Showbread - Among Ancient Groups

Among Ancient Groups

There is evidence of Jewish groups around the turn of the common era, such as the Qumran community at the Dead Sea, and the Therapeutae in Egypt, which seem to have regarded themselves as part of the main Jewish body worshipping at the Jerusalem temple, despite being geographically isolated from it, and, in the eyes of later Jewish thought, theologically distinct from it.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a number of Aramaic fragments, found in cave 2, discuss eschatological connections to the eating of shewbread, which Matthew Black links with the sacred community meal discussed in a scroll from cave 1 (1QSVI), and the Messianic meal discussed in another scroll in the same cave (1QSall); Professor Black suggests that the Qumran community may have considered their regular bread sharing to be an enactment of the Sabbath division of shewbread at the Jerusalem Temple.

There is dispute among scholarly groups as to whether the Qumran community was identifiable with the Essenes, but scholars do generally agree that there was an association between the Essenes and the Therapeutae. Philo reported that the Therapeutae's central meal was intended to emulate the holy table set forth in the sacred hall of the temple, but though the Qumran community are portrayed in the Dead Sea Scrolls as viewing the Jerusalem service as having failed to achieve priestly holiness, Philo describes the Therapeutae as deliberately introducing slight differences in their practices from those at the Temple, as a mark of respect for the Temple's shewbread.