The Damascus Document

The Damascus Document (CD, for Cairo Damascus) is a key text for scholarship on the community or communities behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, intercommunal polemics in the Second Temple period, the development of halakhah, and biblical exegesis. The document takes its name from a reference to “those who entered the new covenant in the land of Damascus” (CD 6:19). The text is known from many copies, the best preserved of which come not from Qumran but from the Cairo Geniza in Egypt and date to the medieval period. In 1896, two copies of the document (CD-A and CD-B) were found there, among thousands of other discarded texts. It appears that Karaite Jews produced these copies from older manuscripts because they found an appealing message in the text. Ten more copies, dated variously to the first centuries BCE and CE, were found at Qumran in the mid-twentieth century. Because of the significant overlap between the Qumran and Cairo Geniza manuscripts, it is believed that the later Karaite-produced manuscripts preserve authentic Second Temple–era texts. Nonetheless, the ancient copies from Qumran provide extensive previously unknown material, including the beginning and end of the work, as well as substantial halakhic content.

The Damascus Document can be roughly divided into two major sections. The first is normally labeled the Admonition and comprises a call for group members to separate from the rest of Israel and to keep God’s commandments. The second is a collection of laws, some consisting of communal legislation regulating life in the communities as prescribed by the text and some addressing general halakhic issues, such as Sabbath observance, dietary practices, ritual purity, skin disease, priestly tithes, marriage, oaths, vows, judicial matters, and relations with gentiles. This part of the document highlights some of the halakhic positions that distinguished the sect from other Jewish groups of the time, including opposition to polygamy, extension of the prohibition on marriage between a woman and her nephew to a man and his niece, and the application of laws of ritual slaughter to fish and locusts.

The Admonition is loaded with very particular terminology, including various sobriquets referring to the community, its officials or leaders, important personalities in the history of the group, and the group’s enemies. This part of the document is also important because it contains echoes of the history of the group behind the Damascus Document, although the text is clearly imbued with biblical language and ideological flourishes. It also offers unique insights into the group’s ideology, especially vis-à-vis its self-presentation and relationship to the rest of the Jewish people and the Jerusalem Temple. In short, the Damascus Document depicts a group that believed it was living in the end of days, a period marked with tribulation and under the dominion of Belial, the Prince of Darkness, but one that would end imminently on the arrival of the messianic age.

The Damascus Document shares many links with the Community Rule, although the documents also have several important differences. The relationship between the two texts, as well as the community or communities behind them, remains the subject of much discussion.