History of the Jews, Vol. 2 (of 6)

The tendency of the Judæans of that period, however, was more especially directed to the maintenance and development of all that belonged peculiarly to themselves than to the acquiring of the arts of foreign civilization. The Hebrew language, which, since the close contact of the people with Asiatic nations, had been almost superseded by the Aramaic, appeared now to be celebrating to a certain extent its renaissance; it was rejuvenated and became, for the second time, though in an altered form, the language of the people. It was rendered precious to them through the Holy Scriptural records which they had preserved from destruction, and which had ever been the source of their zeal and enthusiasm. Their coins were, as mentioned before, stamped in Hebrew, public records were written in Hebrew, and the songs of the people were sung in the same language. Though some prevalent Aramaic names were still retained, and Grecian numbers were adopted, the Hebrew language showed its strong vitality by enriching its vocabulary with new forms of words, and stamping the foreign elements it admitted with its own mark. The form that Hebrew assumed from this time forth is called the "New Hebrew." It was distinguished from the old Hebrew by greater clearness and facility, even though it lacked the depth and poetical fervor of the latter. At the same time Greek was understood by all the leaders and statesmen of the community. It was the language made use of in their intercourse with the Syrian kings, and was likewise spoken by their ambassadors to the Roman Senate. Along with Jewish names, Greek names appeared now more frequently than before. The character of the literature was also marked by the change which took place in the spirit of the people at this period of its revival. The sweet note of song was mute; not a trace of poetical creation has come down to us from this and the next epoch. The nation called no longer for the fiery inspiration which flows through the lyric songs of the Psalms, and it could not furnish matter for mournful elegies. What it required to promote religious sentiment and fervor was already provided by the poetry of the Temple, and in the rich stores of the Scriptures the people found knowledge and instruction. Sober history now took the place of triumphant hymns, and related facts and deeds for the use of posterity. History was the only branch of literature which was cultivated, and the recent past and the immediate present furnished the historian's pen with ample subjects. That Hebrew was used in historical writings is shown by the fragments which have come down to us. The so-called first book of the Maccabees, which was written in Hebrew, (but is now extant only in a Greek translation) is a proof of the inherent power of rejuvenescence belonging to the language.

The change in the current of life, caused by political events, showed itself even more in the sphere of religion than in the literature and habits of the people in general. The victory over the Syrians, the expulsion of the Hellenists, the subjection of the Idumæans, the humiliation of the Samaritans, culminating in the destruction of the Temple of Gerizim, were so many triumphs of Judaism over its enemies, and were sanctioned as such by the champions of the religious party. In order to stamp them indelibly on the memory of future generations, their anniversaries were to be kept like the days of the consecration of the Temple. Religion was still the great underlying impulse in all movements, and showed its strength even in the abuse to which it gave rise when it forced Judaism upon the heathens. In the meantime the religious consciousness of the people shone with a clearer light in consequence of the wider field upon which it had entered; the wider view which had been gained into the various relations of life, the advance out of the narrow circle of tradition and inherited customs, produced schism and separation amongst the Judæans themselves. The strict religious party of Assidæans withdrew from the scene of passing events, and, in order to avoid mixing in public life, they sought a secluded retreat where they could give themselves up to undisturbed meditation. In this solitude they formed themselves into a distinct order, with strange customs and new views, and received the name of Essenes. Their example, however, of giving up all active share in the public weal was not followed by all the strictly devout Judæans, the majority of whom, on the contrary, whilst firmly adhering to the precepts of their faith, considered it a religious duty to further the independence of their country. Thus there arose a division among the pious, and a national party separated itself from the Assidæans or Essenes, which did not avoid public life, but, according to its strength and ability, took an active part in public affairs. The members of this numerous sect began at this time to bear the name of Pharisees (Perushim). But this sect, the very center, as it were, of the nation, having above all things at heart the preservation of Judaism in the exact form in which it had been handed down, insisted upon all political undertakings, all public transactions, every national act being tried by the standard of religion. To these demands, however, those who stood at the head of military or diplomatic affairs, and who saw how difficult it was always to deal with political matters according to the strict claims of their faith, would not or could not reconcile themselves. Thus a third party was formed – that of the Sadducees (Zadukim) – the members of which, without forsaking the religion, yet made the interests of the nation their chief care and object. Of these sects – the Assidæan-Essenes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees – only the last two exerted a powerful influence upon the course of events. At what precise period opposition began to show itself among these several parties cannot be determined, as indeed the birth of new spiritual tendencies must ever remain shrouded from view. According to one account, the adverse parties first appeared at the time of Jonathan.

The Pharisees (Perushim) can only be called a party figuratively and by way of distinction from the other two, for the mass of the nation was inclined to Phariseeism, and it was only in the national leaders that its peculiarities became marked. The Pharisees received their name from the fact of their explaining the Scriptures in a peculiar manner, and of deriving new laws from this new interpretation. As expounders of the law the Pharisees formed the learned body of the nation. Their opinions were framed, their actions governed by one cardinal principle – the necessity of preserving Judaism. The individual and the State were to be ruled alike by the laws and customs of their fathers. Every deviation from this principle appeared to the Pharisees as treason to all that was most precious and holy. To their opponents, the Sadducees, who argued that, unless other measures were used for political purposes, weighty national interests would be often wrecked by religious scruples, the Pharisees replied that the fate of the State, like that of the individual, depended not upon man but upon God. It was not human strength, nor human wisdom, nor the warrior's prowess that could determine the weal or the woe of the Judæan people, but Divine Providence alone. Everything happened according to the eternal decrees of the Divine will. Man was responsible only for his moral conduct and the individual path he trod. The results of all human endeavors lay outside the range of human calculation. From this, the Pharisees' view of life, the rival opinion of the Sadducees diverged; whilst the Essenes, on the contrary, exaggerated it. Another view of the Pharisees was probably directed against the following objection urged by the Sadducees: If the fate of the individual or of the State did not depend upon the actions of the one or the policy of the other, there would be an end to Divine justice; misfortune might then assail the righteous man, whilst the sun of happiness smiled upon the sinner. This reproach the Pharisees set aside by the doctrine, borrowed from another source, which taught that Divine justice would manifest itself not during life but after death. God will rouse the dead out of the sleep of the grave; He will reward the righteous according to their works, and punish the wicked for their evil deeds. "Those will rise up to everlasting life, and these to everlasting shame."

These views, however, precisely because they concerned only the inner convictions of men, did not mark the opposition between the parties so clearly as did the third dogma of the Pharisees, establishing the importance and all-embracing influence of religious injunctions. In a nation whose breath of life was religion, many customs whose origin was lost in the dim twilight of the past had taken their place by the side of the written Law. If these customs were not found in the books of the Law they were ascribed to the great teachers (the Sopherim and the great assembly – Keneseth hagedolah), which, at the time of the return of the Captivity, had given form and new vigor to the religious sentiment, and at the head of which stands the illustrious expounder of Scripture, Ezra. Such religious customs were called the legacies of the teachers of the Law (Dibre Sopherim). All these unwritten customs, which lived in the heart of the nation and, as it were, grew with its growth, gained an extraordinary degree of importance from the dangers that Judaism had encountered and the victories that it had achieved. The people had risked, in behalf of these very customs, their property and their life; and the martyrdom that many of the faithful had undergone, and the antagonism they felt towards the renegade and frivolous Hellenists, had much increased the reverence and attachment with which these customs were regarded. The Temple, especially, which had been so ruthlessly defiled and afterwards been reconsecrated in so marvelous a manner, had become doubly precious to the whole people, who were determined to keep it free from the faintest breath of desecration. The Levitical rules of purity, so far as they related to the Temple, were therefore observed with peculiar care and rigorous strictness.

But this devotion to outward forms and ceremonies by no means excluded the religion of the heart. The Pharisees were acknowledged to be moral, chaste, temperate and benevolent. In their administration of justice they allowed mercy to prevail, and judged the accused not from the point of view of moral depravity but from that of human weakness. The following maxim was given by Joshua, the son of Perachia, one of the leaders of the sect, who, with his companion, Matthai of Arbela, lived in the time of Hyrcanus: "Take a teacher, win a friend, and judge every man from the presumption of innocence." His high moral temperament is indicated by this maxim. Their rigid adherence to the Law, and their lenient mildness and indulgence in other matters, gained for the Pharisees the deep veneration of the whole people. Of this sect were the pious priests, the teachers of the Law, and, above all, the magistrates, civil and religious, who at that time often combined both offices in one. The whole inner direction of the State and the Temple was in their hands. But the Pharisees owed their influence chiefly to their knowledge of the Law and to the application they made of it to the affairs of daily life, and they alone were called the interpreters and teachers of the Law. The degrading charge of hypocrisy, which was applied to them by their enemies in later times, they by no means merited, and, indeed, it is altogether preposterous to stigmatize a whole class of men as dissemblers. They were rather, in their origin, the noblest guardians and representatives of Judaism and strict morality. Even their rivals, the Sadducees, could not but bear witness to the fact that "they denied themselves in this world, but would hardly receive a reward in a future world."

This party of the Sadducees, so sharply opposed to the Pharisees, pursued a national-political policy. It was composed of the Judæan aristocracy, the brave soldiers, the generals and the statesmen who had acquired wealth and authority at home, or who had returned from foreign embassies, all having gained, from closer intercourse with the outer world and other lands, freer thought and more worldly views. They formed the kernel of the Hasmonæan following, which in peace or war faithfully served their leaders. This sect doubtless included also some Hellenists, who, shrinking from the desertion of their faith, had returned to Judaism. The Sadducees probably derived their name from one of their leaders, Zadok. The national interests of the Judæan community were placed by the Sadducees above the Law. Burning patriotism was their ruling sentiment, and piety occupied but the second place in their hearts. As experienced men of the world, they felt that the independence of the State could not be upheld by the strictest observance of the laws of religion alone, nor by mere reliance upon Divine protection. They proceeded from this fundamental principle: man must exert his bodily strength and his spiritual powers; he must not allow himself to be kept back by religious scruples from forming political alliances, or from taking part in wars, although by so doing he must inevitably infringe some of the injunctions of religion. According to the Sadducæan views, it was for that purpose that God bestowed free will upon man so that he himself should work out his own well-being; he is master of his fate, and human concerns are not at all swayed by Divine interposition. Reward and punishment are the natural consequences of our actions, and are therefore quite independent of resurrection. Without exactly denying the immortality of the soul, the Sadducees completely repudiated the idea of judgment after death. Oppressed by the abundance of religious ordinances, they would not admit their general applicability nor the obligation of keeping them. Pressed to give some standard by which the really important decrees might be recognized, they laid down the following rule: that only the ordinances which appeared clearly expressed in the Pentateuch were binding. Those which rested upon oral tradition, or had sprung up at various times, had a subordinate value and could not claim to be inviolable. Still they could not help occasionally recognizing the value of traditional interpretations.

From a number of individual instances in which the Sadducees separated themselves from their rivals, one can mark the extent of their opposition to the latter. This appeared in their judiciary and penal laws and in the ritual they adopted, their worship in the Temple being in particular a subject of angry controversy. The Sadducees thought that the punishment ordered by the Pentateuch for the infliction of any bodily injury – "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" – should be literally interpreted and followed out, and obtained in consequence the reputation of being cruel administrators of justice; whilst the Pharisees, appealing to traditional interpretations of the Scriptures, allowed mercy to preponderate, and only required a pecuniary compensation from the offender. The Sadducees, on the other hand, were more lenient in their judgment of those false witnesses whose evidence might have occasioned a judicial murder, as they only inflicted punishment if the execution of the defendant had actually taken place. There were many points relating to the ritual which were warmly disputed by the two parties; for instance, the date of the Feast of Weeks, which, according to the Sadducees, should always fall upon a Sunday, fifty days from the Sabbath after the Passover; so also the pouring of water on the altar and the processions round it with willow branches during the seven days of the Feast of Tabernacles, which the Pharisees advocated and the Sadducees rejected. The latter objected to the providing of the national offerings out of the treasury of the Temple, and insisted that the required sacrifices should be left to the care and zeal of individuals. The manner in which the frankincense should be kindled on the Day of Atonement, whether before or after the entrance of the high priest into the Holy of Holies, was also the cause of bitter strife. On these and other points of dispute the Sadducees invariably followed the exact letter of the Law, which resulted in their occasionally enforcing stricter rules than the Pharisees, who have been so much abused for their rigid austerity. To one Levitical injunction, however, they paid but little attention – that of carefully avoiding the touch of any person or thing considered unclean – and when their rivals purified the vessels of the Temple after they had been subject to any contact of the sort, they ridiculed them, saying, "It wants but little, and the Pharisees will try and cleanse the sun."

In spite of the relief which these less stringent views gave the people, the Sadducees were not popular; the feeling of the time was against laxity and in favor of strict religious observance. Besides, the Sadducees repelled their countrymen by their proud, haughty demeanor and their severe judicial sentences. They never gained the heart of the public, and it was only by force and authority that they were able to make their principles prevail. At that period the religious sentiment was so active that it gave birth to a religious order which far surpassed even the Pharisees in strictness and painful scrupulousness, and which became the basis of a movement that, mixing with new elements, produced a revolution in the history of the world. This order, which, from a small and apparently insignificant origin, grew into a mighty power, destined to exert an irresistible influence, was that of the Essenes.

The origin of this remarkable Essene order, which called forth the admiration even of the Greeks and the Romans, can be dated from the period of great religious enthusiasm excited by the tyranny and persecutions of the Syrians. The Essenes had never formed a political party, but, on the contrary, avoided the glare and tumult of public life. They did not place themselves in harsh antagonism to the Pharisees, but rather assumed the position of a higher grade of Pharisaism, to which party they originally belonged. They sprang without doubt from the Assidæans, whom they resembled in their strict observance of the Sabbath. In their eyes the mere act of moving a vessel from one place to another would count as a desecration of that holy day. Even the calls of nature were not attended to on that day. They lived in all respects like the Nazarites, whose ideal it was to attain the highest sanctity of priestly consecration. It was their constant endeavor, not only to observe all the outward Levitical laws, but to attain through them to inward sanctity and consecration, to deaden their passions and to lead a holy life. The Levitical laws of cleanliness had, through custom and tradition, developed to such a pitch that their austere observers must have been in constant danger of being defiled by contact with persons and objects; and bathing and sacrifices were prescribed, through which they might recover a state of purity. A life-long Nazarite, or, what is the same thing, an Essene, was consequently obliged to avoid any intercourse with those who were less strict than himself, lest he should be contaminated by their proximity. Such considerations compelled him to frequent the society of, and to unite himself with, those only who shared his views. To keep their purity unspotted, the Essenes were thus induced to form themselves into a separate order, the first rule of which commanded implicit obedience to the laws of scrupulous cleanliness. It was only those whose views coincided with their own who could be allowed to cook food for them, and from such likewise had to be procured their clothes, tools, implements of trade and other things, in order to ensure that, in their manufacture, the laws of cleanliness had been duly carried out. They were thus completely set apart by themselves; and, in order to keep clear of any less strictly rigid observers, they thought it advisable to have their meals in common. Thus the Passover supper, which could be partaken of only in a circle of fellow-worshipers, must have been their ideal repast. It was almost impossible for Essenes to mix with women, as by the slightest contact with them they risked coming under the Levitical condemnation of uncleanliness, and, led on from one deduction to another, they began to avoid, if not to despise, the married state. How was it possible for the Essenes to maintain their excessive rigidity, especially in those warlike times? Not only the pagan enemy, but even the Judæan warriors returning from the battle-field, defiled by the touch of a corpse, might bring all their precautions to naught. These fears may have induced the Essenes to seek seclusion in some retired place, where they could remain unvexed by the sounds of war and undisturbed in their mode of life by any of its necessary incidents. They chose for their residence the desert to the west of the Dead Sea, and settled in the oasis of Engadi. The fruit of palm trees, which abound in this district, partly furnished their simple fare. All the Assidæans did not join in the asceticism of the Essenes, nor did all the Essenes betake themselves to the desert. Some continued to live in their own family circles and did not renounce marriage; but, in consequence of their rigid scruples, they were met by many difficulties.

Thus it was that celibacy and repasts held in common came to be considered as the general and most important characteristics of the Essenes. This mode of living led the Essenes to divest themselves of all their private possessions. To a member of their sect private property could be of no use; each one placed his fortune in the common treasury, out of which the wants of the various members of the order were supplied. Hence the proverb, "A Chassid says, 'Mine and thine belong to thee'" (not to me). There were consequently neither rich nor poor among them, and this lack of all concern about material matters naturally led them to abstract their attention from everything mundane and to concentrate it upon religious matters. They thus avoided more and more all that pertained merely to the world, and followed with the enthusiasm of recluses a visionary, ideal tendency. The Essenes were distinguished also by other peculiarities. They were always clothed in white linen. Each of them carried a small shovel, with which, like the Israelites during their wanderings in the desert, they would cover their excrements with earth and thus hide impurity from sight. They also wore a sort of apron or handkerchief (knaphaim), with which to dry themselves after their frequent ablutions. In order to remove even unperceived impurities, they, like the priests before officiating in the Temple, bathed every morning in fresh spring water; and from these daily baths they were called "Morning Baptists" (Toble Shacharith). The name Essene appears likewise to have been derived from this peculiarity, as in the Chaldaic language it means a bather (Aschai, pronounced Assai).

These outward forms were, however, only the steps that were to lead to inward purity and righteousness – the symbols of their close communion with God; to which, according to the opinion of antiquity, man could only attain by fleeing from the world, and devoting himself to an ascetic mode of life. The utmost simplicity in food and dress, abstinence, and the practice of morality and self-sacrifice were certainly virtues which adorned the Essenes, but were not peculiar to their sect, as they belonged equally to the Pharisees. The distinguishing traits of the Essenes, however, were their frequent prayers, their aversion to taking an oath, and their devoted pursuit of a kind of mystic doctrine. Before saying their prayers no profane word was permitted, and at the first dawn of day, after the Shema had been read, they assembled for quiet meditation, preparatory to what was considered their real prayer, which was always to be a spontaneous effusion of the heart. To the Essenes their repasts were a kind of divine service, the table on which their food was spread, an altar, and the fare which they partook of, a holy sacrifice, which they ate in deep and pious meditation. No language of a worldly nature passed their lips during their meals, and these were generally partaken of in complete silence. This strange silence doubtless produced a great impression upon those who did not belong to the order; the more so, because the real nature of this exclusive sect was not known to its contemporaries, and everything concerning it assumed a mysterious and awful aspect.