James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (125 page)

The usage ‘
House of Judgement
’/‘
Beit ha-Mishpat
’ will appear in the eschatological exposition in Column VIII.1–3 of how those with ‘
Faith in the Righteous Teacher
’ and ‘
suffering works
’ will be ‘
saved
(‘
in the Last Times
’)
from the House of Judgement
’. All these exegeses set up a purposeful tension between the death of ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ and the worldly or profane trial he ‘
pursued
’ against the person we consider to be James, and the Heavenly or eschatological ‘
Beit ha-Mishpat
’ or ‘
Judg
e
ment
’ God pronounces by the hand of ‘
the Sons of Zadok
’ or ‘
His Elect
’ against him.

Seen in this manner and with the actual historical scenario of James’ Sanhedrin trial in mind, one can think of the refe
r
ence to his ‘
pursuing him with his House of Exile
’ as being an esotericism or an expletive of some kind for the Sanhedrin trial that ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ Ananus actually ‘
pursued
’ against James. This would also seem to be something of the import of the interpretation of the words, ‘
the Wicked spies on the Righteous
,
seeking to kill him
’, but God did not allow him ‘
to be co
n
demned when he is tried
’ in the
Pesher
on Psalm 37:32–33 (and, for that matter, the early Church
Pesher
on Isaiah 3:10–11), which is deliberately turned around in the exposition to signal, as here in the Habakkuk
Pesher
,
the
‘
reward God would pay
’
the Wicked Priest
, ‘
delivering him into the hand of the Violent Ones of the Gentiles to execute Judgement upon him
’.
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Put more explicitly – so abhorrent, therefore, were the proceedings ‘
pursued
’ by Ananus against James in the Phar
i
see/Sadducee-dominated Sanhedrin – here denoted by the ‘
Beit-Galuto
’/‘
his House of Exile
’ – to ‘
the Assembly
’ or ‘
Church of the Poor
’, they would not deign to acknowledge these either as a proper ‘
Beit-Din
’ or a ‘
Beit ha-Mishpat
’ (‘
Court
’ or ‘
Trial
’). Therefore the words, ‘
his
Galut
’ or ‘
Exile
’ here are not a location or an actual ‘
Exile
’
per se
, which is the normative understan
d
ing of the expression in Qumran Studies, but an expression of their loathing or disgust for just this place and these procee
d
ings.

This is another and altogether more sensible way of looking at the expression ‘
His Exiled House
’, taking the pronominal suffix tied to it to mean not
the Righteous Teacher
’
s
‘
House
’, the usual understanding of scholars, but
the Wicked Priest
’
s
. In fact, one encounters this exact sense in the allusion, ‘
the House of the High Priest
’, mystifyingly evoked in the Gospels to d
e
note precisely
the Sanhedrin Trial by
‘
all the High Priests
,
Scribes
, and
Elders
’, and ‘
the whole Sanhedrin seeking testimony against Jesus in order to kill him
’ in the middle of the night at ‘
the House
’ or ‘
Hall of the High Priest
’ (Mark 14:53–55 and
pars
.).

One need be mystified no longer. Not only are the exact words ‘
seeking to kill him
’ of the Psalm 37:32
Pesher
above e
m
ployed here, but it is directly following this that Jesus is pictured as evoking the proclamation also attributed to James, ‘
You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of Heaven
’, and the High Priest, for some reason – again mystifyingly – then rending his clothes and saying, ‘
He has spoken blasphemy
’ (Matthew 26:65). One says ‘
my
s
tifyingly
’, for it was not ‘
blasphemous
’ to say the sorts of things Jesus is pictured as saying at this point in the narrative.
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Nor could anything better recapitulate the events converging on James’ death than this. Moreover, we would not have thought to look at these parallels without looking into the materials surrounding James’ Sanhedrin Trial and death.

‘
The Exile
’ of the Sanhedrin in Talmudic Sources

This exposition of ‘
His House of Exile
’ would suffice as an alternative suggestion as to how to translate this curious phrase, but it is possible to develop a more convincing exposition even than this which really must be seen as a
definitive
proof. In most Biblical contexts, the words ‘
pursued after
’ are usually accompanied by the phrase ‘
with the sword
’. This is true of Pharaoh’s ‘
pursuit
’ of the Israelites in Exodus 14:8 and Saul’s ‘
pursuit
’ after David in 1 Samuel 23:25. This is also true of the depiction of the attack on ‘
the soul of the Righteous One
’ and ‘
all the Walkers in Perfection
’ by ‘
the Pourer out of Lying
’’s confederates, ‘
the Seekers after Smooth Things
’ and ‘
those who broke the Covenant
’ and ‘
transgressed the Law
’ at the end of the First Column of the Damascus Document.
36

Often such a ‘
pursuit
’ involves the name ‘
Jacob
’, as in Jacob’s pursuit by
his father-in-law Laban (Genesis 31:23 and 36), which no doubt would have appealed to the Qumran exegetes if James was the subject of their exegesis – James’ original name in Hebrew being ‘
Jacob
’. This theme is recapitulated in Amos 1:11’s accusation, this time ‘
against Edom
’, that ‘
he pursued his brother with the sword
’. Again the ‘
Edomite
’ connection here would have been particularly attractive to Qumran exegetes; but what is certain is that in all these contexts,
the pursuit signaled by the word ‘
pursue
’ was mortal
and carried with it the intent ‘
to kill
’ or ‘
destroy
’.

This is also true in the mirror reversal of this, ‘
the Law of the Pursuer
’ of Deuteronomy 19:6, which actually includes the idea of the ‘
heart
’ of the Pursuer in ‘
blood Vengeance
’ being uncontrollably ‘
Hot
’ just as we have here in the Habakkuk
Pesher
. There even seems to be a hint of the inversion of these matters in the exposition of the Habakkuk
Pesher
we have before us. Of course, if one does admit the identification of Ananus with ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ and, along with this, the connection poss
i
bly in his mind of James with the assassination some six years earlier of his brother, the High Priest Jonathan, by those Jos
e
phus at this point had started denoting as ‘
Sicarii
’ (as tenuous as this may be), then the fact of a species of ‘
blood Vengeance
’ being involved in, according to his view,
the judicial proceedings he
‘
pursued
’
against James
has to be entertained.
37

Looking at the words ‘
he pursued the Righteous Teacher
’ in or with ‘
his
Beit ha-Mishpat
’ in the Greek can also be som
e
what illustrative. We have already found this helpful in terms of looking at other allusions in Hebrew, but it is especially true when looking at perhaps the most interesting parallel between how Jesus was portrayed in the Gospels to the archetypical d
e
struction of ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’ in the Hellenistic literature,
the Courtroom Trial of Socrates
. In Plato’s
Euthyphro
, for i
n
stance, Socrates comes to the court and outside meets one Euthyphro who is later to be among those who accuse him (Socr
a
tes) of ‘
Impiety
’ which leads to his death. An Oracle of sorts, Euthyphro is ‘
pursuing
’ courtroom proceedings against, as it turns out, his own father! The word used here to express this in the Greek is ‘
pursued
’ in the sense of
pursuing judicial pr
o
ceedings against someone
.
38
As far afield as this might originally seem, it is nevertheless useful in bringing home the mindset of the individuals responsible for documents of the kind before us, and we suggest that this is the sense of the word as it is being used at this critical juncture of the Habakkuk
Pesher
.

If we now look at Talmudic sources relating to Sanhedrin proceedings carrying the death sentence and the legitimacy or i
l
legitimacy of these, one finds materials that
directly relate to this usage in the Habakkuk
Pesher
. Once again, the reader should realize that we would not have thought even to consult these, where the fate of ‘
the Righteous Teacher
’ at Qumran is co
n
cerned, were we not looking at
the paradigmatic fate of James
. There, it turns out, that on at least
six
different occasions, when the issue of capital punishment is being discussed – particularly that
relating to passing a death sentence for
‘
blasphem
y’ – it is specifically claimed that, in the Period under consideration (from the 30s–60s CE), the Sanhedrin ‘
was exiled
’ – these are the words Talmudic tradition actually uses – from its normal place-of-sitting in ‘
the Chamber
’ on the Temple Mount to a place-of-sitting outside these precincts cryptically referred to as ‘
Hanut
’.
39

As these sources generally recount this tradition, this is expressed as ‘
before the destruction of the Temple
(here, also e
x
pressed as ‘
ha
-
Bayit
’ or ‘
the House
’),
the Sanhedrin
was
exiled
(
galtah
)
and took up its sitting in
Hanut
’ – or more simply even, ‘
the Sanhedrin was exiled
…
from the Chamber of Hewn Stone to
Hanut
’.
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In the Tractate
Rosh Ha-Shanah
, where this notice or its counterparts are recorded
three times
, it is specifically linked to two passages from Isaiah 26:5 and 29:4, about ‘
the fall of the Lofty Ones
’ or ‘
the Lofty Ones being brought low
’. The same words are specifically evoked, particularly as regards ‘
the fall of the Cedars of Lebanon
’ – as, for instance, in the
Pesharim
on Isaiah 10:33–34 introducing the famous ‘
Rod
’ and ‘
Branch
’ material ‘
from the Roots of Jesse
’ in 11:1–5 (‘
white
’ in the sense of underlying ‘
Lebanon
’, ‘
levan
’ meaning ‘
white
’ in Hebrew, almost always signifying ‘
the Temple
’ and ‘
the Cedars
’, its
wood
) – both at Qumran and in Talmudic literature to refer to the fall of the Temple and, in the
Talmud
anyhow (if not at Qumran), the fall in 70
CE
; never an earlier fall.
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