ath. They also think it a good thing to
obey their elders and the majority. They are stricter than any others of
the Jews in resting from their labors on the seventh day, for they not
only prepare their food the day before, that they may not be obliged to
kindle a fire on that day, but they will not venture to move any vessel
out of its place.

[Sidenote: Jos. Jew. War, II, 8:10b, c, 11b]
They are also long-lived, insomuch that most of them live over a hundred
years because of the simplicity of their diet and as a result of their
regular course of life. They despise the miseries of life and are above
pain because of their noble thoughts. And as for death, if it come with
glory, they regard it as better than immortality. They think also, like
the Greeks, that the good have their habitation beyond the ocean in a
region that is never oppressed by storms of rain or of snow, or with heat,
and that this place is refreshed by the gentle breath of the west wind
that is continually blowing from the ocean; while they allot to the bad a
dark and cold den which is never free from unceasing punishment.

[Sidenote: Jos. Jew. War, II, 8:12]
There are also those among them who undertake to foretell things to
come by reading the holy books, by using several different forms of
purifications and by being constantly familiar with discourses of the
prophets; and it is only seldom that they fail in their predictions.

I. Influences that Gave Rise to the Jewish Parties. The Maccabean period
witnessed the birth of the great parties that henceforth distinguished
Judaism. They represented the crystallizing of the different currents of
thought that were traceable in the Greek period and even earlier. These
diverse points of view were in part the result of that democratic spirit
which has always characterized Israel's life. In the striking antithesis
between the idealists and the legalists and the practical men of affairs
it is also possible to detect the potent influence which the prophets had
exerted upon the thought of their nation. In the Greek period the
Chronicler and certain of the psalmists, with their intense devotion to
the temple and its services to the practical exclusion of all other
interests, were the forerunners of the later Pharisees. Ben Sira, with his
hearty appreciation of the good things of life, with his devotion to the
scriptures of his race, with his evident failure to accept the new
doctrine of individual immortality, an