Sources: Talmud Bavli Menachot 65a; Sukkah 43b; Tosefta Rosh Hashanah 1:15; Avot de-Rabbi Natan.

The Boethusians (Beitusim) are a Second Temple sect closely related to — and possibly identical with — the Sadducees. They are named for either Boethus (a High Priest appointed by Herod the Great whose family dominated the high priesthood for decades) or Simon ben Boethus. The talmudic sources are hostile and sparse, and many modern scholars question whether the Boethusians were a distinct sect at all rather than a sub-group or the same group as the Sadducees under a different name. Their attested theological positions closely parallel the Sadducees: rejection of oral Torah, disputes over Temple liturgy calendar (specifically when Shavuot is calculated — they read “the day after the Sabbath” in Leviticus 23:15 as literally the first day of the week, while the Pharisees read it as the day after the first day of Passover). The Boethusian-Sadducee relationship is one of the harder historiographical problems in Second Temple studies: we are almost entirely dependent on rabbinic sources written centuries after both groups ceased to exist, describing their opponents in polemical terms. This is the broader hermeneutical problem of Second Temple sectarian history — virtually every source we have is written by the group that won.