This Must Be the Place: The Zadokite Exodus in the Dead Sea Scrolls

In the Qumran texts the desert is both a metaphor and a real place. However, the metaphor involving the desert is not univocal. As Shemaryahu Talmon put forward in a seminal study, a number of Qumran texts consider the wilderness wandering as a punishment meted out to a generation of sinners in accordance with the biblical narrative (cmp. e.g. CD III 5-7). On the other hand, the desert is the chosen place of a small group of Zadokite separatists after the end of the Zadokite high priesthood in Jerusalem. This group justifies its choice by recalling nothing less than the words of the prophet Isaiah (see Is 40:3). In this case the desert is no longer the place of sin and punishment but the place to recreate a religious and social context which the new leaders in Jerusalem (the session of perverse men mentioned in 1QS VIII 13) had brought to an end. It is worth noting that the heart of Isaiah’s announcement, the reason for the messages of good news, is that God is returning to take up residence in Jerusalem again and this could also be the group’s more or less explicit intention or hope. This paper will analyze the different views of the desert in the DSS literature, trying to ascertain if they could help to better delineate a possible historical context of the Qumran schism, in the perspective of the Zadokites’s vicissitudes in second century BCE Judea.