Stephen,
Since the Essenes are earlier said to have inhabited the cities of Judea, the prevailing assumption has been that the passage you quote from Every Good Man is Free 89-91 must refer to the deeds of rulers of that country. Yet no Judean ruler is known to have committed such outrageous deed against his own countrymen as Philo describes. Indeed, in “Embassy to Gaius” Philo indicates that the Jews have been well treated from the time of Augustus down through the reign of Tiberius, with the sole exception of certain misdeeds under Sejanus in Rome and Pilate in Judea. But Philo’s description of even the worst crimes under Pilate falls far short of the genocidal savagery Philo ascribes to the mysterious “potentates” of the above passage. Rather, my own extensive research indicates that the true scene of the horrible events Philo refers to was Alexandrian Egypt. Specifically, Philo unmistakably refers to Flaccus, the governor of Alexandria under the anti-Jewish riots in 38 CE, as well as prominent anti-Semitic Greeks Isidorus and others who worked behind the scenes to instigate violence against the Jewish community in Alexandria. This is demonstrated by numerous very striking verbal parallels between the passage and Philo's essays On Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius. This necessitates a date of 38 CE at the earliest for Every Good Man is Free.
Best regards,
Russell Gmirkin
Stephen wrote:
The following is Colson's Loeb translation of sections 88-91. Two types of
rulers are discussed, both quite disapproved by Philo here and by Essenes. Can
you tell which type sounds more like the Essene view of Sadducee-influenced
rulers and which the Essene view of Pharisee-influenced rulers?
"Such are the athletes of virtue produced by a philosophy free from the
pedantry of Greek wordiness, a philosophy which sets its pupils to practice
themselves in laudable actions, by which the liberty which can never be
enslaved is firmly established. Here we have a proof. Many are the potentates
who at various occasions have raised themselves to power over the country.
They differed both in nature and the line of conduct which they followed. Some
of them carried their zest for outdoing wild beasts in ferocity to the point
of savagery. They left no form of cruelty untried. They slaughtered their
subjects wholesale, or like cooks carved them piecemeal and limb from limb
whilst still alive, and did not stay their hands till justice who surveys
human affairs visited them with the same calamities. Others transformed this
wild frenzy into another kind of viciousness. Their conduct showed intense
bitterness, but they talked with calmness, though the mask of their milder
language failed to conceal their rancorous disposition. They fawned like
venomous hounds yet wrought evils irremediable and left behind them throughout
the cities the unforgettable sufferings of their victims as monuments of their
impiety and inhumanity. Yet none of these, neither the extremely ferocious nor
the deep-eyed treacherous dissemblers, were able to lay a charge against this
congregation of Essenes or holy ones [osion] here described...."
In this very partisan account, (young?) Philo shared an Essene point of view,
and he may here reflect Essene views on Sadducee- and Pharisee-influenced
Hasmoneans, including Alexander Jannaeus, the Qumran-view Wicked Priest.
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