Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [193]
Another such figure was clearly the “Teacher of Righteousness” of the Qumran group. The texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls report that for a long time after they were forced from their appointed rounds they continued to be lost in the wilderness. Then the Teacher of Righteousness arose and showed them how to organize themselves into a cenobitic community, a monastic life where the community comes together for meals. They honored their founder figure but there is no evidence that they expected him to return. Instead, they expected a great war at the end of time when the angels in heaven would come down and fight against the vastly superior forces on the other side. This would be possible because they kept themselves in such a state of purification as to allow for angelic presence at any time. Likely, they thought that their own forebears in the movement were the angels who would return.
Some of these movements then, like the Dead Sea Scroll community itself, even arise out of ambiguities in the way a religion is interpreted by different classes in a colonial and imperial setting. As priests they are entitled to a certain status in society which has been taken away, not by the Syrian oppressors but, ironically, by the Maccabean kings. While the whole society understood the fight to be against the Syrian Greeks, there was concerted military action in Judea. But when the priests alone were deprived of their traditional meaning and “access to the redemptive media,” the result was a religious innovation, a millenarian community of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This allowed them to divide the world into good and evil, identify themselves with only the good, and predict that God and his angelic minions (some of whom are the sainted dead of the group) will soon defeat the arrogant dominion of those who flout the law. This was a problem only for a small, well-defined group in the society.
Though all people require norms for orienting their lives, religious systems at times provide better norms for some parts of society than for others. When groups see themselves as cut off from the goals of society, in terms of power, ethics, or status, and from the feelings of self-worth that arise from achieving these goals, they may coalesce into antisocial movements of communitas, or communitarian idealism.43
Such movements, which stress an alternative social structure to that of the dominant majority, can appeal widely to one whose status is ambiguously defined by a society. Status ambiguities were common in Roman society because class was defined by law, not by occupation and buying power. Therefore, people who succeeded in a trade often achieved a status above their legal station in life. Reform of the basic social categories appeals to such people, and they are seeking to redress a deprivation, but one could hardly call them materially deprived in any normal sense. While deprivation of both material needs or spiritual status is necessary for the development of apocalypticism, it, too, is not sufficient to produce an apocalyptic movement.
To develop an apocalyptic cult, in contrast to a purely political movement, people must have a propensity to impose religious meanings upon events and must be searching for a more satisfactory system of religious values. The factors of need, deprivation, anxiety, leadership, and the propensity to interpret events in a religious framework all came together in first century Judea. The result over the next two centuries was the rise of a variety of apocalyptic cults, both religious and political.44
The Dead Sea Scrolls community is a very clear example of this latter kind of group. Because the Maccabees and their successors controlled the Temple but were (in the eyes of the Dead Sea Scroll sect) usurpers, they prevented this group, and indeed the entire world in the eyes of the group, from enjoying the benefits of God’s sacrificial service on earth. The service in heaven continued, however, and this group