‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 137
himself unable to escape as much as he would have liked from the world
of action, as we shall see (Chapter 7). The life of the Therapeutae seems
too intense to be real. Each individual is said to live in isolation (in con-
trast to the communal life of the Essenes) except on the Sabbath, when
they meet for improving talk. They eat and drink only after sunset, and
as little as possible, some accustoming themselves ‘as they say the grass-
hoppers have, to live upon air’, and restricting themselves to cheap
bread and salt (or hyssop for the dainty) and spring water. They are said
to celebrate in particular the festival of Shavuot, to which the number
fifty has been assigned as being ‘the most sacred of numbers and the
most deeply rooted in nature’. On this occasion, after praying with
hands outstretched and eyes turned up to heaven, they enjoy a vegetar-
ian, teetotal banquet, each lying in order on couches, men on the right
and women on the left, while their leader examines something in the
holy writings, ‘unfolding the meaning hidden in allegories’, and they
sing hymns in perfect harmony:
The choir of the Therapeutae of either sex ... create an harmonious con-
cert, music in the truest sense ... Thus they continue till dawn, drunk with
this drunkenness in which there is no shame, then not with heavy heads or
drowsy eyes but more alert and wakeful than when they came to the ban-
quet, they stand with their faces and whole body turned to the east.^45
Of the details in Philo’s description which encourage confidence that he
was describing a real group of Jews, the most telling is his inclusion of
women as full members, in contrast to the womenfolk of the married Ess-
enes described by Josephus, whose role was only to procreate, and whose
only recorded religious act was to bathe ‘wrapped in linen’ when their
menfolk wore a loincloth. Since Philo was elsewhere strikingly antagonis-
tic to women as ‘selfish, excessively jealous, skilful in ensuring the morals
of a spouse and in seducing him by endless charms’, his particularizing the
full role of women among the Therapeutae is unlikely to have come from
his imagination, let alone his description of the practicalities in allowing
men and women to worship together in chaste fashion:
This common sanctuary in which they meet every seventh day is a double
enclosure, one portion set apart for the use of men, the other for the women.
For women too regularly make part of the audience with the same ardour
and the same sense of their calling. The wall between the two chambers
rises up from the ground to two or three or four cubits built in the form of
a breast work, while the space above up to the roof is left open. This