient Christianity Judaism research in cave number 1 the first cave were probably found in some vases in these jars but a mention that I don't know if Julio ever said it archaeologists have found scrolls inside jars of vases never The archaeologists what they found was always the reference of the Bedouins that we know were the first ones but we don't have at that time shell film didn't exist so they didn't take the photo with the rolls and obviously the most famous of all is the famous scroll of isaiah a complete version of isaiah from cave number 1 a version that is 7 meters 34 centimeters with the 66 chapters very close to the most heretical isaiah where we also find some documents the habakkuk commentary is a commentary that we say sectarian to the book of this minor prophet Habakkuk for the first time in the West the testimony of this literary genre the rule of the community which is precisely the being is called rule in a term that we know only in Hebrew from Qumran and ya hat as the community calls itself the jach'a the entire community and here the most important thing is the following the first most dead scrolls the first three were bought by the professor of the uc Hebrew sukenik or by the first archaeologists of the Jewish people in the purchases the first scrolls at the end of the year 47 and already in February 1948 in his personal diary the professor suggested that the Hebrew mercy writes Meanwhile I looked at the other scrolls I tend to think that this deposit from the Essenes the first who thought of a connection with the sukenik designs in the personal ice later in the edition of his that nick on the dead sea scroll in 1948 developed this point a little explaining to us how he came to the conclusion that he talks about the designs and says if it still requires further investigation background to whom this deposit belongs but I found a sign that generated a hypothesis in this regard when I reviewed the scrolls in the possession of the Assyrians I found the number of them a type of regulations on the behavior of the members of a group 6a refers to the rule of the community that I said before, I tend to think that this deposit has as its origin the sect of the Essenes, which, as we all know from the different ancient literary sources, the location of this sect was located on the western side of the Dead Sea link a thousand mediations of en What differs, what do you think about the quote from Pliny the Elder?

That is to say, I reached that conclusion in 1948 when the hundreds of manuscripts that we know of had not yet been found and Cover was not excavated. It is a great excavation between 1951 and 1956 and here we have then when he enters from hbo who runs the bible school french biblical alcohol and ezkaba

qumr

an and when should i begin to dig in the desert and jewish cover the buildings of cum brand that some images I know that july already talked about this and identified for example in this case a tower located to the north of the buildings and also located a complex of rooms that because inkwells were found there and they found remains that when they were rebuilt were like a type of bolivar tables the conclusion that it seems to have been a scriptorium or that functions as a scriptorium and in this case also suggesting that probably the scrolls in the nave because they were all believed today we know that most of them were not written probably there they rise then for example rise we have something very striking which is a water system with not only pools that serve for accumulation of water in some with steps and that is probably served as ritual pools, that is, for ritual purification, which leads him to think that men lived there, but he comes to the conclusion that it is a highly pious community that what they used to do was purify themselves. and then also in the largest room in Cumbren, which is 22 meters long and four and a half meters wide, some pieces of pottery were found, about 1,200 pieces, that were used for what he believes was a community meal, and in this case I must also have found the largest cemetery that has ever been completed in israel entangled found because very little escaped approximately 1,200 graves and the graves are very specific all are marked with a mound of stones and the bodies are located in supine position always facing north in a type of burial very different from the familiar ones that we know from the Herodian era and finally HBO also comes to the conclusion now using archeology that as you can see desvaux's conclusion was that the inhabitants of the place were a highly ritualistic sect of Jews called the Essenes is the one I must now using the archaeological argument also comes to that conclusion a conclusion that has become known as the Essenes fulfill hypothesis and this hypothesis suggests that the original inhabitants according to were the Essenes and that they established the site in the desert with religious purposes and to finish this part then and now skipping the academic discussions and projects, one of the leading archaeologists today is Professor Yoldi Magness from Chapel Hill in the need in North in North Carolina did in a book that is now classic in the archeology of qumbrani the dead sea scrolls says yes in my opinion the points of correspondence between the archaeological evidence and the information provided by the scrolls and our ancient sources indicate that the community of

qumr

an must be identified as in dreams and now simply to synthesize so that they understand that the thesis is sennia and obviously I cannot enter now into all the other controversies of othersscholars who of course do not accept this position I want to allude to the strength of the thesis in the hypothesis a little frog is sennia alluding to the unfortunately deceased mother eternal professor one more margarit who was not an archaeologist at all nor that Olga directed the department of rationality of speed and 'jerusalem and wrote a fascinating book out of the cave I don't know that it has a Spanish translation edited by magno express and harvard university press and what it did from the point of view of studying science is to try to show the rationality of the thesis scientific and it is very difficult to find them among scientists and what he is trying to prove is that the thesis is already a very solid thesis because it has three argumentative bases.

On the one hand, it has the Essenes, which are the classical sources and the information that On the other hand, we have the Qumranites of archeology and then we have the community of the scrolls and we see how the arguments correlate. We can see that there is such an important correlation where the archaeological findings illuminate the texts and illuminate the sources and that is why If you don't remember anything I said so far in the last hour of the presentation, finally, this is the stone of the paradigm of the thesis that teaches Qumbrani, the designs of the classical sources are equivalent to the community, as I said, the traveler of the scrolls is in equivalent to the corralitos of archeology I wanted to finish if you allow me to spend two minutes I think it is not so bad that I want to end with a reflection that what was already enough and you too throughout this seminar listening to July and the professor florentino garcía martínez will be able to delve into the problem of the scrolls and the exceptional contribution that these documents represent for the study of Judaism since they are the same ancient but if you allow me I would like to make a final reflection that goes far beyond the strictly academic Which was the objective of this meeting.

I believe that, as I said, I find a very special meaning in the fact that this week we not only celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Israel Museum, the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, and I believe that it also has a special meaning in the fact that that I am of Argentine origin and for more than 35 years I have served in Jerusalem as the director of the book sanctuary and the curator of the dead sea scrolls and I am founded as an Argentine, Israeli and Jewish, which has enormous importance in the fact that this seminar is being done and being carried out here at the foundation and the fact that you here, those who are following the transmission here, can access these topics that not only have an academic value but precisely these documents come from a time where rabbinic Judaism does not yet exist and Christianity does not yet exist, John the Baptist and Jesus do not know that they are Christians, they are Jews and they are part of that Jewish world that is the pre-rabbinic world and in that sense they give us a perspective of the ancient world and of ancient Judaism, which is ultimately the mother movement from which precisely rabbinic Judaism and Christianity will be born, and since then, as you well know, 2,000 years of feeling the controversies of persecution that were also suffered here in Spain, we have reached a new era a new era after the second vatican council with the visits of the parents and recently the visit of france francis the first i think it has a very special meaning precisely in a time where we are harassed by irrational violence precisely in one of the places focus on the history of man such as the East, I believe that precisely bringing this and what we try to translate through these sources, which ultimately is the oldest testimony of the Hebrew Bible, which is the basis of Western civilization, I believe that in Ultimately, I believe that this entire seminar, and I humbly tried to do so in my presentation, ultimately shows us that Jews and Christians are brothers, thank you very much.