Women among the Essenes or Women at Qumran? A study on gender in the Damascus Document, the Rule Scroll, and in the historical sources related to the Essenes

Abstract

Nowadays the debate on gender among the Dead Sea scholars has become fiercer. This issue can hardly be avoided when we ponder that women and themes related to sexual relations or marriage are present in the rules and purity system of the Dead Sea Scrolls in documents as important as the Damascus Document, and the Temple Scroll. Clearly, it is impossible for such community to follow the rules as we read them in the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Congregation, and the Rule of the Community. They simply reflect different realities. The community glimpsed in the Damascus Document, where families lived in their own properties, cannot be the same as the one indirectly depicted in the Rule of the Community, a document about a community where people shared their goods, their meals and their time while praying, studying the Scriptures and working. In this sense, if the movement depicted in the Damascus Document included women among their members, does it mean that, consequently, the Qumran Community, living isolated in the Judean Desert, also received women to live a life in common with the group inside its walls? Scholars such as C. Wassen and E. Schuller are among the ones who are devoting part of their studies directly to this theme, seeking the answers through the archaeological findings in the Qumran site, the manuscripts found in the Qumran caves and the historical sources of Philon, Josephus and Pliny. These efforts are focused on understanding the social role, possibilities, daily life of some (or many) Jewish women that entered the dynamics of a closed movement in the turn of the first millennium and, at the same time, aim at grasping a little more of the modus operandi of that society.