英文摘要 |
This article, based upon the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered in the mid-twentieth century, depicts the ancient Qumran community. It intends to understand this religious group in the Hellenistic context as well as in the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. From the beginning of the Hellenistic era, many Jewish sects rose to rival one another as a result of the political and cultural impacts that the rapidly changing history brought to Judaism. Some high priests, protesting against their Jerusalem colleagues, left the age-old cultic center and joined the pietistic Essenes about the mid-second century BCE. They together established a secluded community on the margins of the Dead Sea. This community, widely called Qumran today, exhibited such theological ideas as 'two spirits,' determinism, two messiahs, and angelology. They show how the religious group stood against the mainstream Jewish society and waited earnestly for the salvation in the end-time. The members of Qumran engaged themselves in scriptural reading and study. They regarded pesher as the right, eschatological hermeneutical principle and applied it to interpreting the Hebrew Bible. With regard to daily practices, they formed themselves into a rigid, hierarchical community, observing rules of discipline in every respect. To legitimate their special status as the 'true Israel,' they maintained strict purity rites of various kinds on a regular or non-regular basis. All these were conducted to manifest their self-understanding as a sacred and chosen 'remnant' in the end-time. This article lastly argues that although the members of Qumran were marginalized from the Jewish main body, they were actively constructing a significant belief system in the desert. By using their imagination to create 'two worlds,' which amalgamate the past and the future on the one hand and this world and the heavenly realm on the other, they were accordingly able to cope with the present eschatological crises. |