Damascus Document

Furthermore, other apocryphal texts and ancient writings reinforce this narrative, such as the books of Enoch, Jubilees, the apocryphal Genesis, and the second and third Baruch.

as well as the Damascus document.

There are also scattered mentions throughout the Pentateuch and in historical books such as Judges, Joshua, and Samuel.

The Book of Giants presents a detailed narrative about the origin, history, and fate of these antediluvian giants, as well as their parents, the so-called Watchers.

I mean, I can go on and on.

Even if I jump forward, Philo of Alexandria, the Damascus document from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But you look at the earliest Christian texts as well, the Didache.

It's presumably written by the apostles.

Now, that causes some surprise or even consternation to some people because Jesus didn't actually say an explicit word about homosexual practice or transgenderism.

And yet, what I'm going to argue is that there is a moral logic behind his argument in this famous Jesus sex text, as I call it, in Mark ten, verses two to twelve, and Matthew nineteen, three to nine.

That's a parallel to the Markan text.

And in that context, Jesus uses a form of moral logic which renders a male-female prerequisite, I'm tipping my hat as to where I'm going here, a male-female requirement or prerequisite for all sexual activity as the foundation of sexual ethics in his understanding.

Now, of course, it's good to begin with Jesus because, let's face it, he is our savior.

He is our Lord.

I was also the only scholar, I think, uh, who had a position and had published.

The others were more interested in ideology.

Suddenly, the so-called Zadokite fragments had a much older identity.

It became widely known as the Damascus Document, often abbreviated by scholars as CD, from the Latin title Cairo-Damascus Document.

That name creates another mystery.

Why Damascus? The text speaks of people entering the land of Damascus, but it does not clearly tell us that the community literally lived in the Syrian city of Damascus.

You do not have to cross a border to feel exiled.

You can be surrounded by your own people, living in your own land, speaking your own language, and still believe that the society around you has lost its way.

That is the emotional world of the Damascus document, and its manuscript history makes that world even more remarkable.

The work seems to have travelled through time by routes we can barely reconstruct, first composed or collected in the turbulent Second Temple period, copied by members of a movement associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, preserved in fragments in desert caves, somehow also transmitted across centuries into the medieval Jewish world.

Can you put cushions under it so it can jump out of the thing on its own? Can you put blankets over it? And there's something that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls that ta- that's talking about this debate.

It's called the Damascus Document that captures the i- the tone of the era, and they say, quote, "No man shall deliver an animal on the Sabbath day.

If it falls into a cistern or a pit, he shall not raise it up on the Sabbath." And so the legalistic Pharisees know that there's no perfect answer here, right? They're, they, they have to pull in the character of God to have wisdom here, and they just remain silent.

Hmm.

At least, that is how his followers remembered him.

The Damascus Document, one of the major texts associated with this movement, speaks of a period when Israel was wandering in blindness.

Then, after years of confusion, God visited them and caused a teacher of righteousness to arise.

The wording is important.

It involved two anointed leaders, one connected with Aaron, the ancestral line of Israel's priests.

The other connected with Israel, a title generally understood to point toward royal or national leadership.

The language appears in documents like the Community Rule and the Damascus Document.

These texts speak of a future time involving the messiahs of Aaron and Israel – That wording is important because Messiah simply means anointed one.

And that's in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it actually says, I believe it's in the community rule.

It might be in the Damascus document.

At the end, they have those rules after they give their main thesis of their views and all.

And it says, and you may not help an animal out of a pit A pit means a well, not just like a ditch, you know, that you'd have to bring ropes and spend hours, you know, trying to figure out how we're going to do this.

So, yeah, I don't buy

it.

At least the – remember, we're capturing most of what we have – about them from Josephus which isn't as helpful but some parallels but the community role in the Damascus document and those are from the first century BCE BCE before BC we say uh popularly in our culture uh and that you know most movements uh it's happening now to the branch Davidian movement the David Koresh movement and it's only been you know what 30 40 years Most, let's see, 93, yeah.

So most movements, as they go on, Jehovah's Witnesses are this way, the Mormons are this way, and so forth.

Like meaning like, like you had to give all of your money to the, your whole wealth to the group and, uh, and that, that, that it was kind of just fully devoted to this devotion and contemplation and study.

There's another document which we call the Damascus document, a, a different order.

So I think I wanna emphasize some level of like, like, let's call it like different forms of communities, not just one group in one place.

And there it's, it's a little more, uh, like it's still intense, but it's written to men who have wives, families, and jobs, and that like rather than all your wealth, you devote like two days of your monthly wages to like a common fund.

Like the, the, the Dead Sea sect, um, um, like it's not, I don't think they were just at that Qumran site.

Like, like they, the, the scrolls, um, talk about themselves as...

Like, like in the Damascus document, they often talk about the, the, the Machanot, the camps, and it, like meaning, like, like I would...

I think the image, the bec- the, the Dead, the site there very much led people to kind of just associate from the very, the scholars that started this, like set it up this way.