Community Rule
Serekh HaYachad
The true Israel is not the nation as a whole but a small, voluntarily self-segregated community of the elect living in strict purity and shared property while awaiting imminent divine judgment on everyone outside it.
- a self-segregated "true Israel" community with communal property
- sons of light versus sons of darkness under opposed cosmic spirits
- strict, graded admission and purity procedures
- the fullest surviving record of an organized Second Temple sect
A foundational rule-book for the sectarian community that produced and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, prescribing communal property, ranked hierarchy, an annual ritual renewal of the covenant, and strict admission procedures for members entering what it presents as the true, faithful remnant of Israel. It divides humanity sharply between "sons of light" and "sons of darkness," governed respectively by opposed cosmic spirits, a dualism many scholars connect, cautiously, to currents of Persian religious thought absorbed during the Second Temple period. Surviving in multiple copies among the scrolls found in the Qumran caves in 1947 and after, it offers the fullest surviving picture of an organized, self-consciously separatist Jewish community in the two centuries before the Temple's destruction in AD 70.
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