94 CHAPTER TWOJewish districtsofPalestine.^116 Thisimpliesanadultmale population of30,000–
60,000. The sectarians (who were presumably adult males) would have
amounted to as much as 15–30 percent of the adult male population of Judaea.
Though most scholars have simply juxtaposed Josephus’s figures with an
estimate of the size of the Palestinian population (if they have considered
the figures at all) and concluded that the sects were tiny,^117 a more nuanced
consideration of the numbers shows that they are in fact remarkably high.
They would, if correct, indicate among other things that almost no Judaean
(of whatever social class) can have avoided contact, indeed, even family rela-
tionship, with a sectarian, and that no Judaean settlement apart from the
smallest can have lacked a sectarian population (as Josephus in fact says of
the Essenes: War 2.124). Perhaps this only proves that Josephus’s or Broshi’s
figures were wrong.
But it is worth recalling here Martin Goodman’s account of the social and
economic history of Judaea in the first century, which in broad outline is
completelyconvincing.^118 Goodmanbased hisaccount onthe undeniablefact
that the Herodian Temple was a massive magnet for money: silver and gold
poured into its treasuries from all over the Roman and Parthian worlds, as did
pilgrims into its courtyards. This fueled an economy that was, though on a
smaller scale, as abnormal as that of central Italy in the same period. Although
much of the “investment” in the Temple was unproductive (except from the
perspective of the Roman generals who occasionally plundered it), the rest
fundeda largeestablishment ofpriests, Levites,provisioners, constructionand
maintenance workers, clerks, and administrators. The masses of pilgrims may
not often have invested in the city, but they certainly consumed a great deal
oftheproductionofthesurroundingcountryside,andspentmoneyonlodging
and locally manufactured goods. Thus, there came to be in Judaea an unusu-
ally large proportion of relatively well-to-do people, who, dependent as they
were on the temple and the special status of Jerusalem for their well-being,
are likely for the most part to have been pious.^119 Many of them were probably
priests, for it seems clear that the priestly class had grown tremendously since
the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, or of (pseudo-?) Hecataeus of Abdera, who
(^116) “Population of Western Palestine”; this figure, and my guess for Judaea, may be slightly
high. See Introduction, note 13.
(^117) So Baumgarten,Flourishing of Jewish Sects, p. 42 n. 2; S. Cohen,From the Maccabees to
the Mishnah(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), pp. 172–73, emphasizes the small size and mar-
ginal status of the sects without discussing Josephus’s numbers. It is puzzling that Sanders, in his
long (and, it must be said, rather odd) discussion of the social and political history of the Pharisees
(Judaism, pp. 380–412), never discusses the size of the sect.
(^118) Ruling Class, pp. 51–75.
(^119) Goodman argues that the same development worked to the disadvantage of the Judaean
peasantry, since the tendency of the wealthy to invest in land led to the alienation of smallhold-
ings and the reduction of their owners to tenancy, and perhaps other types of dependency.