The Damascus Covenant or How Many Covenants Can be Found among the Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls

The certainty of constituting a community of people chosen by God to follow His will and obey His laws in the only correct way was ratified, in these people’s minds, by the idea that God had established a particular, eternal and definitive covenant with them. Their group was the germ of the future society desired by God. The noun “covenant” was used by the Yahad diversely, both as a simple noun and in various compound forms such as “new covenant” or “eternal covenant”. This noun appears in many of the sectarian compositions, such as the Pesher Habakkuk, but especially in their “constitutional” documents: the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Community and the Rule of the Congregation.

A strong strand in the research of the DSS advocates that the sectarian community split from a larger and more open movement. The texts as we have them today would be the result of the sectarians’ reworking of documents which originally belonged to their former group, something that, according to this theory, would better explain their literary difficulties. From this premise, we would be expected to consider at least two different covenants: the earlier, broader and more inclusive one and the latter, closer and more particularistic one. Nonetheless, there are other explanations and other appraisals that could result from the analysis of these ancient texts, which is exactly what we propose to accomplish in this paper.