Note 91 — THE ESSENES.

1852.—Though Ewald published the second edition of the fourth volume of his Jewish History in 1852, when Frankel’s Essay had been six years before the literary world, yet he manifests total ignorance of it in his account of the Essenes, contained in this volume. Still, this profound and merciless critic, without having access to the Jewish information gathered from the Talmud and Midrashim, saw that Essenism was no Greek plant transplanted into Palestine, but like Pharisaism grew out of the Chassidim. He remarks that “people who left the great community in order to lead a specially holy life, with the permission and under the direction of the law, were to be found in Israel from the remotest times, yet in its first form there were only the Nazarites, of whom each one lived for himself; and in the second, the Rechabites combined themselves already into a larger union; but now the whole conscience of the people itself, as it were, departed into solitude with numerous Essenes. For it cannot be denied that they, proceeding from the Chassidim, represent the direct and legitimate development of Judaism in the form which became the ruling one since Ezra.” “Their new features and endeavours merely consisted in their intensely earnest and rigorous application of the demands of the law, as understood and interpreted since Ezra. Finding that the rigorous and logical application of these laws was impossible in the great community, especially in that community as regulated by the Pharisees, they preferred to congregate and live in solitude.”91 Very unfortunate is Ewald’s derivation of Essene from the Rabbinic ‏חזן‎ servant (of God), and the assertion that this name was given to them because it was their only desire to be θεραπευταὶ θεοῦ.