130 A History of Judaism
homes are open to members of the sect arriving from elsewhere. Secondly,
there is but one purse for them all and a common expenditure. Their
clothes and food are also held in common, for they have adopted the prac-
tice of eating together. In vain would one search elsewhere for a more
effective sharing of the same roof, the same way of life and the same table.
This is the reason: whatever they receive as salary for their day’s work is
not kept to themselves, but it is deposited before them all, in their midst,
to be put to the common employment of those who wish to make use of
it. As for the sick, they are not neglected on the pretext that they can pro-
duce nothing, for, thanks to the common purse, they have whatever is
needed to treat them, so there is no fear of great expense on their behalf.
The aged, for their part, are surrounded with respect and care: they are
like parents whose children lend them a helping hand in their old age with
perfect generosity and surround them with a thousand attentions.The refusal to own slaves was particularly unusual in the ancient world,
and even more unusual was the reason. According to Philo, the Essenes
‘condemn slave- owners, not only as unjust in that they offend against
equality, but still more as ungodly, in that they transgress the law of
nature which, having given birth to all men equally and nourished them
like a mother, makes of them true brothers, not in name but in reality.
But for its own greater enjoyment crafty avarice has dealt mortal blows
at this human kinship, putting hostility in the place of affection, and
hatred in the place of friendship.’ Josephus states more succinctly in the
Antiquities simply that the Essenes ‘consider slavery an injustice’.^34
The general agreement between Philo’s description of the Essenes
and that given by Josephus in the Antiquities suggests either that Jos-
ephus had read Philo or that the two relied on a common source (which
also happened to give precisely the same number for the group, ‘more
than four thousand’). Their emphasis on renunciation of both women
and money fits well with the account given by Pliny.^35
Rather different was the long account of Essene life given by Jos-
ephus in the second book of his Jewish War. It is a remarkably full
ethnographic account, aimed clearly at non- Jewish readers, and a set-
piece to which Josephus referred his readers on a number of occasions
elsewhere in his work:
The third [school], who certainly are reputed to cultivate seriousness, are
called Essenes; although Judeans by ancestry, they are even more mutually
affectionate than the others. Whereas these men shun the pleasures as vice,
they consider self- control and not succumbing to the passions virtue. And