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Updated: June 5, 2025
The Jews are good citizens and their manner of life is humanitarian. The Essene sect is a living proof of Jewish practical socialism and practical philosophy, the Therapeutae show the Jewish zeal for the contemplative life. Next we come to Philo's philosophical monographs, which are not, as one might expect, the work of his mature thought, but rather the exercises of youth.
Philo concludes his account thus: "This then is what I have to say of those who are called Therapeutae who have devoted themselves to the contemplation of nature, and who have lived in it, and in the soul alone, being citizens of heaven and of the world, and very acceptable to the Father and Creator of the universe because of their virtue; it has procured them His love as their most appropriate reward, which far surpasses all the gifts of fortune, and conducts them to the very summit and perfection of happiness."
The Therapeutae abandon their property, their children, their wives, parents, and friends and homes, to seek out fresh habitations outside the city walls, in solitary places and in deserts. They pray twice in the day, at morning and evening, and the interval is wholly devoted to meditation on the Scriptures and elucidating the allegories therein.
Here it was long before the Savior's birth, not only the Essenes and Therapeutae those Jewish sects, composed of persons with a morbid melancholy, or rather partially deranged had their chief residence; but many others also, that they might better please the gods, withdrew themselves as by the instinct of nature from commerce with men and with all pleasures of life.
But in process of time, persons of this description at first retired into deserts, and afterwards formed themselves into associations, after the manner of the Essenes and Therapeutae. "The causes of this institution are at hand.
Among the Jews the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and the Therapeutae in Egypt, had formed ascetic communities, the former more "practical," the latter more "contemplative:" but both alike agreed in the purpose of escaping from the world into a life of poverty and simplicity, piety and virtue; and among the countless philosophic sects of Asia, known to ecclesiastical writers as "heretics," more than one had professed, and doubtless often practised, the same abstraction from the world, the same contempt of the flesh.
Having acquired from the Egyptian astrologers the arts of healing, thaumaturgy and necromancy, and teaching them in their school, the professors of the Jewish college of Alexandria assumed the title of Essenes, or Therapeutae, the Egyptian and Greek words signifying Doctors, Healers or Wonder Workers.
Judaism had been impregnated with Buddhism, or at all events with Brahminism, and with ideas of asceticism. The Essenes and Therapeutae lived, the first in the time of the Maccabees upon the shores of the Dead Sea, and the last two centuries later, in Egypt.
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