CHAPTER VI. JUDEA DURING THE REMAINDER OF THE RULE OF THE ASMONEANS. =1. Rival Factions. Pharisees and Sadducees.=――Two parties had grown up in the State. They were rival political factions rather than rival religious sects, although their differences had been in the first place, and were still mainly, of a religious sort. Misfortune does not affect all natures alike. In cases of shipwreck there are always some people who make a rush at the boats, and some who turn at once to the pumps. The simile may serve for the Jews at this period. The Babylonian conquest had threatened national shipwreck, and after the anchorage of the Exile, a long-sustained struggle for national existence had begun. More than once it looked as if the waves must close over the people. There were Syrian storms and Roman winds to make way against, and Greek sunshine to resist; and the sunshine perhaps was the most paralysing of all. The different effects of trouble on different natures soon became manifest. Two distinct parties came to the front. One who at all costs stuck to the ship. Hot and grimy, and terribly in earnest, these worked away at the pumps. They kept to that one task, and, in dread of leaks, patched and cobbled, and by degrees laid down a new keel. The other set, in all good faith, took to the boats. They carried with them what they considered essentials for national existence, but what they had not room for, and thought superfluous, they threw overboard. =2. How they got their Names.=――The people who stood by the ship, and who in effect saved it, came to be called Pharisees. There are two possible meanings to the root פרש from which the name is derived. It means to enlarge or to explain, and it also signifies to separate or divide. From either or from both these meanings the Pharisees probably gained their name. Their first object was to separate from everything that might pollute them externally or internally. The fear of injury to their beloved ship, the Law, made them put on it, as it were, an extra coat of defensive armour-plating. They added line upon line and precept upon precept to the original proportions. Pride in their patriotic patchwork induced them also, as we have seen, to accept the name Chasidim, or Saints, which was given them by outsiders, and to gradually, and somewhat ostentatiously, separate themselves collectively as well as individually from the more easy-going part of the nation. The people who took to the boats, the Zaddikim, who relied on their own righteousness, grew to be known as Sadducees. Tradition tells of a certain Sadok, a famous scholar, from whom the Sadducees derived some of their ideas, and possibly their name.