The Qumran "wicked priest"--Yannai--was said to suffer, according to Qumran mss, from his life of wickedness (cruelty, drunkenness, impurity, robbery...), and from his countrymen, and from foreigners. No Qumran sentence known to me explicitly says he was killed by foreigners; nor by his countrymen; nor killed twice; but suffered variously and died once. Did he suffer from foreigners (and countrymen)? M. H. Segal, seeing that Yannai was "wicked priest" (JBL 1951), thought so, citing Josephus Antiquities 13.375f:
"Then he engaged in battle with Obedas, the king of the Arabs, and falling into an ambush in a rough and difficult region, he was pushed by a multitude of camels into a deep ravine near Garada, a village of Gaulanis, and barely escaped with his own life, and fleeing from there, came to Jerusalem. But when the nation attacked him upon his misfortune, he made war on it and within six years slew no fewer than fifty thousand Jews. And so when he urged them to make an end of their hostility toward him, they only hated him the more on account of what had happened. And when he asked what he ought to do and what they wanted of him, they all cried out, 'to die'; [cf. 4Q448] and they sent to Demetrius Akairos [cf. 4QpesherNahum], asking him to come to their assistance." (Josephus also claimed that Alexander Jannaeus told his wife to offer his corpse to the Pharisees. On the relation of this story to 4QpNahum, see VanderKam, High Priests, p. 330f.) Paul, reportedly a former Pharisee, read Habakkuk differently than the Essene writer of 1QpesherHabakkuk whose 'osey hatorah had faith in Judah, the "teacher of righteousness." Sadducees, reportedly accepting neither named angels nor resurrection, were quite unlikely to become Nazarenes (later "Christians") nor bring those teachings. Among the very small minority of Jews who did become "Christians," conversations about observance of torah, evidently continued, mutatis mutandis, between former Pharisees and former Essenes. best, Stephen Goranson _______________________________________________ g-Megillot mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot
