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.