preoccupations and expectations 205
water, day and night’. It is hard to tell how much of the piety that Jos-
ephus evidently ascribed to this teacher derived from the harshness of
his life and how much from his avoidance of pollution by manufactured
clothes and food. In many respects John the Baptist is portrayed in the
Gospels as similar to Bannus in his insistence on purity, since (apart
from ablutions) he wore camel- hair clothing and a skin tied around his
loins, and ate only locusts and wild honey, eating no bread and drinking
no wine, but in at least one passage in the Gospel of Matthew he is por-
trayed as remarkable not only for the purity of his food but for his
abstinence: in comparison to Jesus, who ‘came eating and drinking, and
they say, “Look, a glutton and drunkard” ’, ‘John came neither eating
nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon.” ’^8
We have seen (in Chapter 4) that the use of fasts for repentance was
well established in the Bible, but fasting seems to have become much
more common among Jews in the late Second Temple period. The
Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Jews ‘by frequent fasts ... bear wit-
ness to the long hunger with which they were once distressed’, and
Josephus singled out fasts as among the characteristics of Judaism
(along with the Sabbath and food taboos) which have spread to the
gentile masses: ‘there is not one city, Greek or barbarian, nor a single
nation, where the fasts ... are not observed.’ Lack of rain or other natu-
ral disasters could prompt a public fast, as described (or perhaps just
imagined) in the Mishnah:
On the first three days of fasting, the priests of the course fasted but not
the whole day; and they of the father’s house did not fast at all. On the
second three days, the priests of the course fasted throughout the whole
day, and they of the father’s house fasted but not the whole day. But on the
last seven days, both of them fasted throughout the whole day. So
R. Joshua. But the Sages say: On the first three days of fasting neither
fasted at all. On the second three days the priests of the course fasted but
not the whole day, and they of the father’s house did not fast at all. On the
last seven days, the priests of the course fasted throughout the whole day,
and they of the father’s house fasted but not the whole day.^9
Such fasting for rain could take highly ritualistic form, as in stories
about the fasts and prayers of the pious Honi the circle- maker, who
seems to have lived in the first half of the first century bce:
Once they said to Honi the Circle- maker, ‘Pray that rain may fall.’ He
answered, ‘Go out and bring in Passover ovens that they be not softened.’