This is the Bama podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today we continue our look at the responses to Hellenism in the world of first century Judaism. This time examining the group known as the S.E.N.s.

Again, we're going to have a presentation we'll get into with some photos to help. And Brent will be using his chapter markers to have those come up if you're using podcasting software that allows for that. Seriously, they're fantastic. If you're using an iPhone and you're not using an overcast, I don't know.

I'm not using an iPhone and I'm not using an overcast. Well, I'm going to have to check that out. Brent's over here telling me I'm not with it. I'm not very hip. Alright, so we talked about the Sadducees and we talked about the Herodians. What would you say is the thing that bonds them together Brent?

Well, they're both devoted followers of the culture of Hellenism. Okay, so they're pro Hellenism. And that's, we don't want to oversimplify that. There would have been all kinds of gradient scales to their devotion to Hellenism. There would have been plenty of Herodians that would have been reluctantly Hellenistic. But they were complex people just as much as you and I today are complex people.

But yes, they are very pro Hellenism. So we're looking at five different groups and their different responses to Hellenism and the first two groups we looked at are pro Hellenism. Their position would have been I like Hellenism, at least a little bit, if not a whole lot.

And I think I can put my God and my Hellenism together and I think it works. Now there was a group.

As far as we know and the man again dig into history here, do some extra study and discuss it because history loves to argue about the Essings and who the Essings were. That's what we want to talk about the day, the group called the Essings first group of Sadducees, second group of Herodians, through group we want to talk about as the Essings and history debates who they were and where they were and how they came to be.

History always seems to kind of historians and scholars kind of cycle around and they always land the conversation in the same place and they kind of draw a bunch of conclusions and for years it will just kind of sit there and everybody will be in agreement.

And then something will happen, somebody will bring the conversation to the table again and everybody will get all fired up and disagree for a while and then it will come back and resolve in the same place.

And then it just kind of goes on these cycles. So there's a lot of debate about who the Essings were and how much we actually know about them.

But what we seem to know is the Essings were almost largely men but we have and some of the most recent excavations found some female bodies and the graveyards in the cemeteries.

And that's thrown scholars for a loop. I don't really know what to do with that because as far as we knew we thought we knew Essings were completely men and we thought that Essings were almost completely driven by priests.

It wasn't just a random group of people but these were priests that had decided that because of the corruption that we talked about with the Sadducees, they said God has abandoned this system. It is so corrupt, it's so broken.

We can't even be a part of this anymore. And so they left and they went out into the desert and literally they went out into the middle of the desert to a place we're going to look at called Kumran.

That's where we found the Dead Sea Scrolls and we'll talk about that in a moment. But they went out into the desert and they set up shop and they braced themselves for the end of the world for God's coming judgment.

They were very separatist group and in a lot of ways you could say they were driven by kind of a fanatical commitment to a particular version of eschatology.

They saw the corruption of the temple as a sign of the end and they were going out to the desert to prepare kind of like a I don't want to make them sound too crazy here because I love the Essings.

They're of all the five groups I I cling to the Essings with my heart and we'll end there by the time we're done but I'm making them sound almost like preppers because they have almost that feel to them.

Their theology certainly has that feel to it. They went out into the desert to become sons of light and they are rejecting the sons of darkness and there is a huge condemnation of the temple system.

And some of them we have found in history continued to serve at the temple.

Zachariah might be an example of somebody that had Essine connections will look at here in a moment and still did his duties.

He was still serving in the temple. He would have told he would have told anybody that the temple system was completely corrupt but maybe he personally felt like he couldn't give up on the call that God gave to priests.

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