Category:Women (subject)

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Women have played an important role in Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins, in spite of social, cultural, and religious restrictions.

Overview

The Essenes and Women

The Essenes reject pleasures as an evil, but esteem continence and the conquest over our passions, to be virtue. They neglect wedlock, but select other persons children, while they are pliable, and fit for learning, and esteem them to be of their kindred, and form them according to their own manners. 121 They do not absolutely deny the fitness of marriage, and the succession of mankind thereby continued; but they guard against the lascivious behaviour of women, and are persuaded that none of them preserve their fidelity to one man. (Josephus, Jewish War 2)

For no Essene takes to himself a wife, because woman is immoderately selfish and jealous, and terribly clever in decoying a man's moral inclinations, and bringing them into subjection by continual cajoleries. For when, by practising flattering speeches and the other arts as of an actress on the stage, she has deluded eyes and ears, then as having thoroughly deceived the servants she proceeds to cajole the master mind. And should she have children, she is filled with pride and boldness of speech, and what she formerly used to hint under the disguise of irony, all this she now speaks out with greater audacity, and shamelessly compels him to practices, every one of which is hostile to community of life. For the man who is either ensnared by the charms of a wife, or by force of natural affection makes children Ins first care, is no longer the same towards others, but has unconsciously become changed from a free man to a slave. (Philo).

On the west [of Lake Asphaltites] the Essenes flee away from the shores that are harmful, a people alone and in all the world strange above the rest, [being] without any woman, abdicating all sexual acts, without money, companioned by palms. (Pliny)

There is another order of Essenes, who agree with the rest as to their way of living, and customs, and laws, but differ from them in the point of marriage, as thinking that by not marrying they cut off the principal part of human life, which is the prospect of succession; nay rather, that if all men should be of the same opinion, the whole race of mankind would fail. 161 However, they try their spouses for three years' probation; and if they find that they have their natural purgations thrice, as trials that they are likely to be fruitful, they then actually marry them. But they do not use to accompany with their wives when they are with child, as a demonstration that they do not marry out of regard to pleasure, but for the sake of posterity. Now the women go into the baths with some of their garments on, as the men do with something girded about them. And these are the customs of this order of Essenes. (Josephus, Jewish War 2).

Summary

Women were present in the community life regulated by the legal prescriptions in the Scrolls. This is indicated by the number of regulations pertaining to women, especially in the areas of marriage, sexual conduct, and biological causes of impurity. That these prescriptions were not simply the general laws in force in Judaism at this time and thus can tell us nothing about this particular community is evidenced by the fact that some of them embrace positions in opposition to other groups within Judaism of the period (e.g. the bans on uncle-niece marriage and polygamy). The regulations for community life also indicate the presence of women; in fact, women had particular roles to play in the governance of community life, and could attain special honored positions (e.g. “Mothers”). Finally, although the hierarchy of the community was male-dominated and the viewpoint of the Scrolls androcentric, there is nothing in the Scrolls themselves that indicates that women were deliberately excluded or that this was a male-only community.

The Qumran documents are the library or collection of the Jewish Essenes in the late Second Temple period. The Essenes included women, and its members married, but a subgroup within the Essenes eschewed marriage for purity reasons.82 Qumran was a study center for the Essenes, inhabited mostly by males pur suing a rigorous standard of purity and adhering to the Rule of the Community, but the majority of the Essenes lived throughout Judaea, following the regulations of the Damascus Document. This thesis allows us to place women back into the frame of Qumran studies, and resolves the question of so-called Essene “celibacy.”