Abstract
Of all the explanations of where the sectarian movement which produced the community documents of Qumran belonged within Judaism of the time, the most convincing remains that they are somehow connected to the Essenes. Strikingly Pliny reports a community on the Dead Sea which contains no women and who practice sexual abstinence and are called Essenes. The descriptions in Philo and Josephus of rules of the Essenes have much in common with what we find in the documents. Commonly, scholars pointed also to what they called Essene celibacy...