Secret Groups in Ancient Judaism

The thesis advanced in this work is that the model of a secret or esoteric group is fruitful for studying various movements and groups in the Greco–Roman world. This is worked out in the extremely interesting case of the Essenes and the Qumran covenanters, for which we have available not only outsider descriptions but also the very documents that embody at least part of their secret teachings. This approach to analysis is not intended to supplant the sect/normative pattern for describing Ancient Judaism, but to supplement it, adding a very fruitful unexplored dimension to the analysis of ancient Jewish society. By attributing, in the footsteps of Georg Simmel, and more recently L. Hazelrigg, the organization and dynamic of secret societies to the need to guard the secret knowledge, it provides ways of understanding the organization and practice of the Qumran covenanters Essene sect, which were previously unperceived. Having established the theoretical framework, having shown that such groups existed in both non-Jewish and Jewish society in the Greco–Roman world, the book then proceeds to analyze in detail the working out of this dynamic in the cases of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, supplementing this with investigation of whether there is evidence for this same dynamic elsewhere in Second Temple Jewish society. Moreover, this analysis bears on the overall “fit” of these groups in the society of the period, so richly endowed with names of and evidence for different groups in that society.