136 A History of Judaism
special worshippers of God they thought it right to make their minds
truly holy, rather than to sacrifice living beings, he did not thereby imply
that sacrifices were seen by them as undesirable, just that they had a
different route to particular piety.^43
The term used by Philo for the Essenes as special worshippers was
therapeutae (‘healers’), and in a separate work, On the Contemplative
Life, he wrote about a contemplative sort of Essene, to whom he gave
the specific name of ‘Therapeutae’ or, for female devotees, ‘Therapeutri-
dae’. What distinguished these Therapeutae from the Essenes, according
to Philo (our only testimony to their existence), was their devotion to
the life of contemplation rather than action. They are said to have left
their homes in the cities for an idyllic life ‘above the Mareotic lake on a
somewhat low- lying hill very happily placed both because of its security
and the pleasantly tempered air. Their safety is secured by the farm
buildings and villages round about and the pleasantness of the air by the
continuous breezes which arise both from the lake which debouches
into the sea and from the open sea hard by. For the sea breezes are light,
the lake breezes close and the two combining together produce a most
healthy condition of climate.’
The Mareotic lake in the Egyptian delta lay south- west of the city of
Alexandria, separated by a narrow isthmus from the Mediterranean
Sea. Here the men and women of the community lived a dedicated life:
They are accustomed to pray twice every day, at sunrise and sunset. When
the sun rises they ask for a ‘fine day’, the ‘fine day’ being [that] their minds
will be filled with a heavenly light. In the second instance they pray that
the soul, being entirely relieved from the disturbance of the senses and
being in its own council and court, may follow the way of truth. The entire
interval from morning until evening is for them an exercise, for they philo-
sophize by reading the sacred writings and interpreting allegorically the
ancestral philosophy. They consider the words of the literal text to be sym-
bols of Nature which has been hidden, and which is revealed in the
underlying meaning.They relied on ‘writing drawn up by the men of a former age’ and they
used the allegorical writings as exemplars. Hence ‘they do not confine
themselves to contemplation but also compose hymns and psalms to
God in all kinds of metres and melodies which they write down with the
rhythms necessarily made more solemn.’^44
There has, unsurprisingly, been much suspicion that these ascetic phil-
osophers were an invention of Philo, the dedicated philosopher who was