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ANCIENT JUDAISM

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Chapter One

The Time and Place

There are periods of history as there are places on earth that played a particularly important role in the development of the religious and intellectual culture in which we live. Why these particular ages and these particular places were so fruitful is a mystery not yet resolved, but the fact itself is undisputable. Certain scholars would relate significant developments in religious and intellectual culture to particular stages of social and economic development. At such junctures of events, they maintain, intellectual classes developed in society, striving after the transcendent emerged, and value systems were structured in terms of realities outside the confines of the natural world. These crucial segments of time have been called "Axial Ages."

Fifth-century Athens was such a crucial place and time for human civilization; Renaissance Italy was another; a third was the eastern Mediterranean basin in the last pre-Christian centuries and the early years of the present era. Modern Western culture is largely built on foundations laid in these and similar crucial periods, and here I shall consider the last of the periods and places mentioned, the eastern Mediterranean basin immediately following the turn of the era. Among the great events that took place there and then were the origin and spread of Christianity and the development of Rabbinic Judaism.

So, one may ask, why should these events be studied again? Has not two thousand years' diligent labour taught us almost all that there is to know about them? Is there not a consensus, still accepted by most scholars, on what happened then and how it all came about? The fact of the matter is that modern people have a great deal to learn from a reexamination of that time and that place. "The root of the word is not the root of the matter"; the study of origins does not necessarily explain the outcome. Yet, the outcome, the present day, cannot be comprehended in depth without seeking to understand the past as well.

Moreover, when we examine the time and the place in which those events happened, they turn out to be singularly interesting in their own right. These discoveries deserve reexamination, not least because a series of archaeological discoveries, particularly in the course of the last century, cast new light upon them. They include new manuscript finds that imperiously demand that assumptions sanctified by two millennia of learning and tradition be questioned. New material evidence requires us to reassess things we thought we knew. This is, on the whole, a healthy requirement. When time-hallowed assumptions and "beliefs" are set aside, the "old" evidence too speaks with a new and different voice and is heard with different ears.

If the twentieth century was the "century of the manuscripts," the crown of all its manuscript discoveries was the sectarian library known as Dead Sea Scrolls. The discovery of the sectarian scrolls, i.e., those reflecting the particular views and beliefs of the sectaries who lived at Qumran on the Dead Sea coast, has uncovered, or better recovered, a type of Judaism existing in the last pre-Christian centuries, at whose existence we would otherwise scarcely have guessed. Moreover, these scrolls give us insights into the preceding period, between 400 and 200 B.C.E., for which we have very little data. When we examine the textual basis of the history of ancient Israel and Judaism, it is both true and remarkable that virtually the only literary or historical works surviving from the thousand years or more of the history of Israel down to the conquest of Judah by Alexander the Great (332 B.C.E.) are those included in the Bible. Of course, the Hebrew Bible was not the sum total of the literature produced by ancient Israel, and it contains numerous references to other works, which are lost. Moreover, during and after the fourth century B.C.E. the biblical evidence itself peters out (except for the book of Daniel). Obviously, this poses great problems for historians of Judaism, and the early dates of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, and the even earlier dates of some of the compositions they contain, cast an invaluable light on this obscure age.

Spectacles of Orthodoxy

It is true that history is no "hard science," a point much belaboured in recent times. We can know, so we are told, not secure facts but various narratives, telling of the past. Yet, I feel it necessary to emphasize, the historical enterprise cannot be reduced to rehearsal of a number of ancient (or modern) narratives with equal claims on our credulity. Nor does the historical enterprise release us from the obligation to apply what archaeological or other corroborative data we have to the ancient narratives and to assess them for verisimilitude, parsimony, and plausibility. Modern sensitivities, indeed, bring us to pose new questions of the evidence.

When Jews and Christians tell the story of the last pre-Christian centuries and the turn of the era, which is of the time of Christ and the founding of Christianity, those tellings are not dispassionate. The "baggage," the cultural memory of the modern historians, affects the way they view and tell that story (see also note 2 above).When contemporary historians' religious faith is also involved in this telling (and not infrequently their personal belief system is grounded in a particular perception or interpretation of this piece of the past), the problemis compounded. These factors, in some instances, have real implications for the way the history of that crucial age is written. Robin G. Collingwood, in The Idea of History, appositely remarked that history is in the present and not in the past.

Two main factors, then, condition our understanding and view of the history of Judaism during the age of the Second Temple. One is the historians' presuppositions, the "baggage" and assumptions that they bring to their task. The other factor is the character of the sources of information that are available and how we read them. These two factors are intimately related.

The selection of the source material transmitted by both the Jewish and Christian traditions was determined by the particular varieties of Judaism and Christianity that became "orthodox," or in other words, that became dominant and survived. I adhere in general to the view of an initial diversity that developed into orthodoxy, and not of a pristine orthodoxy that degenerated into variety or diversity. This is true both of Judaism and of Christianity. Observe that these Jewish and Christian orthodoxies only became established as such after the period that I am discussing.

Now, once these later orthodoxies were established, of necessity they viewed the earlier ages through the prism or spectacles of their own self-perception. They cherished only such sources and such information relating to the earlier ages that agreed with their understanding of their past and of themselves. They had no "distance" from their own traditions. So, Judaism and Christianity preserved and transmitted Second Temple–period writings not because they were acceptable in the Second Temple period itself (though some of them may well have been) but because they were acceptable to the forms of Christianity and of Judaism that became dominant, sometimes considerably after the Second Temple period. Moreover, because the later orthodoxies were regnant, they created or profoundly influenced the worldview that, even today, dominates how we see the past. Western culture is informed by the "orthodox" Christian understanding of this segment of antiquity, however politely in recent decades this has been called "Judeo-Christian." Furthermore, in historical writing, we must construct the "other" from a memory transmitted through "oneself," and oneself perceives things through the spectacles of tradition and cultural memory.

First, let us consider in further detail the impact of the "spectacles of orthodoxy" on the survival and perceptions of the data. This may be discerned at a number of levels, and it impacted different types of data in different ways. As we said, religious writings were preserved and transmitted from antiquity because those forms of Christianity and Judaism that became dominant cherished them, or at least regarded them as acceptable. Other writings may have been lost either because they were rejected or due to other quite different (even random) causes. However, when a transmitted tradition preserves writings over time, this shows that they are acceptable to and accepted by that tradition. Generally, "unorthodox" works were not preserved; although some ancient religious groups kept material they regarded as unacceptable, predominantly for polemical purposes, i.e., in order to controvert it. In Late Antiquity, writings containing unacceptable views were often paraphrased or excerpted verbatim, and the polemical context in which they survived clearly reveals attitudes towards them.

It follows, therefore, that Second Temple–period writings transmitted within the Christian (and Jewish) traditions were those acceptable, not in the Second Temple period itself, but to the forms of Christianity and of Judaism that came to dominate after the Second Temple period, for the domination of these streams developed after the destruction of the Second Temple.

If this general point of view is accepted, a further level of complication ensues. "The Second Temple period" actually designates half a millennium, and presumably a process of selection (deliberate or not) also went on during that half-millennium. In addition to ideological or theologically driven considerations, which were doubtless the weightiest, the expense and labour of hand-copying a book must also have served as a winnowing factor. Books that had to be hand-copied were presumably considered important and worthwhile enough (for content, for function, or for some other reason) to justify the expense and effort. Thus, to take the criteria emerging from subsequent orthodoxies as those determining the preservation or production of manuscripts in the Second Temple period is an anachronism. Instead, the dynamics engendered by changes in society and religion must be taken into account.

Yet another layer of complexity may exist when we consider the character of Judaism in the Second Temple period. The difference between "official" and "popular" religion, graphically illustrated for ancient Israel by William G. Dever and others and for the Middle Ages by Carlo Ginzburg and others, should be borne in mind. Dever shows that the religion projected by the biblical books of the First Temple period is a "book" religion cultivated by certain (quite limited) groups in society, while the type of religion reflected by archaeological finds from many and varied sites and, indeed, implicit in certain statements in the biblical books as well when they are read in light of the archaeological data was very different. Ginzburg's approach seeks to reconstruct popular religion, i.e., ancient beliefs still held by the peasant population, which were quite different from the views of the church that were cultivated in higher levels of society. Being interested in the time of the Reformation, he reconstructs these popular beliefs by sensitive reading of official records (particularly of the Inquisition). Ginzburg penetrates behind the structures of accepted doctrine and ideas, even when what he perceives was not understood by the Inquisitors, whose thoughts were themselves informed by official ideas and approved doctrines. So he traces the changes in popular religion coming about due to its conversation with the religion propagated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. We are led to ask whether such approaches might mutatis mutandis prove fruitful in the study of Second Temple–period Judaism. Might evidence be found for the existence of types of religion in the Second Temple period that are not explicit in the written record? Such evidence could come even from sensitive reading of textual sources, such as Tobit, or from archaeological and epigraphical discoveries. Of course, such a search might prove to be in vain, and the written records, even before the emergence of rabbinic orthodoxy, might cohere and overlap with the religious practice and beliefs of most people. In this paragraph, I am entertaining a possibility, no more.

Only certain varieties of Judaism and Christianity survived after the end of the first century C.E. (or rather, are known to us from the traditional literature). Certainly, the growth and probably increased dominance of certain streams of Judaism and the attrition of others must have been underway before the last quarter of the first century C.E. I chose that time as a watershed because towards the end of the first century and in the early second century Rabbinic Judaism emerges fully into the light of day and Christianity grows into separateness. The paramountcy of Rabbinic Judaism was the result of a long process. The consequent rise to dominance of the type of Christianity that became orthodox was also not a onetime event but a centuries-long process. Both processes were underway by the start of the second century C.E.

These dominant forms of Judaism and Christianity determined which sources were transmitted from antiquity, and thus they profoundly influenced the formative tradition of Western culture. For the historian of antiquity, this situation produces a closed circle in two respects:

a. The actual textual corpus is "filtered." What was transmitted to the present was for the most part such as reinforced the claims and position of the eventually dominant varieties of Christianity and Judaism. 29 Concepts like canon, apostolic authority, and oral Torah provided an ideological underpinning for this endeavour. The books that survived were those visible through the spectacles of orthodoxy, and they were often, through one strategy or another, provided with the imprimatur of divine authority.

b. The preserved data are themselves selected by the orthodoxies of a period later than that of their creation, and scholars perceive in them evidence that accords with and buttresses those orthodoxies. Indeed, it is those orthodoxies that have formed the cultural context of the scholars' own days, for, to a great extent, the scholars' contemporary cultural context determines what they perceive. Consequently, they tend to privilege the elements that are in focus through those particular "spectacles," even if other phenomena are present in the same data. This selectivity is, for the most part, not deliberate.

There is here a vicious circle, and being conscious of it is an essential first stage of our historical research. In order to position ourselves as far as we can "outside the box" of the regnant tradition, it is helpful to think from perspectives other than those prescribed by that tradition itself. In this lies the value of the work of nonmainstream and dissenting scholars, who highlight phenomena that conflict with the consensus and thus force "consensus" colleagues to take account of them. I am not saying that these other perspectives should be adopted just because they lie outside the received orthodoxy, but that it is necessary to recognize our own inherited cultural complex and to attempt to challenge it from varied perspectives and so achieve a more nuanced view of the past preceding the coming into being of our inherited orthodoxies.

Now is the time to consider this assertion in further detail. As I have said, many scholars engaged in the task of delineating Judaism of the "preorthodoxy" period are themselves working from the presuppositions of the later Jewish or Christian orthodoxies. So, they may tend to study and emphasize those aspects of Judaism of the period of the Second Temple that were important for the development of the later orthodoxies, Jewish or Christian, or for the exegesis of the Scriptures accepted by those later orthodoxies. Thus Jewish scholars tend to emphasize features of the Jewish literature and thought of the Second Temple period that resonate with rabbinic literature. Works by Jewish scholars have been devoted predominantly to the halachic (Jewish legal) aspects of the documents, to their exegetical methods and their relationship to later midrashic (homiletic) traditions and collections, and the like.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ANCIENT JUDAISM by Michael E. Stone Copyright © 2011 by Michael E. Stone. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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