The sect possessed the Jewish Scriptures. The books of the law are “the hut of the King” (i.e. the congregation)—the fallen hut which God had promised to raise up; “the pillar of your images” are the books of the prophets, whose words Israel despised. The founder of the sect, the star out of Jacob, is the interpreter of the law who came to Damascus (7 14 ff.). The authority of the Pentateuch is appealed to in support of the position of the sect in the matter of marriage and divorce; their peculiar statutes and ordinances are the true interpretation and application of the law of God. The prophets are frequently cited, and allusions to passages in the prophets or reminiscences of their phraseology are much more numerous. There are similar reminiscences of the Psalms and of the Proverbs, and perhaps of other books among the Hagiographa. As regards the Old Testament scriptures, therefore, the sect stood on common ground with Palestinian orthodoxy.(60) The formula of citation is peculiar; a quotation is usually introduced by the words “as he said,” rarely “as God said”; or with the name of the sacred author, “as Moses said.” Besides the Biblical books, we have a quotation from Levi—probably the Testament of that Patriarch—introduced by the same phrase as quotations from the Bible; and the reader is referred to the Book of Jubilees by name for an exact computation of the last times. There is nothing to indicate that the authority attributed to these writings was inferior to that of the Hagiographa. The canon of the “Scriptures” was not defined, even in the rabbinical schools, until the second century of our era, and in the sects many books enjoyed high esteem which the orthodox repudiated.(61) To a different class belong, apparently, the Book of Institutes, and the Foundations of the Covenant, in which the judges must be well versed. To every religious gathering of ten men or more belongs a priest well versed in the Book of Institutes. The title Foundations of the Covenant suggests a writing (or a fixed tradition) dealing with the obligations and duties of members of the sect. The name here rendered Book of Institutes, on the other hand, is obscure,(62) but the fact that a knowledge of it is demanded of the priest and of the judges makes it likely that it contained the “statutes and ordinances” of the sect, its peculiar definitions and interpretations of the law, often referred to as _perush_; in technical phrase, a collection of sectarian _halakoth_, such as is preserved in the second part of the texts before us, which seems to be derived from such a legal manual. The objection to committing _halakah_ to writing which was long maintained in the rabbinical schools was not shared by the sects, and would be least likely to exist where the ordinances were not in theory a traditional law handed down from remote antiquity, but were attributed to an individual interpreter, the founder of the sect.