=4. State Quarrel with the Pharisees.=――By the time of John Hyrcanus, the relation between the court and the people had become so strained that a very slight cause was in the end sufficient to bring about the actual rupture. At a big banquet which Hyrcanus gave one day, a person who happened to be a Pharisee, and to whom, possibly, the seat he liked had not been given, took occasion to speak loud scandal against the priest-king’s mother, and to question the consequent right of Hyrcanus to the priesthood. He seems to have been more strict in his notions, this Pharisee, than correct in his facts. His impolite conduct would seem to have had not even the excuse of truth. Hyrcanus was excessively indignant at the ill-timed and ill-tempered attack; he mistook this meddlesome Pharisee for a type of his class, and, in his irritation, during the rest of his reign the king chose his friends and his officials from among the Sadducees. =5. The Essenes.=――One other party among the people claims a little notice. Hardly numerous enough to be called a sect, nor of political importance sufficient to take rank as a faction, the Essenes yet form a feature in the period. The Essenes have been called the monks of Judaism, and they are the nearest approach to anything in the way of monks that Judaism has to show. They were men who in a sort of holy selfishness, and in utter weariness of the world, gave it up, so far as they could, altogether. Their own souls were their chief objects of interest. They passed their days in praying and preaching, and such few possessions as they had were common to all alike. They lived in the very simplest and most uncomfortable fashion, dwelling in caves and huts and deserted places, more like birds and beasts than men. They led this sort of life from duty, but it was an odd conception of duty, and one so entirely opposed to Jewish notions that the Essenes never gained much sympathy among Jews, and were never regarded as more than an eccentric offshoot of Judaism. The little body was never numerous, and gradually died out.