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Updated: May 7, 2025
But it being against our rule to send animals to the Temple for sacrifice, we bade them farewell and sent forth messengers into other lands, inviting the Gentiles to come to us to receive instruction in the Jewish religion, with promises to them that if our rule of life was agreeable to them, and they were exact in the appointments of all rites and ceremonies, we should be willing to marry them after their time of probationship was over.
After a year's probationship I was admitted into the order of the Essenes and was given choice of a trade, and it was put forth that I should follow the trade of my father or work amid the fig-trees along our terraces, but my imagination being stirred by the sight of the shepherds among the hills, I said, let me be one.
You will remain with us for to-night and for as long after it as pleases you to the end of your probationship and after, if you prove yourself worthy of admission. Meanwhile you will be given a girdle, a white garment and a little axe. You will sleep in one of the outlying huts. Come with me and I will take you round our village.
'The conflict going on within me goes on within every man, but without this conflict life would be superficial; we shouldn't know the deeper life. Duty has its rewards as well as its pain, and the knowledge that I am passing through a time of probationship sustains me. I know I shall come out of it all a stronger man.
At the news of a new adherent, the faces of the brothers became joyous; for though the rule seems hard when related, they said, in practice, even at first, it seems light enough, and soon we do not feel it at all. They were now on the outskirts of the village, and pointing to a cabin the Essene told Joseph that he would sleep there and enter on the morrow upon his probationship.
To begin his probationship with a surreptitious act would disgrace him in the eyes of the prior, whose good opinion he valued above all. So did his thoughts run on till he came within sight of a curator, who told him that sometimes, on the first day of probationship, honey and figs were allowed.
There is a long time of probationship before one is admitted, the president continued, and when that is concluded another long time must pass over before the proselyte is called to join us at the common repasts.
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