The Essenes and Ancient Quest for Free Speech: A story as old as time

Another question I get asked all the time is my position on the Jewish people and why I like them so much.  Unfortunately, most people don’t know their history and have their understandings about things defined for them with a modern context, which is usually politically driven and has some bits of globalism in their assumptions.  They have had their understanding of the Jewish people defined by enemies of the Bible and world dictators like what we saw with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which tries to lump the Hebrew people into one giant heap of the same-thinking people, and that is wrong.  People say to me, “You love freedom and independence, but then speak out about centralized banking; the Rothschilds are Jewish.  The United Nations created the modern state of Israel; how can you support these tyrannical forces?”  And “that Jews typically vote for Democrats.”  The problem is that even with all the information that is available to people, they just haven’t learned what they need to in life to make proper decisions about things, and for me, it’s all about the Jewish people surviving as the most extended group of people from the past to be able to hold it together long enough to bring us information from the far past.  But even among themselves, fighting and disagreements were prevalent, and if I had been around during the biblical period and happened to be Jewish or been associated with the Jewish people, I would have the most in common with the Essene people of Qumran, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  That band of Jewish rebels flocked into the desert for hundreds of years during the Second Temple Period and isolated themselves from the rest of the world.  They were the Tea Party of that time, where the rest of the Jewish people were more like the RINO Republicans of our present culture.

After Jesus was killed for political reasons, the Jewish people tried to lead a revolt against their Roman controllers, and, around 68 A.D., attacked Jerico to put down the rebellion.  By 70 A.D., Rome attacked Jerusalem to chase down the remaining troublemakers, which is a lot like what we are seeing today with cancel culture trying to put Trump in jail and all the members of his former White House.  But this wasn’t an easy task because, at that time, the Jewish people were divided into three basic categories: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and, of course, the Essenes.  The Pharisees were, of course, attributed to the plotting to kill Jesus with Jewish manipulation of their Roman overseers, and the situation was getting irritating to the regional governors, which migrated into the rebellion of 70 A.D.  After wiping away the last remnants of Christ and his disciples, the Romans were trying to get control of their empire again which had as its motivations the same priorities as the current Deep State is utilizing against any challengers to their authority.  The only real difference between then and now is that the new empire is globalism because technology has allowed for a power grab that we are currently experiencing.  But in the times of the Roman Empire, everything grew outward from the Mediterranean Sea, which was their prime source of communication.  Modern globalism uses communications systems and modern transportation to spread its intentions beyond regional concerns.  But the effort is essentially the same.  And this is when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and forced the Jewish rebels to flee for their lives.  That left the Essenes on the outskirts of the desert to flee ahead of the Romans, where they sought refuge at Masada. 

Eventually, the Essenes were pinned down by the Roman army, and before they were massacred atop that mountain fortress, they committed mass suicide, and the rest became history.  The Essenes were a very rebellious group, and they had been fighting with the other Jews for many hundreds of years and thought of them as sell-outs to their Roman overseers.  They refused to be part of the typical Jewish society and spent their time as monks relishing ancient scripture.  And it was they who anticipated that at some point, the world would come for them to implement their destruction, so they wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls and hid them in the caves at Qumran, knowing that was the only way to preserve their culture for the future.  But it’s because of them that we have what we do today.  However, they weren’t willing to associate with the Pharisees and Sadducees as one big happy team.  And thank goodness they preserved their history the way they did because we can learn a lot from their past; it’s all happened before.  And if we don’t want it to happen in the future, we need to do something different.  But just calling the Essenes “Jewish” doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.  They thought of their fellow Jewish brothers and sisters as wrong and evil, and they wrote their work in a style called Apocalyptic, where their fantasies were that God would come along, as stated in the Book of Revelation, and put down all their enemies for their betrayal.  The Essenes hoped to have redemption from their persecutors, so they fled to the desert in the first place.  They weren’t hanging around in the Jewish high society in Jerusalem making goat sacrifices at the Temple.  They were rebels of the rebels waiting in the desert for God to come and crush their enemies.  They left that apocalyptic vision in their various biblical and non-biblical writings for the future to read in the many clay jars that corresponded to the ancient text. 

At that time, the Essenes had no way of knowing that the Greeks would preserve the Old Testament in the form of the Septuagint or that, eventually, the Roman Empire, under the weight of their control, would seek to make Christianity the one religion of the empire.  So, they wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls to preserve their view of the world.  They only validated that the Qumran texts were authentic to what we had come to know as the Bible.  There are historical references and religions from all over the earth, but under no other circumstances do we have such a well-documented period or one that corresponds to what the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed. But at the time, the Essenes were not cooperative Jewish sell-outs.  They were rebels, even considered radicals, along the lines of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ living out in the desert in isolation.  Their commitment to intellect can’t be mistaken.  When the Romans invaded and pushed them to flee to Masada, that was one of the first attempts at mass cancel culture, precisely what we see today.  Except for this time, we aren’t trying to hide on the mountaintops to preserve ourselves or hide our life’s work in the caves of Qumran, so the future remembers us.  We are instead voting for President Trump to put a stop to these evil groups of tyrants who are constantly forming empires and trying to kill people they can’t control.  Only this time, we have our nation to fight back with, which describes the conflict of our times.  I am very thankful to the Jewish people for their history and preservation.  If not for the Essenes, there is a lot we wouldn’t know and learn from.  But because of them, we are fighting for our lives in a way that is the first time in history that the trend favors freedom and not oppression. 

Rich Hoffman

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