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an essene community at qumran
between similar maledictions and contrasting praise for God. 4QBlessingsa 2:4–5 is a representative sample: Cursed be the Wicke[d One in all . . . ] of his dominions, and may all the sons of Belial be damned in all the works of their service until their annihilation [for ever, Amen, amen.]
These writings, echoing language in the Community Rule and War Scroll, are sectarian.34 Three ritual texts available since 1991 may also come from the Qumran Community. Thus, 4QPurification Liturgy and 4QRitual Purifications A–B tackle ritual uncleanness. The highly fragmentary 4QRitual of Marriage, on the other hand, despite its name, touches on matters more mundane, including husbands and wives and children. Next come three important calendrical documents. The first one, penned in the cryptic script normally thought to intimate a sectarian provenance, is 4QPhases of the Moon. It records the moon’s phases in fourteen stages, as 4QPhases of the Moon 2:2–4 makes clear: [On the f]ifth (day) of it (the month), [tw]elve (fourteenths of the moon’s surface) are covered and thus it [enters the day. On the sixth (day) of it] thir[teen] (fourteenths of its surface) are covered and thus it enters the day.
The importance of heavenly bodies, and by implication the calendar, for the Qumran Sect is evident here. As such, the work ties in to other calendrical pieces, although they tend to lack partisan features, whether a cryptic script or special vocabulary. Indeed, only recently available in full, copies of 4QCalendrical Documents A–H correlate three important things: a dominant solar calendar of 364 days per year, a secondary lunar calendar of 354 days, and the twenty-four priestly courses assigned duty in the Temple week-by-week. The end result does not make for exciting reading. But 4QCalendrical Document C, as observed earlier, mentions in passing Shelamzion (Salome Alexandra) and Aemilius Scaurus (the first Roman governor of Syria) of the first century bce.35 4QCalendrical Signs lists the occurrence of a ‘sign’ every three years and names the relevant priestly course serving in the Temple. The ‘sign’ is probably the addition to the secondary lunar cycle of an extra 30-day month every three years (3 ⳯ 354 + 30 = 1092 days) to ensure its length equals that of three solar years (3 ⳯ 364 = 1092 days). A related calendrical interest informs works like 4QHoroscope and Physiognomy and 4QZodiology, although initially these documents seem a little odd. The latter, a badly worn text released in 1991, tracks the