Essenes (Essēnoi, Essaioi), a small religious fraternity among the Jews, whose name and origin, as well as character and history, are alike involved in obscurity. The Essenes bore one of the most momentous parts in the development of Judaism. Christianity stands in so close connection with them that John the Baptist and Christ himself have by some been pronounced to have issued from their ranks; and Islam still bears traces of an original connection. Josephus, Philo, Pliny, Eusebius, and the Fathers generally were long considered the sources, and the only sources, from which the genuine history of this fraternity could be deduced. Strange that for so many centuries the real and genuine sources—the Talmudical writings—should never have been thought of. These, together with Josephus and Philo, Pliny, Makrisi, and Abulfaraj, better enable us to form an idea of the real state of this community. Exception must be taken to the opening statement of Josephus, that there were three different 'sects' among the Jews—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Sadducees were a political party, nothing more or less; and the Pharisees, forming as they did the bulk of the nation, cannot rightly be called a sect. Least of all were the Essenes such. They were Pharisees of stronger convictions, and carried out the Pharisaic views with a consistency which made them ridiculous even in the eyes of their own mother-party. The comparatively modern name of Essenes may be derived either from a Chaldee word sacha, meaning 'bathers' or 'baptists,' or from asa, meaning 'healers.' The Mishna, Beraitha, and Talmud speak of these advanced Pharisees in general as Chasidim (Assidaioi, 'pious men'), Nazirim ('abstainers'), and Toblé Shachārith ('hemerobaptists').
The Nazirim, a kind of voluntary priesthood, enjoining abstinence from wine, flesh, and other sensual enjoyments, had in the troublous times of anti-Syrian agitation, and the general upheaving of society, found numerous adherents; and gradually there sprang up a host of men calling themselves 'Nazirs for ever' (Nazire olam). Pharisees of a spiritual and contemplative bias took this vow of Nazirship for life, and constituted themselves into a sort of religious club. Levitical purity in its strictest and highest sense made them draw closer and closer the innumerable 'fences' which the traditional law had erected round the Biblical law. Thus it became necessary, or at least expedient, that those among them who could break all ties of friendship and family should retire into a solitude not easily approachable by a stranger to their community. Food, again, could not be prepared save by those of the brethren who knew and strictly obeyed the hyper-traditional injunctions. Their dress, every implement of daily use, had to be made under similarly stringent laws of purity. A natural consequence of this their exalted notion of outward priesthood was their general celibacy. In this state of voluntary isolation, trading was out of the question: they tilled the ground, and lived on the fruits of the earth. Taking their meals, and these of the coarsest and plainest description, in common, they idealised the table into an altar, and, prayer having been said, they remained standing silently round it during the repast. That they had no individual property follows of course, and their communistic motto, which the Mishna (Aboth) has preserved to us—'Mine is thine, and thine is mine'—explains itself. We need not enlarge further on their small eccentricities—on the white linen garment, the apron, the scoop or shovel; they are one and all signs and symbols of Levitical purity. Every morning they bathed, like the priests who ministered in the temple, in pure spring-water. They abhorred blood as a source of impurity, and for this reason, probably, some of them abstained also from going up to the temple, where sacrifices were daily offered; others we find present at a festival in the temple (Succah, 51, 53). But these were but outward signs of purity, stepping-stones to inner piety, to communion with God, which was only to be acquired, according to their notion, by solitude and an ascetic life. The belief in the efficacy of the most rigid simplicity and willing self-sacrifice they held in common with the Pharisees; their horror of oaths, their frequent prayers, their occupation with mystical doctrine were their own. Untroubled by the noise of war or the strife of parties, leading a life divided between ablutions, contemplation, and prayer, despising the body and bodily wants—what more natural than that by degrees they should be led into a kind of mystical enthusiasm and fanaticism? They allegorised, they symbolised; and their efforts culminated in seeing the unseen.
Angelology, derived from the Magi, formed a prominent feature of their creed. In course of time, they were looked upon by the vulgar as saints and workers of miracles: they cast out demons, and healed the sick. Jehovah is the original light; from him proceed a number of spirits, and at their head stands the Wisdom, or Logos, into which, after death, the soul is again absorbed. Their code of ethics was threefold—the love of God, of virtue, and of man, their scale of perfectibility reaching its acme in the communion with the Holy Spirit—Ruach Hakodesh (Mishn. Sota, 99). In fine, mixing up, in the strangest manner, the most exalted and the most puerile notions, they became the forerunners of the Christian Gnostics and of the Jewish Cabbalists. One fragment of their literature alone remains; it is quoted in the Talmud (Jerusch. Berachoth) in the following words: 'It is written in the book of the Chasidim, If thou leavest it (the divine law) for one day, it will leave thee for two.'
They seem never to have numbered more than four thousand, including even those Nazirs or Essenes who remained in their own families. Their colony appears to have been established chiefly near the Dead Sea, and it is undoubtedly this colony which has served Josephus as a basis for his romantic Essene republic. But, however distant from each other they might be, a constant intercommunication was kept up through a body of delegates, or angels (Malachim). As they had sprung from the Pharisees, so they again merged into them; the remaining part became Therapeutæ, or Christians. The Talmud gives a distinct account of their ceasing to exist as a separate community (Bechoroth, 27).
See the Talmud, the Midrash, Josephus, Philo; the histories of the Jews by Ewald and Grätz; Sprenger, Leben Mohammads (1861); Reuss, La Théologie Chrétienne; Keim, Jesus of Nazara; Lightfoot on the Colossians; Zeller, who, in his Philosophie der Griechen, makes them indirectly influenced by non-Jewish, neo-Pythagorean doctrines; Lucius, Der Essenismus (Strasburg, 1881).