a Hellenistic ritual in which participants discussed Greek philosophy while
lounging around a table and eating a large feast. The Pharisees replaced the
philosophical discussion with an annual recounting of the Exodus from Egypt –
a ritual that came to be known as the Passover Seder. More broadly, there was
originally no Jewish concept of man-made law; rather, all law had to come
from Scripture. The Greeks, by contrast, had a long-standing tradition of
human law that dated back to Aeschylus’s Eumenides, which climaxes in the
divine system of justice – the Furies – being transformed into the Athenian
system of justice. The Pharisees emulated this concept of human law, but
rooted it in the existing framework of biblical scripture, thus expanding
Ezra’s exegesis of Midrash.
By the end of the reign of Herod, an additional sect appeared alongside the
Pharisees and Sadducees: the Essenes. Much of what is known about this sect
comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collections of parchments discovered in
the Dead Sea region in 1947. The Essenes were an offshoot of the Sadducees,
but shared some characteristics with the Pharisees. They regarded themselves
as the true heirs of the priesthood, and were disillusioned with the deteriorat-
ing integrity of the Jerusalem priesthood. In response, they withdrew from
mainstream Judean and Galilean society to a monastic lifestyle in the caves
near Qumran.
Like the Pharisees, the Essenes regarded all other sects as ritually impure,
especially the Sadducees and the Jerusalem priesthood. Also like the Pharisees,
they stressed ritual purity, but went to far greater lengths to achieve it. They
immersed themselves multiple times each day in a mikveh(ritual bath; baptisma
in Greek). They regarded personal prayer as having superseded sacrifice as the
true form of worship, yet prayed for a new age in which they would be the new,
purified priesthood. The Essenes, moreover, believed in a cosmic struggle
between the armies of light and darkness that would be set in motion by a new
set of divine instructions. Accordingly, they practiced celibacy in preparation
for what they regarded as an imminent moment of revelation. Since, they rea-
soned, the Israelites had been instructed by Moses to be celibate for three days
prior to revelation at Sinai, not knowing when revelation would take place
required them to remain celibate at all times. By the time Herod died in 4
C.E., then, there were at least three distinct forms of Judaism in Judea. During
the first century C.E., a fourth sect would emerge that would ultimately upend
the delicate relationship between Rome and Jerusalem: the Zealots.
The Zealot tradition and the age of revolt
For all his achievements, Herod left behind chronic tensions between Jews
and pagans, between Jews and local Roman officialdom, between the sects,
and between Jerusalem and the countryside. In retrospect, it is remarkable
that it took more than sixty years after Herod’s death for these tensions to
erupt in the form of armed Jewish revolt. Two factors held these tensions in
The challenge of Hellenism 37