The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect Part 4

53 As in Mishna _Yoma_ the High Priest has to be instructed by experts in the ritual of the Day of Atonement, and made to swear not to depart from his instructions.

54 Probably the lands belonging to the sect.

55 That a court must consist of ten judges, the Karaites deduce from Ruth 4 2. So Anan quoted by Poznanski, Revue des etudes juives, vol.

xlv, p. 67, and p. 69, n. 1.

56 This seems to be the meaning of the somewhat obscure pa.s.sage.

57 It is not clear whether imprisonment or surveillance is meant.

58 On the spirit of Belial (ruling over Israel) see Jubilees 1 20.

59 "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft," 1 Sam. 15 23.

60 In contrast to the Samaritans.

61 In 8 18 ff., after saying, "Such will be the judgment of every one who despises the commandments of G.o.d, and he forsook them and they turned away in the stubbornness of their heart," A adds: "This is the word which Jeremiah spoke to Baruch the son of Neriah and Elisha to his servant Gehazi," referring probably to otherwise unknown apocryphal books. Johanneh and his brother, whom Belial raised up against Moses, are familiar figures of Jewish legend.

62 The simplest explanation of the form would be to take it as an abstract noun of the type _fa'l_, like _sa?u_; "swimming" or _fi'l, fu'l,_ like _seku_ (n. pr.), _tohu_, _bohu_, etc., from the verb _hagah_ (root _hagw_), "reflect, give thought to something," also "read" (aloud), so that the noun might literally mean "study,"

equivalent to _midrash_, or perhaps "reading."-If the opinion which connects the sect with the Dositheans were tenable (see below, p.

360 ff.), another explanation of the name might be suggested by a pa.s.sage in Abul-Fath's account of the origin of the Dositheans. He narrates that a son of the Samaritan high priest, named Zar'ah, a man preeminent for learning in his time, having been expelled from the community for immorality, betook himself to Dositheus, who made him the chief of his sect. This man "wrote a book in which he vituperated all the Samaritan religious heads and set forth heresies." The words are, _haja fihi kul al' a'immetin wa'abda'a fihi_. Inasmuch as the Arabic _hajwun_ formally corresponds to the Hebrew _hagu_, the Book of _Hagu_ in our texts might be identified with this controversial writing of Zar'ah, the disciple of Dositheus. The Hebrew verb _hagah_ is thought by Kohut (Aruch Completum, III, 177) to occur in Echa Rabbathi on Lam. 1 4 and 3 33 in the sense "contemn, deride," equivalent to the Arabic _haja_, "lampoon, vituperate." It might then be conjectured that Abul-Fath had heard of a Dosithean book of _hagu_ (in Hebrew) and, taking the word in its Arabic meaning, evolved his description of the character of the work from this etymology.

63 Some Karaite authorities, also, transferring to the synagogue the holiness of the temple, forbade a man in a state of uncleanness to enter the inner room of the synagogue (Nissi; see Winter und Wunsche, Die judische Litteratur, vol. ii, p. 74).

64 The coincidence of the name with the Arabic _masjid_, "place of bowing down," mosque, is hardly a sufficient reason for suspecting Moslem influence, as Dr. Schechter does, who thinks it possible that the word was introduced by a later (Falasha?) scribe as a subst.i.tute for the original term.-Elia Bas.h.i.+atzi (Adereth Eliahu, p. 58), a Karaite writer of the 15th century, gives _Beth hishta?awiya,_ together with _Beth hakeneseth_ and _Beth hamidrash_, as the three names of the place of wors.h.i.+p. Moslem influence can here hardly be questioned; in a later chapter Elia describes the postures of prayer quite after the Moslem pattern, alleging Biblical authority for all of them.

65 The opinion that after Josiah's reform, or after the restoration of the temple by Zerubbabel and Joshua, Jerusalem was the only place where Jewish sacrifices were offered is refuted by an acc.u.mulating volume of evidence from various regions. See D. S. Margoliouth, Expositor, 1911, pp. 40 ff.

66 Cf. the accusation against the orthodox Jews (5 6): "They defile the Sanctuary in that they do not separate according to the law,"

etc.-It is possible that the prohibition quoted above applied, not to the inhabitants of the city, but to persons who visited it for the purpose of wors.h.i.+p, as is the rule for pilgrims to Mecca.

67 The holy spirit in them. Dr. Schechter adduces parallels in Jewish writings. Cf. Jubilees 1 21, 23, "Create in them a clean heart and a holy spirit."

68 Dr. Schechter conjectures that the author wrote _Sar ha-Panim_, the Prince of the Presence, but the pa.s.sages from Jubilees which he quotes in support of this opinion are hardly convincing.

69 See Slavonic Enoch 42 5; cf. 9.

70 So far as may be argued from silence, this is an important difference from Jubilees.

71 See 7 2; cf. Slavonic Enoch 50 4: "When you might have vengeance, do not repay either your neighbor or your enemy. For G.o.d will repay as your avenger in the day of the great judgment. Let it not be for you to take vengeance." (ed. Charles, p. 67); cf. Ecclus. 28 1.

72 That Zadok was the name of the "interpreter of the law," the founder of the sect, is a much less probable opinion; the name stands in no connection with the origin of the sect or its legislation, but with the bringing to light again of the Pentateuch. The author cannot have supposed that the _written_ law remained unknown till the second century B.C.; the reforms of Josiah, based on another recovery of the book by Hilkiah, would preclude such a notion.

73 The coincidence of names does not count for very much. Abul-Fath names two Samaritan "Zadokite" subsects among the later Dositheans alone.

74 See Hilgenfeld, Die Ketzergeschichte des Urchristenthums, 1884, pp.

155 ff.; Montgomery, The Samaritans, 1907, pp. 252 ff.

75 See also Epiphanius; the Sadducees were an offshoot from Dositheus.

76 Not in the time of Alexander the Great, as Dr. Schechter has from Montgomery. Abul-Fath, indeed (and Adler's Chronicle after him), introduces this whole story before Alexander, and makes Simon a protege of Darius; but the testimony that Dositheus appeared after the time of Hyrca.n.u.s, which, as a matter of Samaritan history, may be conceived to rest on tradition, is not to be set aside because, in fitting his Samaritan traditions into the framework of universal history, Abul-Fath is in error by two or three centuries about the date of Hyrca.n.u.s. This used to be understood; see, e.g., De Sacy, Chrestomathie arabe, vol. ii (1806), p. 209.

77 Epiphanius avers, on the contrary, that the Dositheans kept their festivals at the same time with the Jews.

78 See Ideler, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie, vol. i, pp. 437 ff., 517; Ginzel, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie, vol. i, pp. 170 f., 287. On the calendar of Gaza, Schurer, Geschichte des judischen Volkes (3 ed.), vol. ii, pp.

88 f.

79 We have experience of the inconvenience of this system in the wandering of Easter and the Christian festivals dependent on it; a reform by which Easter should come on a fixed date in the solar year has repeatedly been proposed, and a movement is now on foot in Europe to bring this about by agreement of governments and churches.

80 The year of 364-days is found also in Enoch 72-82, and (by the side of the true solar year of 365- and the lunar year of 354 days) in the Slavonic Enoch. The intercalary days are introduced one at the beginning of each quarter of the year (Enoch 75 1); this is also the method in Jubilees; see 6 23. In effect this is equivalent to a year in which eight months have thirty days and four-those in which the equinoxes and solstices fall-have thirty-one (Enoch 72 13, 19). It is not impossible that this system is implied in the chronology of the flood in Genesis; see B. W. Bacon, Hebraica, vol. viii (1891-1892), pp. 79-88, 124-139; Charles, Jubilees, p. 56.

81 This is not the place to discuss the value of Epiphanius's testimony. His description of the Scribes and Pharisees at least admonishes to caution.

82 The text is certain enough, in the sense that all the ma.n.u.scripts. .h.i.therto collated have the same reading.

83 Nicetas, in reproducing Epiphanius's account of the Dositheans, has te???sa?, "after having begotten children," which also agrees very well with the context.

84 The familiar t.i.tle of Porphyry's book on vegetarianism, ?e?? ?p????

??????, will occur to every one. Epiphanius himself explains the word in Haer. 18, 1, "they (Nasaraei) thought it unlawful to eat meat."

85 Haer. 9, 3; cf. 30, 2: "The Ebionites, like the Samaritans, avoid touching an outsider." A still more extreme fastidiousness on this point is attributed by Josephus to the Essenes; cf. B. J. ii, 8, 10.

86 Photius, Bibliotheca Codic.u.m, cod. 280 (ed. Bekker, p. 285).

87 The Kitab al-Anwar was published in 937, not 637, as by a misprint on p. xviii.

88 Schechter's translation, Introduction, p. xviii.

89 Schechter, p. x.x.xvii, n. 21.

90 Founder of a Jewish sect which arose in Persia about the end of the seventh century.

91 On this point see above, p. 362.

92 Quoted in the original by Poznanski, Revue des etudes juives, vol.

xliv (1902). p. 162, n. 2.

93 Quoted by Poznanski, l. c., p. 170.

94 Harkavy attributed it conjecturally to Sahl ben Masliah; Poznanski, whom Dr. Schechter follows, thinks it more likely that the author was Hasan ben Mas.h.i.+ah.

95 As the Karaites do. See e.g. Mishna, Rosh ha-Shana, 1 7 ff., 2 1 f.

96 See Poznanski, Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. x (1898), pp. 159, 248, 273.

97 Quoted in the original by Poznanski, Revue des etudes juives, vol.

xliv, p. 176.-The point is that the "Zadokite" writings known to the author said nothing about fixing the beginning of the month by observation. Saadia doubtless based his a.s.sertion, not on anything he found in "Zadokite" books, but on Rosh ha-Shanah 22 a-b.

98 Poznanski, l. c., p. 177; cf. also Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. x, pp. 246 ff.-Saadia probably means that "Zadok" argued from the fact that the 150 days of Gen. 7 24, 8 3, make an even five months (7 11, 8 4), that each month had thirty days (cf. Jubilees 5 27), while for the Karaites thirty days was only the extreme length of a lunar month. See Poznanski, Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. x, p. 241.