elves mighty against all the people of the world.(32)
And God will atone for them, and they will see his salvation with
joy, because they trusted in his holy name.

Here the fragment ends. The destruction of those who fall away from the
sect is threatened in other places; it will suffice to quote the most
important (19 5 ff.):

Upon all those who reject the commandments and the statutes, the
deserts of the wicked shall be requited when God visits the earth,
when the word comes to pass which was written by Zechariah the
prophet, "Sword, awake against my shepherd and against the man
that is my fellow, saith God; smite the shepherd, and let the
sheep be scattered, and I will turn my hand against the little
ones" (Zech. 13 7). But those who observe it (sc. the obligations
of the covenant) are "the poor of the flock" (Zech. 11 7). These
shall escape at the end of the visitation, but the former (sc.
those who reject the commandments) shall be given over to the
sword when the Anointed of Aaron and Israel comes, as it was at
the end of the first visitation, of which God said by Ezekiel that
a mark should be made on the foreheads of them that sigh and cry,
and the rest were delivered to the sword that executes the
judgment of the covenant. And so shall the judgment be of all who
enter into his covenant and do not hold firmly by these statutes,
they shall be visited even with extermination by the hand of
Belial. This is the day in which God will visit, as he spoke, "The
princes of Judah are become like men who remove the boundary; on
them will I pour out my fury like water" (Hos. 5 10). For they
entered into the covenant of repentance, but did not turn aside
from the way of faithless men, and wallowed in ways of fornication
and in unrighteous gain, and avenging themselves and bearing a
grudge against one another.

It is possible, of course, that the judgment of the heathen world, which
looms so large in most of the apocalypses, may have had a place in parts
of the book now lost, but if it had been a very important feature in the
expectation of the sect we should hardly fail to find at least allusions
to it in the pages in our hands. The author is almost exclusively
interested in the sect itself, in the division which had rent it, and in
polemics against laxer interpretations of the law. This limitation of the
horizon i