The basic requirement, they felt, which was asked by God of his people was not the elimination of foreign domination by the Maccabees but the formation of a holy Israel ruled by a theocratic hierarchy. Many such people had fled to the desert before 168 BC, dying of starvation in the wilderness rather than submitting to the abomination of the defilement of the Temple. The Maccabees had persuaded many to return, abandoning their principles in the meantime, in order to rid Jerusalem of the Greeks, but others remained obdurate and true to the law, earning the name of “pious ones” or Hasidim. Out of this group developed two sects – the Essenes and the Pharisees.
The doubts in the minds of the Hasidim were soon enough justified by events. The Maccabeans, called Hasmoneans, were rewarded by the people with the High Priesthood of Israel, but, high as their ideals might have been, the High Priesthood of Israel was a divine office ordained by God, which should have been accorded to one who had satisfied strict criteria of race and purity before he could assume the spiritual and temporal leadership of the Jewish people. In the days of the despised Antiochus the pious Onias III had been banished and the office given to the highest bidder. It was even worse that the Hasmoneans should assume the position of priest kings.
When the most unpopular of them, Alexander Janneus, actually offered the holy sacrifice at the Temple altar, the people hurled abuse at him and his reply was a dreadful massacre of the faithful by the mercenary troops. Such were the events which precipitated a teacher among the Hasidim to gather several priests around him out of the holy city of Jerusalem and flee to the desert. There they began their exile from the impurity and wickedness around them and awaited the Kingdom of God. The community they formed became known as the Community of Righteousness and, as Essenes, they formed with the Pharisees and Sadducees three of the main disciplines of the Jews in the time of Jesus.
In other part of the old Greek Empire various communities of the dispersed Jewish people had become an effective part of the administration and were more open to Hellenising influences. The most important of these communities was in Egypt, so that in Alexandria was formed a distinct canon law which culminated in the construction of a new Temple at Leontopolis in the Land of Onias, the only Jewish sanctuary outside Jerusalem where sacrifices could be made. These Alexandrian Jews were to have a profound influence on the philosophy of the early Christian fathers and the creation of what the Bangor Antiphonary calls the “true vine” which came out of Egypt. The most important of these communities was that of the Therapeutae, who were the Egyptian equivalent of the Essenes.
To be continued
© Pretani Associates 2014