Herod’s will divided his kingdom among three remaining sons. To Philip went the eastern region known as Batanea, containing the cities of Bethsaida, Capitolias, Gerasa, Philadelphia, and Bostra. To Herod Antipas went Peraea (the land beyond the Jordan) and, in the north, Galilee, where lay Esdraela, Tiberias, and Nazareth. To Archelaus fell Samaritis, Idumea, and Judea. In this last were many famous cities or towns: Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheba, Gaza, Gadara, Emmaus, Jamnia, Joppa, Caesarea, Jericho, and Jerusalem. Some Palestinian cities were predominantly Greek, some Syrian; the Gadarene swine attest the non-Jews of Gadara. The gentiles were in the majority in all the coast towns except Joppa and Jamnia, and in the “Decapolis” or ten cities of the Jordan; in the interior the villages were almost entirely Jewish. In this racial division, not unpleasing to Rome, lay the tragedy of Palestine.
We must go back to the Puritans of England to understand the repulsion aroused in pious Jews by the polytheism and immorality of pagan society. Religion was to the Jews the source of their law, their state, and their hope: to let it melt away in the swelling river of Hellenism would, they thought, be national suicide. Hence that mutual hatred of Jew and gentile which kept the little nation in a kind of undulating fever of racial strife, political turbulence, and periodic war. Moreover, the Jews of Judea scorned the people of Galilee as ignorant backsliders, and the Galileans scorned the Judeans as slaves caught in the cobwebs of the Law. Again, a perpetual feud burned between Judeans and Samaritans; for the latter claimed that their hill of Gerizim, and not Zion, had been chosen by Yahveh as his home, and they rejected all the Scriptures except the Pentateuch.18 All these factions agreed in hating the Roman power, which made them pay a heavy price for the unwelcome privilege of peace.
There were now in Palestine some 2,500,000 souls, of whom perhaps 100,000 lived in Jerusalem.19 Most of them spoke Aramaic; priests and scholars understood Hebrew; officials and foreigners and most authors used Greek. The majority of the people were peasants, tilling and irrigating the soil, tending the orchard, the vine, and the flock. In the time of Christ Palestine grew enough wheat to export a modest surplus: 20 its dates, figs, grapes and olives, wine and oil were prized and bought throughout the Mediterranean. The old command was still obeyed to let the land lie fallow in each sabbatical year.21 Handicrafts were largely hereditary and were usually organized in guilds. Jewish opinion honored the worker, and most scholars plied their hands as well as their tongues. Slaves were fewer than in any other Mediterranean country. Petty trade flourished, but there were as yet few Jewish merchants of large means and range. “We are not a commercial people,” said Josephus; “we live in a country [eastern Judea] without a seaboard, and have no inclination to [foreign] trade.”22 Financial operations were of minor scope until Hillel, perhaps at Herod’s suggestion, abrogated the law of Deuteronomy (xv, 1-11) requiring the cancellation of debts every seventh year. The Temple itself was the national bank.
Within the Temple was the hall Gazith, meeting place of the Sanhedrin or Great Council of the Elders of Israel. Probably the institution arose in the period of Seleucid rule (ca. 200 B.C.), to replace the earlier council mentioned in Numbers (XI, 16) as advising Moses. Originally selected by the high priest from the sacerdotal aristocracy, it had come in Roman times to co-opt into its membership a rising number of Pharisees and a few professional Scribes.23 These seventy-one men, under the presidency of the high priest, claimed supreme power over all Jews everywhere, and orthodox Jews everywhere acknowledged it; but the Hasmoneans, Herod, and Rome recognized their authority only in violations of Jewish law by a Judean Jew. They could pass sentence of death upon Jews in Judea for religious offenses, but could not execute it without confirmation by the civil power.24
In this assembly, as in most, two factions fought for predominance—a conservative group led by the higher priests and the Sadducees, and a liberal group led by Pharisees and Scribes. Most of the upper clergy and upper classes belonged to the Sadducees (Zadokim), so named after their founder Zadok; they were nationalistic in politics and orthodox in religion; they stood for the enforcement of the Torah or written Law, but rejected the additional ordinances of the oral tradition and the liberalizing interpretations of the Pharisees. They doubted immortality and were content to possess the good things of the earth.
The Pharisees (Perushim, separatists) were so named by the Sadducees as meaning that they separated themselves (like good Brahmans) from those who contracted religious impurity by neglecting the requirements of ritual cleanliness.25 They were a continuation of the Chasidim, or Devotees, of the Maccabean age, who had upheld the strictest application of the Law. Josephus, himself a Pharisee, defined them as “a body of Jews who profess to be more religious than the rest, and to explain the laws more precisely.”26 For this purpose they added to the written Law of the Pentateuch the oral tradition of interpretations and decisions made by recognized teachers of the Law. These interpretations were necessary, in the judgment of the Pharisees, to clarify the obscurities of the Mosaic Code, to specify its application in particular cases, and to modify its letter, occasionally, in adaptation to the changed needs and conditions of life. They were at once rigorous and lenient, softening the Law here and there as in Hillel’s decree on interest, but demanding the full observation of the oral tradition as well as of the Torah. Only through this full obedience, they felt, could the Jews escape assimilation and extinction. Reconciled to Roman domination, the Pharisees sought consolation in the hope of a physical and spiritual immortality. They lived simply, condemned luxury, fasted frequently, washed sedulously, and were now and then irritatingly conscious of their virtue; but they represented the moral strength of Judaism, won the middle classes to their support, and gave their followers a faith and rule that saved them from disintegration when catastrophe came. After the Temple was destroyed (A.D. 70), the priesthood lost influence, the Sadducees disappeared, the synagogue replaced the temple, and the Pharisees, through the rabbis, became the teachers and shepherds of a scattered but undefeated people.
The most extreme of the Jewish sects was that of the Essenes. They derived their piety from the Chasidim, their name probably from the Chaldaic aschai (bather), their doctrine and practice from the stream of ascetic theory and regimen circulating through the world of the last century before Christ; possibly they were influenced by Brahmanic, Buddhist, Parsee, Pythagorean, and Cynic ideas that came to the crossroads of trade at Jerusalem. Numbering some 4000 in Palestine, they organized themselves into a distinct order, observed both the written and the oral Law with passionate exactitude, and lived together as almost monastic celibates tilling the soil in the oasis of Engadi amid the desert west of the Dead Sea. They dwelt in homes owned by their community, had their meals in common and in silence, chose their leaders by a general vote, mingled their goods and earnings in a common treasury, and obeyed the Chasidic motto, “Mine and thine belong to thee.”27 Many of them, says Josephus, “lived more than a hundred years because of their simple diet and regular life.”28 Each clothed himself in white linen, carried a little hoe to cover his droppings, washed himself like a Brahmin afterward, and considered it a sacrilege to evacuate on the Sabbath.29 A few of them married and lived in towns, but practiced the Tolstoian rule of cohabiting with their wives only to beget children. The members of the sect avoided all sensual pleasure and sought through meditation and prayer a mystic union with God. They hoped that by piety, abstinence, and contemplation they might acquire magic powers and foresee the future. Like most people of their time they believed in angels and demons, thought of diseases as possession by evil spirits, and tried to exorcise these by magical formulas; from their “secret doctrine” came some parts of the Cabala.30 They looked for the coming of a Messiah who would establish a communistic egalitarian Kingdom of Heaven (Malchuth Shamayim) on earth; into that Kingdom only those would enter who had led a spotless life.31 They were ardent pacifists and refused to make implements of war; but when the legions of Titus attacked Jerusalem and the Temple the Essenes joined other Jews in defending their city and its shrine and fought till nearly all of their order were dead. As Josephus describes their customs and their sufferings we enter into the atmosphere of Christianity:
Although they were tortured and racked, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through every torment to force them either to blaspheme their legislator, or to eat what was forbidden them, yet could they not be made to do either of them; no, nor once to flatter their tormentors, or to shed a tear. But they smiled in their very pains, and laughed those to scorn who tortured them, and gave up their souls in great cheerfulness, as expecting to receive them again.32
These—Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes—were the chief religious sects of Judea in the generation before Christ. The Scribes (Hakamin, learned) whom Jesus so often bracketed with the Pharisees were not a sect but a profession; they were scholars learned in the Law, who lectured on it in synagogues, taught it in schools, debated it in public and private, and applied it in judgment on specific cases. A few of them were priests, some were Sadducees, most were Pharisees; they were in the two centuries before Hillel what the rabbis were after him. They were the iurisprudentes of Judea, whose legal opinions, selected by time and transmitted by word of mouth from teacher to pupil, became part of that oral tradition which the Pharisees honored along with the written Law. Under their influence the Code of Moses proliferated into thousands of detailed precepts designed to meet every circumstance.
The earliest definite figure among these lay teachers of the Law is that of Hillel, and even he is nearly lost in the web of legend that a fond posterity wove about his name. We are told that he was born in Babylon (75 B.C.?) of a distinguished but impoverished family. He came as a grown man to Jerusalem, where he supported his wife and children by manual labor. Half his daily wage he paid for admission to the school where two famous masters, Shemaya and Abtolim, expounded the Law. Lacking the fee one day, and denied entry, he climbed upon a window sill “that he might hear the words of the living God.” Frozen with the cold, story says, he fell into the snow and was found there half dead the next morning.33 He became in his turn a revered rabbi or teacher, renowned for his modesty, patience, and gentleness. One account tells how a man wagered he could anger Hillel, and lost.34 He laid down three principles for the guidance of life: love of man, of peace, and of the Law and the knowledge of it. When a would-be proselyte asked him to explain the Law in as little time as a man could stand on one foot, Hillel answered: “What is hateful to thyself do not do to another”;35I it was a cautiously negative form of that Golden Rule which had long before been phrased positively in Leviticus. Again Hillel taught: “Judge not thy neighbor until thou art in his place.”37 He sought to quiet the quarreling sects by laying down seven rules for interpreting the Law. His own interpretations were liberal; most notably, he facilitated the lending of money and the procurement of divorce. He was a pacifier, not a reformer; “separate not thyself from the congregation,” he advised the young rebels of his day. He accepted Herod as an inescapable evil and was appointed by him president of the Sanhedrin (30 B.C.). Its Pharisean majority loved him so well that he remained head of the Great Council until his death (A.D. 10). Out of respect for his memory the office was made hereditary in his family for 400 years.
The Council gave its second place of honor to Hillel’s rival, the conservative rabbi Shammai. He taught a much stricter interpretation of the Law, rejected divorce, and demanded the literal application of the Torah, regardless of new conditions. This division of Jewish teachers into conservative and liberal groups had existed for a century before Hillel, and continued until the destruction of the Temple.