On my first trip to Israel in the spring of 2015, our tour did not have a plan to stop at Qumran; the archeological park and excavation site of the Essenes and the location where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. I remember looking longingly out the bus window, next to me was my dearest friend Robin, watching what must have been a cave of some kind at Qumran disappear in the distance. I could imagine the enigmatic Essenes shuffling up the horrifically steep and precarious trails shouldering scrolls that scholars would later proclaim to be the most important Biblical archeological find in history. Robin looked at me and together we kind of half-smiled and said, "Well, another time." That "another time" was in 2018 and again in 2022, when my husband and I scampered around the park and trails of what is for me, the most mysterious area of Israel.

Now, this is a blog and not a research paper, and since most people don't want to read anything too long (except my husband and parents, who love everything and chant, "More, more!"), I will try to be very succinct. *See the footnotes for further information and credits.
In the last blog, I wrote about Hannukah and how it relates to the Essenes who lived in Qumran. (a). Dr. Ken Johnson (a noted Dead Sea Scroll scholar), commented in an interview on Prophecy Watchers in May of 2024, that when the Jews returned to the land of Israel with Ezra, they had the same general beliefs and Messianic ideas that we do as believers in Jesus. In the 2nd century B.C., after the Maccabean revolt, Jewish sects developed, mainly divided by their approval of the permeating Greek culture and its infiltration into the Temple system. The three main sects were the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. The problems in Jerusalem escalated to such a degree that the Essenes (considered to be the faithful priests of the order of Zadok who held to very strict beliefs and were against the Hellinization of their culture) fled to Egypt. When Rome began to rule over the area of Israel, the Essenes saw the fulfillment of the prophecy in Daniel and made their way back to Israel. As Dr. Johnson states, (b)."They were supposed to return to Israel and prepare the way of the Messiah...Judaism is the same as Christianity, it has the same doctrine, and when they don't ..., it's because a cult rose up (Pharisees and Sadducees), and kind of took everything over."
A major problem for the Essenes was the switch from the solar to the lunar calendar. A capitulation the Pharisees and Sadducees agreed to at the request of the Greek rulers turned out to be a pivotal issue in Jewish history. The Jewish people were given specific dates by God to do religious memorials, and sacrifices, so when the calendar system was changed by Antiochus Epiphanes (and agreed to by the Pharisees and Sadducees), instead of the dates being fixed appointments as required, they floated through weeks and months. ( Just as Christmas is always on December 25th, but the day of the week changes yearly.) Because of this corruption, the Essenes were fit to be tied and left Jerusalem, where some eventually settled in Qumran (footnotes (a)/(b).
Ancient historians like Josephus (c). document that the Essenes were prophets who, "Rarely, if ever fail in their predictions". Indeed, from the excavations and examinations of their writings in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls they were spot on: Especially in their calendar system and predictions of when the Messiah would come to earth, die for our sins, and resurrect from the dead. So here is a group of very religious and sincere Jewish priests, maintaining ritual purity in the desert, awaiting the coming of the Messiah, and announcing His arrival in the desert. Sound like anyone we know? Was John the Baptist an Essene? Many scholars believe there is a good amount of evidence that he was.

Aside from preserving the oldest Biblical documents, the Qumran Essenes have an interesting calendar system through which they identified the Messiah. (d). Beginning at Creation and ending after the Millenial Reign of Jesus, they have time and ages broken into various intervals. It is pretty involved so I'll stick to the simplest timeframes paraphrased from a wonderful outline in Thomas Horn's book Zeitgeist 2025: All history consists of seven thousand years. A millennium is one thousand years, a jubilee is fifty years, and seven years is called a shemitah (Horn 267-268).
The following deserves a direct quote from the book:
"An interesting document called the 11QMelchizedek found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Qumran caves is believed to have been written around a century before the birth of Jesus Christ at the latest. It accurately predicts the arrival and death of the coming Messiah, right down to the exact year, and uses the Essene Calendar and the understanding of the ages of human history to explain it..." (Horn 270-271).
Why do the Essenes, their calendar system, and prophecies matter to us today? If Jesus died in A.D. 32, then according to the Essene's writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls this was accurately predicted (Horn 270). They also prophesied that the last jubilee (50 years) before the change of the ages would be from A.D. 25-75. Jesus came, died, and resurrected, the Temple was destroyed (also the Temple in Egypt), before the end of the jubilee in A.D. 75. What is interesting for us is that our Messiah completed His ministry, died and rose in the FIRST seven years (shemitah) of the last jubilee of that age. The Essenes predicted that the LAST jubilee before the Millenial Reign of the Messiah begins in 2025 and ends in 2075. This could mean that IF events follow the same pattern, (not date setting, just speculation based on historical prophetic patterns), Jesus could (maybe, just speculating) come for the Church, the Tribulation begin and end, all within the first seven years of this coming jubilee. This makes sense to me considering it will take a while to clean up the earth after the Tribulation, get the word out to all the nations that there's a new Sheriff in town, organize the glorified saints into their ruling positions, and have everything set and ready for Jesus's Millenial reign by 2075 (Horn 274-286).
Some say that the Essenes disappeared mysteriously with no real explanation of what happened to them Others believe that when the Essenes found out that Jesus had come and fulfilled all of the Messianic prophecies for His first coming, they became followers and left Qumran to spread the Gospel (Horn 270). These holy, sincere, and courageous people should be acknowledged with great honor for their copious writing and preservation for which we are the beneficiaries. Only time will tell if the Essene calendar is accurate for the coming age, but we can know for sure that the Word of God alone is perfectly accurate and all that is prophesied in its pages will come to pass.

Oh Dawn, I love this soooo much. So very interesting. I didn't know this story of the Essenes. Many thanks for writing this. Beautiful.