denunciation of the
priesthood and the scribes, "their teachers in those times," and of the
godless Asmonaean priest-kings, is followed by the well-deserved judgment
inflicted on them by Herod, and after him comes Varus, burning part of the
temple, crucifying, and carrying off into slavery. The second of the
Psalms of Solomon may also be compared.

The schismatic character of the sect would also be explained if it arose
in an age when the character of the political and religious heads of the
Jewish people was such as to move God-fearing and law-abiding men to
repudiate them with all their ways and works. For it is not merely with a
sect, differing from the mass of their fellows in certain opinions and
practices, that we have to do, but with a schism. The Covenanters of
Damascus are radical come-outers, seceders not only from the land of
Judaea, but from established Judaism, on which they look much as the
Puritan Separatists in the seventeenth century looked on the English
Church; they might have taken to themselves the prophetic word so often in
the mouth of the Puritan, "Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence,
touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, ye
that bear the vessels of the Lord" (Isa. 52 11), as they do apply to the
religious teachers of the Jewish church the most violent invectives of the
same prophet (50 11, 59 4 ff.; see below, p. 344 f.). They will not even
call themselves Jews, they are Israelites who went forth from the land of
Judaea; their Messiah is to spring from Aaron and Israel, not from Judah;
when the final judgment comes in its appointed time, it will no longer be
permitted to make compact with the house of Judah, but every man must
stand in his own stronghold;(14) when the glory of God shines out on
Israel, all the wicked of Judah shall be cut off, in the day of its trial
by fire. They reject the temple in Jerusalem, and will not offer on its
altar. If we consider that the Essenes, notwithstanding their wider
divergence from the common type of Judaism, seem to have regarded
themselves as within the pale of the church, and to have been so regarded
by others--enjoying, indeed, with the people the reputation of peculiar
sanctity--the schismatic character of our sect appears in a still stronger
light.

The language of the book is not inconsistent with the age to which the
contents would seem to assign it. The vocabulary is in the main Biblical,
but there are a numb