The Oxford History of the Biblical World (85 page)

Josephus describes four prominent philosophic schools, or
haireseis,
in Judea in the early decades of the first century
CE
. In the context of discussing the reign of Jonathan the high priest (ca. 145
BCE
), he records the origins of the first three:

Now at this time there were three
haireseis
among the Jews, which held different opinions concerning human affairs; the first being that of the Pharisees, the second that of the Sadducees, and the third that of the Essenes. As for the Pharisees, they say that certain events are the work of fate, but not all; as to other events it depends upon ourselves whether they shall take place or not. The sect of Essenes, however, declares that Fate is the mistress of all things, and that nothing befalls people unless in accordance with her decree. But the Sadducees do away with Fate, holding that there is no such thing and that human actions are not achieved in accordance with her decree, but that all things lie within our own power.
(Antiquities
13.5.9)

Josephus repeats these descriptions in the context of the Herodian monarchy a century and a half later. For this cosmopolitan Jew living in Rome, the Judean movements are philosophic schools divided principally over the perennial question of fate
and free will. Josephus goes on to compare the Pharisees with the Stoics, the Essenes with the Pythagoreans, and, implicitly, the Sadducees with the Epicureans. Unfortunately absent from his descriptions are such concerns of modern historians as detailed reports of lifestyle, views of the Torah, and attitudes toward the Temple.

The Sadducees and Pharisees are also mentioned by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, by early Christian texts, and by the later rabbinic documents. The Essenes appear in the writings of the Roman naturalist Pliny, and many scholars associate one group of Essenes with the people responsible for the various scrolls located near the Dead Sea settlement of Qumran. While the Greek texts (Josephus, the Gospels, Philo) emphasize philosophic and theological differences, the Hebrew and Aramaic documents (the Qumran scrolls, the rabbinic documents) focus on issues of practice. Only through comparison of all the data can we reconstruct the practices and beliefs of these groups and their histories.

Even more amorphous were what Josephus labels a “fourth philosophy,” the Zealots. To these movements can be added various revitalization and reformist groups, including the followers of John the Baptist, the growing movement known for its claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the diverse congregations of Diaspora Judaism, and various “proselytes” and “sympathizers.”

Although the Temple was the most important and influential institution of the second commonwealth, contemporary comments on its priests and the party most closely connected with them, the Sadducees, are—not unexpectedly—scant. The Sadducees lost power with the onset of the revolt against Rome. All sources describing their beliefs and practices both postdate their fall and are composed by individuals who define themselves in opposition to Sadducaic practice: Josephus, the early Christians, and the rabbis.

The origin of their name is not clear. Perhaps it derived from Zadok, the high priest appointed by King David. Yet the Sadducees are also associated with the Boethusians, a high-priestly family from Alexandria in Egypt, who gained ascendancy under Herod the Great, perhaps because Herod needed them as a counter to the high-priestly claims of the Hasmonean household.

The various sources provide a composite view of the Sadducees: they were pre-dominantly wealthy and aristocratic; their social interests were therefore not surprisingly in preserving the status quo. Such a conservative agenda also extended to their religious preferences. They apparently did not accept such theological innovations as resurrection or angels (see Acts 23.8), and they believed strongly in free will. While many were priests, not all were.

As Temple officials, the Sadducees in the first century
CE
also dominated the Sanhedrin. The high priest was its president, and its senior leaders were members of the Sadducaic party. Pharisees also served in the Sanhedrin, but not infrequently the two groups disagreed.

Although the origins of the Pharisees are not clear, their name apparently comes from a Hebrew root that means “to separate.” The Pharisees may thus have separated
themselves from other Jews in order to practice particular forms of personal piety, or they may have separated themselves from the Gentiles (see 1 Mace. 1.11). According to Josephus, they were immersed in Hasmonean politics, first as enemies of Janneus and later as friends of his wife, Salome Alexandra. The queen promoted the Pharisees, but her action was later reversed by her son Aristobulus. The group found itself again empowered under Herod, in part because the Pharisee Pollio advised the people to accept his rule.

Under Herod the Great, the Pharisees numbered about six thousand (so Josephus). Herod apparently provided them some support, and they in turn appear to have shifted from their strongly political orientation during the reign of Alexander Janneus to a greater emphasis on inward religiosity. Their political activities did not cease, however. At the time of the First Revolt against Rome, the Pharisee Simon ben Gamaliel, along with several Pharisaic colleagues, strongly supported the rebels.

Josephus also remarks upon the Pharisees’ influence with the women of the Herodian court and among the Jewish population at large. Because these comments appear in the
Antiquities,
written in the last decade of the first century
CE
, but are not recorded in his
Jewish War,
written at least a decade earlier, it is plausible that Josephus rewrote history to the advantage of the movement that survived the revolt. Nevertheless, the Pharisees were influential even before 70, as Christian texts also indicate. Paul, writing before the First Revolt, proclaims himself to have been a Pharisee (Phil. 3.5–6), and Acts 22.3, written after, adds that Paul was educated “at the feet of Gamaliel… strictly according to our ancestral law” (see also Acts 5.34–39 on Gamaliel’s view that the followers of Jesus should be tolerated). Regardless of the accuracy of the statements in Acts, their testimony to the importance of the Pharisees remains. For all the Gospels, and especially for Matthew, the Pharisees represent the standard of piety even as they present the greatest challenge to the nascent church.

From the writings of Josephus, early Christian texts, and rabbinic sources, the Pharisees’ beliefs can be tentatively reconstructed. This confederation of like-minded individuals valued both the Torah and their own elaboration of its contents to fit the new questions and circumstances of the changing world. Josephus notes that they “handed down to the people certain regulations from the ancestral succession and not recorded in the laws of Moses”
(Antiquities
13.10.6). This tradition of interpretation, which came to be known as the “oral law,” thus took its place alongside the “written law,” the Torah. The Pharisees extended the holiness of the Temple and its functionaries to domestic life: for them the home became a focal point for religious practice, and the household table matched the Temple altar in sanctity. Doctrinally expanding beyond scripture, the Pharisees also promoted such non-Pentateuchal concepts as the resurrection of the dead, and they coupled belief in free will with an acknowledgment of divine omnipotence.

To accomplish their extension of Torah and practice, the Pharisees engaged in ritualized eating practices, insisted that their food be tithed according to scriptural mandate, and sought to live their daily lives in conformity to the will of heaven. They apparently fasted, a practice shared by many in early Judaism (see Mark 2.18). Some may have practiced private prayer. Yet how specific laws and beliefs were to be interpreted and implemented differed among Pharisaic groups. Rabbinic texts suggest that by the mid-first century
CE
, divisions arose within the movement itself, the most
famous being the “house of Hillel” and the “house of Shammai.” Hillel and Shammai themselves were teachers during the end of the first century
BCE
and the beginning of the first century
CE
. Their debates concerned such matters as Sabbath observance, table fellowship, and purity regulations. Shammai is best known today for his impatience. Hillel—whose spiritual heirs, the rabbis, are responsible for telling the stories about him and about his rival—is remembered as having told the Gentile who asked to be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn!” Despite the several rabbinic references to these figures and their schools, it is extremely difficult to peel away the layers of legend to find the real Hillel or Shammai, much as it is difficult to find the “historical Jesus” beneath the Gospel texts.

The origins of the word
Essene
are unknown; it may been connected to the Hebrew
Hasidim,
or “holy ones,” or it may have some relation to the Greek term for “healers.” Josephus makes the earliest known reference to the group, describing a movement in existence at least by the mid-second century
BCE
. Like Philo, Josephus also indicates that the number of Essenes was comparably small, perhaps only four thousand, and that members lived throughout Judea.

But Philo and Josephus’s Gentile contemporaries, Pliny the Elder and Dio Chrysostom, state that the Essenes lived on the shore of the Dead Sea. From this evidence comes impetus for the conclusion, accepted by the majority of scholars today, that the group responsible for the copying and preservation of the scrolls discovered in the caves near the Dead Sea settlement of Qumran were Essenes. Other scholars, however, have suggested that the composers and copiers of the scrolls were instead a group of Sadducees disenchanted with, if not disfranchised from, the Temple. A third view holds that the scrolls were composed and copied elsewhere and brought to Qumran for safekeeping.

Were the Essenes exclusively male and celibate? The Qumran scroll 1QS suggests that members were celibate men. (Scrolls are identified with a number representing the cave in which the document was found, with “Q” for Qumran, and a final element identifying either the contents of the document or the number of the manuscript. In this case, the “S” stands for
Serek ha-yahad,
Hebrew for “rule of the community.”) But the Essenes known from external sources as well as the group represented by another scroll associated with but not found at Qumran, the Cairo-Damascus Document (abbreviated “CD,” and sometimes called the “Zadokite fragment”), included married members and children. Apparently, some were celibate and some were not.

Reconstruction of the Qumran community on the basis of archaeological investigation and from the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves suggests that the community began as early as the time of the Maccabean revolt. Excavations indicate a settlement from approximately 140
BCE
that was substantially expanded about 100, abandoned about 31
BCE
because of an earthquake, and repopulated at the turn of the era.

The scrolls locate the origins of the community with a figure known only as the “Teacher of Righteousness” or “Righteous Teacher.” Probably a contender for the high priesthood but deposed by the “Wicked Priest” (the Hasmonean kings Jonathan and Simon are plausible candidates), the Teacher led his followers out of Jerusalem
and eventually to the shores of the Dead Sea. Accepting the centrality of the Temple but rejecting its present practices and leaders, the scrolls unique to Qumran propose an alternative to Sadducaic control, as well as to the Pharisaic response.

From the fourteen caves around Qumran come numerous manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and even Greek. These include copies of books from the Hebrew scriptures (with the possible exception of Esther) and from the Old Testament Apocrypha (such as Tobit; the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus; the Letter of Jeremiah); pseudepigraphical works known also from external sources (sections from 1 Enoch; the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs; Jubilees); commentaries on the Hebrew scriptures (called
Pesharim);
Targums (Aramaic translations) of Job and Leviticus; and various documents unique to Qumran, such as the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness (1QM), the Hymn Scroll (1QH), the Temple Scroll (11QTemple), the Genesis Apocryphon (IQapGen), and the awkwardly titled “Collection of Works of the Torah” or (more succinctly) 4QMMT.

In addition to documents, the caves near Qumran also yielded a substantial number of
mezuzot
and
tefillin
(phylacteries) that contain texts from Exodus and Deuteronomy.
Mezuzot
were, and still are, attached by Jews to the doorposts of the house in conformity with Deuteronomy 6.9. Following Deuteronomy 6.8,
tefillin,
also still used in Judaism, are small boxes ceremonially worn on the left hand and forehead during prayer.

The individual manuscripts of the Hebrew scriptures, as well as the
tefillin
and the
mezuzot,
sometimes match the Hebrew versions now standardized in synagogue worship. Sometimes they conform to the version familiar from the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Sometimes they differ from both. The Psalms scroll contains several songs absent from the canonical collection. Thus the Qumran documents reveal that at the turn of the era the biblical text was not yet fully standardized.

A highly ordered society as indicated by the scrolls, the Qumran covenanters had a council of twelve members (one for each tribe of Israel) and three priests. They required candidates to endure a three-year probationary period, held property in common, dressed in white, practiced table fellowship, and believed in predestination. These practices, as well as their utilization of a solar calendar (in contrast to the lunar calendar of the Pharisees and Sadducees), ensured their distinction from those they considered corrupt. Josephus remarks of the Essenes that “although they send votive offerings to the Temple, they do not offer sacrifices because of the difference in the purity regulations which they practice”
(Antiquities
18.1.5).