The writing of the pesher on Habakkuk can be dated even more exactly than our previous ones, at the September equinox of AD 37.

Josephus gives us an account of the occasion for the writing of the pesher, in Ant.18, 120-124. War had broken out between Antipas Herod the tetrarch of Galilee and Aretas the king of Arabia. One of the reasons for it was that Antipas had insulted Aretas by divorcing Aretas' daughter, to whom Antipas had been married for a long time. Antipas, a typically licentious Herod, son of Herod the Great from a Samaritan mother, had fallen in love with Herodias, the ambitious wife of a half-brother. Although Antipas would have had no objection to polygamy, she insisted that he divorce the Arab woman.

Antipas was in good standing with the emperor Tiberius, after whom he had named the Galilean capital Tiberias. The crafty, thrifty old emperor preferred Antipas to the spendthrift Agrippa I, whom he had expelled from Rome for bankruptcy. Antipas succeeded in gaining the emperor's approval for his new marriage, and orders were sent to Vitellius the Roman governor of Syria to give Roman assistance to Antipas in his war against Aretas. In March of AD 37 Tiberius died, but since it took 6 months for a ship to travel from Rome to Judea, this fact was not known in Judea until September-October . In the late summer Vitellius "got himself ready for war against Aretas with two legions of heavy-armed infantry and such light-armed infantry and cavalry as were attached to them as auxiliaries. .Since he had started to lead his army through the land of Judea, the Jews of the highest standing went to meet him and entreated him not to march through their land. For, they said, it was contrary to their tradition to allow images, of which there were many attached to the military standards, to be brought upon their soil."

The narrative goes on that Vitellius, who had learned from the mistakes of Pilate to be diplomatic with the Jews, acceded to their request and changed the route of his army, sending them now through the Great Plain, a term that can mean the Jordan valley. He then went to Jerusalem with Antipas to observe Tabernacles. On the fourth day of the feast he received the news of the death of Tiberius. He administered to the people an oath of loyalty to Gaius Caligula the new emperor, and "he now recalled his army, ordering each man to go to his own home for the winter", since he had lost his commission to make war on behalf of Tiberius.

From the watchtower of the Qumran buildings it was possible to look in the direction of Jericho, to the point where the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea. Just above this point was the crossing for which the Roman armies were heading when they were sent through the Jordan valley. At the September equinox the usual council meeting was being held at Qumran, and watchmen on the tower would have seen the Roman armies beginning to make the crossing. Before the order was effected to turn back, consternation reached crisis point in the Qumran council. It was not simply that the Romans were threateningly close, looking terrifying as their shields and helmets glittered in the sun, but there was also a possible threat to the substantial stores of money that were held in the Qumran vaults. It was the income from the mission to the Diaspora, established by Herod the Great, and legally owned by one of the Herod family. This had been Antipas up to now, but the message from Rome had also brought the news that Agrippa had been given the monarchy by his friend Gaius Caligula. It was certain that Agrippa would lay claim to the money, which he badly needed to restore his fortunes.

In a few days of sheer panic, one of the advisers to the council found another passage of scripture which could be interpreted as a prophecy of their present situation. It was in the minor prophet Habakkuk. His book had been written about 600 BC, and actually concerned the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, "who march through the breadth of the earth to seize habitations not their own. Dread and terrible are they.. Their horses are swifter than leopards, more fierce than the evening wolves." "They come from afar.like an eagle."

This was surely, they believed, an exact prophecy of the advancing army they were now witnessing. The Chaldeans meant the Romans, the Kittim, whose emblem was the eagle. They were "marching across the plain (the Great Plain) destroying and plundering the cities of the earth." "They sacrifice to their standards and worship their weapons of war."

The pesher on Habakkuk was composed and written down, in a scribal hand of the middle Herodian period, AD 20- 50. An older piece of parchment, carbondated 88-2 BC, was all that was available to them in their haste, but this was no problem, since they valued older writing material as having venerable authority.

The Habakkuk passage proved to be just right for another problem that was worrying them, the success that Jesus and his pro-Roman hellenisers were having. Since the Teacher had died 6 years earlier, there had been no forceful leader of the Hasidim. Their plan for a Jewish world empire seemed to be collapsing - Diaspora Jews were going over to Rome en masse. The prophet's passage on the Arrogant Man, Habakkuk 2:5-19, could be made to fit Jesus, the Wicked Priest. He had ruled over Israel, that is had been accepted as the potential Messiah of Israel and at first had been called by the name of Truth, that is followed the Qumran doctrine that was called the Truth. But then he and his Gentile associates had abandoned Jewish identity altogether.

It was correct, too, that the Arrogant Man had had to suffer oppression and torture. His oppressors had "inflicted horrors of evil maladies and had taken vengeance on his body of flesh." He had been "humbled by a destructive scourge, in bitterness of soul" - by being crucified by Pontius Pilate.

Even when they saw that the Romans had turned back, the council at Qumran knew that they would have to remove themselves out of reach of Agrippa. Damascus lay outside Jewish territory, and was under the control of Aretas (2 Corinthians 11:32). A monastic building there had been one of their mission centres, and they now made it their new primary centre, transferring their vaults of money there. In Damascus, they justified their exile by declaring that they were the New Covenant in the land of Damascus. CD was written, its successive stages reflecting their history up to AD 70.

Far more correspondences than these will be found when the theory of pesher is applied to the gospels, Acts and Revelation, as will be seen. It may be maintained, however, that up to this point all the data concerning the Qumran pesharim fit the period of John the Baptist and Jesus better than the pre-Christian period in which they were placed by the consensus case.