(54) The Essenes, with a note on Pharisees and Sadducees
Jewish philosophy takes three forms. The followers of the first school are called Pharisees, of the second Sadducees, of the third Essenes.
The Essenes: their Asceticism, Simplicity of Life and Community of Goods
A studied gravity[[329]] is the distinguishing characteristic of the Essenes. Of Jewish birth, they show a greater attachment to each other than do the other sects. They shun pleasures as a vice and regard temperance and the control of the passions as a special virtue. Marriage they disdain, but they adopt other men’s children, while yet pliable and docile, and regard them as their kin and mould them in accordance with their own principles. They do not wholly condemn wedlock and the continuance thereby of the human race, but guard against women’s wantonness, being persuaded that none of the sex keeps her plighted troth to one man.
Riches they despise, and their community of goods is a wonderful arrangement; you will not find one among them distinguished by greater opulence than another. They have a law that new members on admission to the sect shall confiscate their property to the order, with the result that you will nowhere see either abject poverty or inordinate wealth; the individual’s possessions join the common stock and all the brotherhood enjoy a single patrimony.
Oil they consider defiling, and any one who accidentally comes in contact with it scours his person; for they make a point of keeping a dry skin and of always being dressed in white.
They elect overseers of the common property,[[330]] and all their officials for various purposes are chosen[[331]] by the whole body.
They occupy no one city; each city has its own settlement. On the arrival of any of the sect from elsewhere, all the resources of the community are put at their disposal, just as if they were their own; and they enter the houses of men whom they have never seen before as though they were their most intimate friends. Consequently, they carry nothing whatever with them on their journeys, except arms as a protection against brigands. In every city of the order there is one expressly appointed to attend to strangers, who provides them with raiment and other necessaries.
In their dress and general appearance they resemble boys who are schooled under a rigorous system.[[332]] They do not change their garments or shoes until they are torn to shreds or worn threadbare with age.
There is no buying or selling among themselves, but each gives what he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange something useful to himself; they are also freely permitted to accept whatever they choose without making any return.
Their Prayers to the Sun. The Refectory
In religious matters[[333]] their piety is unique. Before the sun is up they utter no word on mundane matters, but offer to him certain prayers, which have been handed down from their forefathers, as though entreating him to rise. They are then dismissed by the overseers to the various crafts in which they are severally proficient and are strenuously occupied until the fifth hour, when they again assemble in one place and, girding themselves with linen cloths, so equipped bathe their bodies in cold water. After this purification, they collect in a private apartment which none of the uninitiated is permitted to enter, and so, pure and by themselves, repair to the Refectory, as to some sacred shrine. When they have taken their seats in silence, the baker serves out the loaves to them in order, and the cook sets before each a single vessel of one kind of food. Before meat the priest says a grace, and none may partake until after the prayer. When breakfast[[334]] is ended, he pronounces a further grace; thus at the beginning and at the close they do homage to God as the bountiful giver of life.[[335]] Then laying aside their raiment, as holy (vestments), they again betake themselves to their labours until the evening. On their return they sup in like manner, and any guests who may have arrived sit down with them. No clamour or disturbance ever pollutes their dwelling; conversation takes place in turn, each man making way for his neighbour. To persons outside the silence of those within appears like some awful mystery; it is in fact due to their continuous sobriety and to the limitation of their allotted portions of meat and drink to the demands of nature.
In all other matters they do nothing without orders from the overseers; two things only are left to individual discretion, the rendering of assistance and compassion. Members may of their own motion help the deserving, when in need,[[336]] and proffer food to the destitute; but presents to relatives are prohibited, without leave from the managers.
Just in their control[[337]] of resentment, they restrain their wrath; they are champions of[[338]] fidelity and very ministers of peace. Any word of theirs has more force than an oath; swearing they avoid, regarding it as worse than perjury, for they say that the thing which[[339]] is not believed without (an appeal to) God stands condemned already.
Their Studies
They display an extraordinary interest in the writings of the ancients, singling out in particular those which make for the welfare of soul and body; through these they make investigations into medicinal roots[[340]] and the properties of stones,[[341]] useful in the treatment of diseases.[[342]]
Admission to the Order. The Novice’s Probation and Oath
A candidate anxious to join their sect is not immediately admitted. For one year, during which he remains outside the fraternity, they prescribe for him their own rule of life, presenting him with a small hatchet, the forementioned loin-cloth and white raiment. Having given proof of his continence during this probationary period, he is brought into closer touch with the rule and is allowed to share the purer kind of holy water, but is not yet received into the life of the community. For, after this exhibition of endurance, his character is tested for two years more, and only then, if found worthy, is he enrolled in the society.
But, before he may touch the common food, he is made to swear tremendous oaths[[343]]:—first that he will practise piety towards God,[[344]] next that he will observe justice towards men; that he will wrong none whether of his own mind or under another’s orders; that he will for ever hate the unjust and fight the battle of the just; that he will for ever keep faith with all men, especially with the powers that be, since no ruler attains his office save by the will of God;[[345]] that, should he himself bear rule, he will never abuse his authority nor, either in dress or by other outward marks of superiority, outshine his subjects; to be ever a lover of truth and to make it his aim to convict liars; to keep his hands from stealing and his soul pure from impious gain; to conceal nothing from the members of the sect and to report none of their secrets to others, even though threatened with death. He swears, moreover, not to communicate any of their doctrines to any one otherwise than as he himself received them; to abstain from robbery; and in like manner carefully to preserve the books of their sect and the names of the angels. Such are the oaths by which they secure their proselytes.
Expulsion from the Order
Those who are convicted of[[346]] serious crimes they expel from the order; and the ejected individual often comes to a most miserable end. For, being bound by their oaths and usages, he is not at liberty to partake of other men’s food, and so falls to eating grass and wastes away and dies of starvation. This has led them in compassion to receive many back in the last stage of exhaustion, deeming that torments which have brought them to the verge of death are a sufficient penalty for their misdoings.
Their Law-courts, Reverence for Moses, Sabbatarianism, etc.
They are just and scrupulously careful in their trial of cases, never passing sentence in a court of less than a hundred members; the decision thus reached is irrevocable. After God they hold most in awe the name of their lawgiver, any blasphemer of whom is punished with death.
It is a point of honour with them to obey their elders, and a majority; for instance, if ten sit together, one will not speak if the nine desire silence.
They are careful not to spit into the midst of the company or to the right, and are stricter than all Jews in abstaining from work on the seventh day; for not only do they prepare their food on the day before, to avoid kindling a fire on that one, but they do not venture to remove any vessel or even to go to stool.
On other days they dig a trench a foot deep with the skalis[[347]]—such is the purpose of the hatchet which they present to new members on admission[[348]]—and wrapping their mantle about them, that they may not offend the rays of the deity,[[349]] sit above it. They then replace the excavated soil in the trench. For this purpose they select the more retired spots. And though this secretion of bodily impurity is a natural function, they make it a rule to wash themselves after it, as if defiled.
The Four Grades of Essenes—their Endurance of Persecution
They are divided, according to the duration of their discipline, into four grades;[[350]] and so far are the junior members inferior to the seniors, that the latter, if but touched by the former, bathe themselves, as though they had been polluted by contact with an alien.
They live to a great age—most of them to upwards of a century—in consequence, I imagine, of the simplicity of, and their moderation in, their diet.[[351]] They make light of danger, and conquer pain by their resolute will; death, if it come with honour, they consider better than immortality. The war with the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of test. Racked and twisted, burnt and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture, to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, they refused to yield to either demand, nor ever once did they cringe to their tormentors or shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies, and with gentle derision of the ministers of their tortures, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again.
Their Belief in the Immortality of the Soul
For it is a fixed belief of theirs that bodies are corruptible, and the matter of which they are made has no permanence, but that souls continue for ever immortal. Emanating from the finest ether, these souls become entangled, as it were, in the prison-house of the body, to which they are dragged down by some magical[[352]] spell; but when once they are released from the bonds of the flesh, then, as though liberated from a long servitude, they rejoice and are borne aloft. For the good souls—and here they are of the same mind as the sons of Greece—they maintain that there is reserved a habitation beyond the ocean, in a place which is not oppressed by rain or snow or heat, but is refreshed by the ever-gentle breath of the west wind coming in from ocean; while to the base they allot a murky and tempestuous dungeon, big with never-ending punishments.
The Greeks, I imagine, had the same conception when they set apart the Islands of the Blessed for their brave men, whom they call heroes and demigods, and the Region of the Impious for the souls of the wicked down in Hades, where, as their mythologists tell, certain persons are undergoing punishment, such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion, and Tityus.[[353]] Their aim was first to establish the premiss that souls are immortal, and secondly to promote virtue and to deter from vice; for the good are made better in their lifetime by the hope of being rewarded even after death, and the impetuous passions of the wicked are restrained by fear and the expectation that, even though they escape detection while alive, they will undergo never-ending punishment after their decease.
Through these theological views of theirs concerning the soul the Essenes irresistibly attract all who have once tasted their philosophy.
Essene Prophets
There are some among them who profess to foretell the future, being versed from their early years in holy books, various[[354]] forms of purification and apophthegms of prophets; and seldom, if ever, do they err in their predictions.[[355]]
Essene Schismatics who Allow Marriage
There is yet another order of Essenes, who, while at one with the rest in their mode of life, customs and regulations, differ from them in their views on marriage. They think that those who decline to marry cut off the chief function of life—that of transmitting it—and furthermore that, were all to adopt the same view, the whole race would very quickly die out. They give their wives, however, a three years’ probation, and only marry them after they have thrice undergone purification, in proof of fecundity. They have no intercourse with them during pregnancy, thus showing that their motive in marrying is not self-indulgence but the procreation of children. In the bath the women wear a dress, the men a loin-cloth. Such are the usages of this order.
The Pharisees and Sadducees
Of the two first-named schools, the Pharisees have the reputation of being the most accurate expositors of the laws, and owe to this[[356]] their position as the leading sect. They attribute everything to Fate and God; yet they admit that to act rightly or otherwise rests for the most part with men, though in each action Fate is an auxiliary.[[357]] Every soul, they maintain, is imperishable, but the soul of the good alone passes into another body, while the souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment.
The Sadducees, the second of the orders, do away with Fate altogether, and remove God beyond, not merely the commission, but the very sight, of evil. They maintain that good and evil lie open to men’s choice and that it rests with every man’s will whether he embraces the one or the other. As for the permanence of the soul, penalties in the underworld[[358]] and rewards, they will have none of them.
The Pharisees are affectionate to each other, and cultivate harmonious relations with the community. The Sadducees, even to one another, are rather boorish in their behaviour, and in their intercourse with their fellows are as harsh as with aliens.
Such is what I have to say on the Jewish philosophical schools.—B.J. II. 8. 2-14 (119-166).