Hello. First, thank you for excerpting this and parts II & III. I completely agree with Doudna and Wise that the 490 years scheme must be dated from the death of the Teacher and not from what we know today historically of Nebuchadnezzar's reign and conquests. Moreover, these schemes look for authority in previous texts such as Ezekiel and Isaiah and therefore cannot be used to date back to 587 BCE.
That said, I find no evidence whatsoever that the Teacher was a high priest. After the block quote from Schwartz 1991 above, Doudna writes: “The rise of the Teacher twenty years after Israel revived back to life (CD 1.8-11) might then allude to the rise of a high priest who at some later stage was deposed from power and driven into exile and died.” Doudna also argues that “the Teacher as high priest would account for the yachad groups’ acceptance of the Teacher’s authority. The mystery as to how the Teacher attained prominence in the yachad groups which he did not himself found would receive a trivially simple answer: it is because the Teacher was the high priest.”
So the Teacher was accepted by the yachad specifically BECAUSE he was a high priest. Not only that, but “the dead plant returning to life could allude to the conquests and expansions of Alexander Jannaeus viewed favorably by the authors of the Qumran texts.” In this possibility offered by Doudna, “the Teacher when he first emerges takes office as the lawgiver, the divinely inspired exegete, [to] the already existing yachad groups scattered throughout the countryside and throughout the region” in Jannaeus’s expanded territories.
So the falling out happened with whom? The Temple priesthood and Jerusalem leadership? If the Teacher was the Temple’s authorized representative in the wilderness but “later” they went their separate ways, the community that had accepted him based solely on his high priestly authority decide to stick with him anyway? Did they retain their reverence for him, going so far as to apply Balaam’s star prophecy to him in 7:18? And did they preserve his memory, including a record of his exile in the Thanksgiving Hymns? Clearly they did — but this is not explained either by his high priesthood or by his falling out with the authorities.
If “the dead plant returning to life” really refers to “the conquests and expansions of Jannaeus,” how does that square with the description of a “remnant” (1:4, 3:13) who “knew they were guilty men” (1:9), so they “sought [God] with a perfect heart” (1:10) and “entered the New Covenant in the land of Damascus” (6:19)? Was Jannaeus the catalyst for this New Covenant? Or did that happen a long time ago, maybe even in Babylon, as Fr. Murphy-O'Connor famously argued? What is Damascus and what is the New Covenant in Doudna's theory? Clearly they cannot be the military conquests of Jannaeus. And when did the Teacher live and die?
Hello. First, thank you for excerpting this and parts II & III. I completely agree with Doudna and Wise that the 490 years scheme must be dated from the death of the Teacher and not from what we know today historically of Nebuchadnezzar's reign and conquests. Moreover, these schemes look for authority in previous texts such as Ezekiel and Isaiah and therefore cannot be used to date back to 587 BCE.
That said, I find no evidence whatsoever that the Teacher was a high priest. After the block quote from Schwartz 1991 above, Doudna writes: “The rise of the Teacher twenty years after Israel revived back to life (CD 1.8-11) might then allude to the rise of a high priest who at some later stage was deposed from power and driven into exile and died.” Doudna also argues that “the Teacher as high priest would account for the yachad groups’ acceptance of the Teacher’s authority. The mystery as to how the Teacher attained prominence in the yachad groups which he did not himself found would receive a trivially simple answer: it is because the Teacher was the high priest.”
So the Teacher was accepted by the yachad specifically BECAUSE he was a high priest. Not only that, but “the dead plant returning to life could allude to the conquests and expansions of Alexander Jannaeus viewed favorably by the authors of the Qumran texts.” In this possibility offered by Doudna, “the Teacher when he first emerges takes office as the lawgiver, the divinely inspired exegete, [to] the already existing yachad groups scattered throughout the countryside and throughout the region” in Jannaeus’s expanded territories.
So the falling out happened with whom? The Temple priesthood and Jerusalem leadership? If the Teacher was the Temple’s authorized representative in the wilderness but “later” they went their separate ways, the community that had accepted him based solely on his high priestly authority decide to stick with him anyway? Did they retain their reverence for him, going so far as to apply Balaam’s star prophecy to him in 7:18? And did they preserve his memory, including a record of his exile in the Thanksgiving Hymns? Clearly they did — but this is not explained either by his high priesthood or by his falling out with the authorities.
If “the dead plant returning to life” really refers to “the conquests and expansions of Jannaeus,” how does that square with the description of a “remnant” (1:4, 3:13) who “knew they were guilty men” (1:9), so they “sought [God] with a perfect heart” (1:10) and “entered the New Covenant in the land of Damascus” (6:19)? Was Jannaeus the catalyst for this New Covenant? Or did that happen a long time ago, maybe even in Babylon, as Fr. Murphy-O'Connor famously argued? What is Damascus and what is the New Covenant in Doudna's theory? Clearly they cannot be the military conquests of Jannaeus. And when did the Teacher live and die?