Posted: Oct 22, 2015 10:47 pm
I still would like to discuss these points, which are not usually discussed anywhere that I have found so far after about 20 years of being interested in such things.
After reviewing the topography of the Qumran caves and their inaccessibility, it seems to be pretty clear that whoever were storing the scrolls and artifacts in them was especially interested in making access very difficult for apparently precious texts. However, why would it seem they would hide scrolls that had differing religious teachings?
And it is interesting to note that the emergence of the Teacher of Righteousness (correctly should be Teacher of Justice - a modern Jewish term for rabbinical judges Moreh Tzedek) was 329 years after the destruction of the Temple. If the author(s) of the Damascus Document and Habakuk Pesher counted according to traditional Jewish chronology, the destruction of the Temple was in 425 BCE and not 587. Thus, the events of the Teacher would be in the time of Herod and his priest son-in-law Simon. Makes for a whole different scenario. Personally, I have never been sure the DD was actually a sectarian non-pharisee document at all.