More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
N.T. Wright
Read between
August 19, 2017 - May 8, 2020
Second, the Sadducees had no time for laws other than those in the Bible (or possibly, other than those in the Pentateuch). This viewpoint is set over against those who follow ‘the traditions of the elders’, a pretty clear reference to the Pharisees, who, though their elevation of such traditions to the status of absolute law may be doubted,212 certainly maintained, and applied to themselves at least, a large body of such traditions.
Third, the Sadducees denied the doctrine of the resurrection.213 It should not need saying, but probably does, that this has nothing to do with the post-enlightenment rationalism or ‘liberalism’ that doubts whether such things are possible.
By the first century, ‘resurrection’ had functioned for a long time as a symbol and metaphor for the total reconstitution of Israel, the return from Babylon, and the final redemption. Ezekiel 37 spoke of the return in terms of Israel being awakened out of the grave; the Maccabaean martyrs, as presented in 2 Maccabees (written in the late second or early first century BC),214 spoke of their own forthcoming resurrection in the context of claiming that their god would vindicate his people against the tyrant.
In the light of Mason’s arguments, however, I am inclined to accept Josephus’ verdict, with modifications: in terms of party effectiveness, the Pharisees were far more successful in persuading the people of their views than the Sadducees were. That is, the majority of the people believed in resurrection (most probably in both the literal and the metaphorical senses); the majority of people went on believing that their god would intervene in history, that matters did not lie solely in human hands; and the majority of people were prepared to take at least some of the Pharisaic traditions with at
...more
His agenda, more likely, was the exoneration of the aristocracy, i.e. of his own party. If he made bald statements about Pharisaic domination which make it look as though (in Sanders’ phrase) ‘they ran everything’, the chance is that he did so in order to give the impression of a noble and well-meaning aristocracy whose hands were tied by populist movements beyond their control.
Josephus’ main aim was to exonerate his own party, the aristocracy, and he did so by emphasizing Pharisaic influence and his own annoyance with it.
We may begin by summarizing part of Sanders’ recent argument. It is often thought that the majority of Jews in the period were regarded by the Pharisees, and perhaps by themselves, as ‘sinners’. Equally, it is often thought that the Pharisees controlled every aspect of everyday life. Sanders has pointed out that these two ideas are mutually contradictory, and that in fact neither represents the true state of things.
We have no reason for thinking, either, that strict Pharisaic laws were widely observed, and plenty of reasons for thinking that they were observed only by the Pharisees themselves. Thus it remains likely that the great majority of Jews cared sufficiently about their god, their scriptures and their Jewish heritage to take a fair amount of trouble over the observance of at least biblical law. They prayed, they fasted, they went to synagogue, they travelled to Jerusalem for the regular feasts. They did not eat pork, they kept the sabbath, they circumcised their male children. Equally, they paid
...more
We may therefore take it that the majority of Jews in Palestine during the Roman period kept more or less to their biblical laws, prayed to their ancestral deity, and regulated their lives so as to emphasize the regular feasts and fasts of the calendar. They were not likely to have been deeply reflective theologians (even Josephus, who had studied a good deal, was clearly not that), but their symbolic world and their regular praxis give us a first-rate insight into the theology to which, however inarticulately, they gave allegiance.
The great story of the Hebrew scriptures was therefore inevitably read in the second-temple period as a story in search of a conclusion. This ending would have to incorporate the full liberation and redemption of Israel, an event which had not happened as long as Israel was being oppressed, a prisoner in her own land. And this ending would have to be appropriate: it should correspond to the rest of the story, and grow out of it in obvious continuity and conformity.
The apocalyptic picture of Israel’s suffering and redemption, though often drawn in lurid colours, remains thematically a direct linear descendant of the exodus tradition. On virtually all sides there is a sense that the history of the creator, his world and his covenant people is going somewhere, but that it has not yet arrived there. The creator will act again, as he did in the past, to deliver Israel from her plight and to deal with the evil in the world. The multiple tellings of this basic story witness powerfully to every aspect of the Jewish worldview.
The book of Daniel itself, with its story of Jewish vindication after oppression at the hands of pagans, would be read at the time of the Maccabees as providing powerful support for the Hasmonean regime. The story of Susannah, when attached to the book of Daniel, subverts this message. The new rulers are themselves becoming paganized, and are oppressing the real faithful Israelites.
One basic form of the Jewish story would look like this: Initial Sequence: God has given Israel his Torah, so that by keeping it she may be his people, may be rescued from her pagan enemies, and confirmed as ruler in her own land. This, substantially, is how the story of the book of Joshua works; it is likely that a good deal of the rest of the Bible would also have been read in this way in the first century.
The problem in the first century was that Israel had now been waiting a long time for rescue, and it had not been forthcoming. How, then, could Torah be made to do the job it was supposed to be doing? How could it be helped in its work of rescuing Israel? The answer is that it was to be intensified, by this or that programme: Topical Sequence:
There is, behind the story which focuses on Israel’s rescue, a sense of an older and more fundamental story, which goes like this: Israel is to be the creator’s means of bringing his wise order to the created world.
Israel’s stories are therefore to be understood, at their deepest level, not merely as moralistic tales or pious legends designed to glorify heroes and heroines of old. They embody, in a rich variety of ways, the worldview which in its most basic form remains anchored to the historical story of the world and Israel as a whole. The creator has called Israel to be his people. She is at present suffering, but must hold fast to his covenant code, and he will rescue her. There will come a time when, in a final recapitulation of the smaller stories, Israel will arrive at the conclusion of the larger
...more
Both Temple and Land were regulated by the Torah, which formed the covenant charter for all that Israel was and hoped for, and whose importance increased in proportion to one’s geographical distance from Land and Temple. Closely related to all three was the fact of Jewish ethnicity: the little race, divided by exile and diaspora, knew itself to be a family whose identity had to be maintained at all costs. Temple, Land, Torah and racial identity were the key symbols which anchored the first-century Jewish worldview in everyday life.
The Temple was thus regarded as the place where YHWH lived and ruled in the midst of Israel, and where, through the sacrificial system which reached its climax in the great festivals, he lived in grace, forgiving them, restoring them, and enabling them to be cleansed of defilement and so to continue as his people.
The Temple combined in itself the functions of all three—religion, national figurehead and government—and also included what we think of as the City, the financial and economic world.29 It also included, for that matter, the main slaughterhouse and butcher’s guild: butchery was one of the main skills a priest had to possess. Allowing for the fact that the Romans were the de facto rulers of the country, the Temple was for Jews the centre of every aspect of national existence.
The Pharisees objected in principle to the Hasmonean priesthood and its successors, but were prepared to tolerate it for the sake of being able to continue with the prescribed Temple rituals, as is clear from the fact that they, unlike the Essenes, continued to attend.
The last four prophetic books in the canon (Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi), and in its own way the work of the Chronicler, all point to the restoration of the Temple under the leadership of a royal (Davidic), or possibly a priestly, figure.33 Only when this work was done would the new age arrive. Conversely, if the new age was not yet present, as it was not (or else why would the Romans still be ruling the Land, and why had the Messiah not come?), any building that might happen to occupy the Temple mount could not possibly be the eschatological Temple itself. There was therefore a
...more
The fortunes of the Land, obviously, expressed the whole theme of exile and restoration, which we shall study in detail in the following chapters. The Land shared the ambiguity of the Temple: that is, it had been repossessed by those who returned from Babylon, but the repossession had been partial, and Israel did not in fact rule it herself except as a puppet
Temple and Torah formed an unbreakable whole: the Torah sanctioned and regulated what happened in the Temple, and the Temple was (in much of this period) the practical focal point for the observance of Torah, both in the sense that much Torah-observance actually consisted of Temple-ritual, and in the sense that the Temple was the major place for study and teaching of Torah.42 So, too, Torah and Land formed a tight bond. The Torah offered the promises about the Land, the blessings which would be given in and through it, and the detailed instructions as to the behaviour necessary for blessing to
...more
in the Diaspora, then and subsequently, the study and practice of Torah increasingly became the focal point of Jewishness. For millions of ordinary Jews, Torah became a portable Land, a movable Temple.44 The Pharisees in particular, in conjunction with the burgeoning synagogue movement, developed the theory that study and practice of Torah could take the place of Temple worship. Where two or three gather to study Torah, the Shekinah rests upon them.45
Not that the Pharisees, until the destruction actually happened, ever imagined a Judaism without Temple and Land altogether. In the Diaspora they still looked to Jerusalem; after the destruction, as we saw, many of them yearned and agonized for the Temple to be rebuilt. But Torah provided, in both cases, a second-best substitute which, in long years without the reality, came to assume all its attributes. In later Judaism, the ideologies proper to Temple and Land were fused together into the central symbol of Torah.
These are two tiny examples of an enormous phenomenon, as a result of which there grew up a large body of what is in effect detailed case law. In the first century, this was not written down, nor officially codified, but passed on from teacher to pupil by repetition. The Hebrew for ‘repetition’ is Mishnah: thus, quite naturally, was born one of the basic genres of Jewish literature.
The ‘Mishnah’ itself was not written down until around the start of the second century AD. But, as we saw in the previous two chapters, many of its debates reflect, even if they distort, earlier debates and controversies.
The alternatives to developing some system of oral Torah (without capital letters) was to abandon the Torah itself. Case law was a way of preserving the Torah as a symbol. It could not be abandoned without giving up one major part of the worldview. Torah was interwoven with covenant, promises, Land and hope. Admit that one has abandoned Torah, and one admits to being a traitor to Israel. The detailed discussions of how Torah should be kept on a day-to-day basis are therefore ways of maintaining the vital symbol while making it relevant, while turning it into praxis.
The most notable sign of an emphasis on racial purity is of course the notice in the Temple which forbade non-Jews to penetrate further than the ‘court of the Gentiles’.65 Though of course Jews who lived in day-to-day contact with Gentiles, as many of them did even in Palestine itself, had no choice but to mix with them regularly and quite freely, the literature gives us a fairly clear sense that Gentiles were presumed to be in principle idolaters, immoral and ritually impure.
Jewish racial identity remained, throughout our period, a cultural and religious symbol every bit as vital as Temple, Land and Torah, and indeed thoroughly linked with all of these.
It is commonly said that Judaism is not a ‘faith’, but a way of life. This is at best a half-truth. But it is true that Judaism gives ‘theology’ a lower place in its regular discussions than it does to the question: what ought one to do? If one is to keep the symbols alive, one must quite simply live by them. And the chief symbol by which one lives is of course Torah.
The three major festivals were of course intimately connected with agriculture (Passover, with barley harvest; Pentecost, with wheat harvest and the bringing of first-fruits to the Temple;72 Tabernacles, with the grape harvest). They thus symbolically celebrated the blessing of Israel’s god upon his Land and his people, and thereby drew together the two major covenantal themes of Temple and Land. In addition, Passover celebrated the exodus from Egypt; Pentecost, the giving of Torah on Sinai;73 Tabernacles, the wilderness wandering on the way to the promised land. All three therefore focused
...more
The two extra festivals made substantially the same point, though without the agricultural connection. Hanukkah, commemorating the overthrow of Antiochus Epiphanes by Judas and his followers, underlined the vital importance of true monotheistic worship and the belief that when the tyrants raged against Israel her god would come to the rescue. Purim, celebrating the story found in the book of Esther, re-enacted the reversal of Haman’s plot to destroy the Jews in the Persian empire; it drove home the same message.
If to study the Torah is the equivalent to being in the Temple, in the presence of the Shekinah, then studying becomes in itself a ‘religious’ activity, picking up these themes from the psalms. In this spirit the pious Jews of the second-temple period went to their work.
The priests were the great teachers and guardians of Torah; but there grew up alongside them, at what period it is hard to say with precision, a corps of lay scribes and teachers, who appear in the work of Ben-Sirach (early second century BC), where we meet the blend of study and piety just noted.
The study of Torah was thus revered and institutionalized within second-temple Judaism. It was not one profession among others; nor, as in some modern countries, was study discounted as an irrelevance within a hard-headed practical world. It was, after priesthood itself, the supreme vocation, and commanded the highest respect: In the study of the Law, if the son gained much wisdom [the while he sat] before his teacher, his teacher comes ever before his father, since both he and his father are bound to honour the teacher.82
If Torah was a vital symbol within first-century Judaism, it was a severely practical one. At a time when Judaism’s distinctive identity was under constant threat, Torah provided three badges in particular which marked the Jew out from the pagan: circumcision, sabbath, and the kosher laws, which regulated what food could be eaten, how it was to be killed and cooked, and with whom one might share it. In and through all this ran the theme of Jewish ‘separateness’.
Within an all-Jewish or mostly-Jewish society, circumcision could be assumed, and the manner of its keeping was (more or less) uncontroversial: a male was either circumcised or he was not.84 But, even within such societies, the keeping of sabbath was a matter of dispute: what counted and what did not?85 The maintaining of purity was even more uncertain: what rendered one unclean and what did not?86 Debates about sabbath and purity, therefore, occupied an immense amount of time and effort in the discussions of the learned, as we know from the Mishnah and Talmud.
Torah thus provided the vital covenant boundary-marker, especially in those areas where it seemed important to maintain Israel’s distinctiveness. That this was the case in Galilee ought to go without saying. If one were in Jerusalem, the Temple (still governed by Torah, but assuming the central role) was the dominant cultural and religious symbol. It was around this that Israel was organized, it was this that the covenant god would vindicate. But away from Jerusalem (in Galilee, or in the Diaspora) it was Torah, and particularly the special badges of sabbath and purity, that demarcated the
...more
The ‘works of Torah’ were not a legalist’s ladder, up which one climbed to earn the divine favour, but were the badges that one wore as the marks of identity, of belonging to the chosen people in the present, and hence the all-important signs, to oneself and one’s neighbours, that one belonged to the company who would be vindicated when the covenant god acted to redeem his people.
Sanders has argued that Jews in this period would not object in principle to associating with Gentiles, or even to eating with them, but that there would have been a general sense that one ought not to do these things too much.93 This seems to me on the right lines, but I think if anything Sanders errs on the side of emphasizing Jewish openness to associating with Gentiles.
In his natural eagerness to exonerate first-century Jews from the charge of being arrogantly exclusive and stand-offish towards Gentiles,95 Sanders seems to me to have made two unjustified moves. First, he argues (rightly) that one cannot retroject later rabbinic passages into the pre-70 period, but implies (surely incorrectly) that the pre-70 period would have been less likely than the post-70 period as a setting for anti-Gentile codes.
Yet there was clearly a strong body of opinion, throughout the period from the Maccabees to bar-Kochba, that Gentiles were basically unclean and that contact with them should be kept to a minimum.
But to say, as Sanders does, that ‘the full expression of antipathy to Gentiles’ cannot safely be retrojected earlier than 135 is to go against all we know of Judaism between the Maccabees and bar-Kochba. No doubt the post-135 rabbis added anti-Gentile sentiments of their own. But they added them to a collection that was already well established.101
Second, Sanders’ argument seems to slide from his demonstration that contact with Gentiles was not ruled out into the suggestion that eating with Gentiles was equally permissible.
Jews may not have had a good explanation for it, but ever since the exile, and increasingly since the Maccabaean revolt and the subsequent arrival of the Romans, Gentiles were the hated enemy, and serious fraternization with them was stepping out of line. To object that legally a Gentile was no more a polluting agent than one’s ordinary (and usually, technically speaking, ‘unclean’) Jewish neighbour is, I think, to miss the point. The racial barrier cannot be reduced to terms of legalistically conceived ritual purity alone.104 As in other areas, the tradition has altered the focus of a piece
...more
Unless they intended to assimilate completely into Gentile culture, Jews in general and the stricter of them in particular regarded the day-to-day praxis of Torah as a vital badge of their Judaism, that is to say, as a vital part of their entire worldview.
And within the Essene community, the pesher method took prophecies line by line and claimed that the events of the present were the real fulfilment of what was spoken many generations before. There is an underlying logic to this: it was agreed on all sides that the prophecies had not yet been fulfilled; the sect believed that they were living in the days of fulfilment; therefore the scriptures must somehow refer to them—whatever their ‘original’ meaning may have been.
1. Who are we? We are Israel, the chosen people of the creator god. 2. Where are we? We are in the holy Land, focused on the Temple; but, paradoxically, we are still in exile. 3. What is wrong? We have the wrong rulers: pagans on the one hand, compromised Jews on the other, or, half-way between, Herod and his family. We are all involved in a less-than-ideal situation. 4. What is the solution? Our god must act again to give us the true sort of rule, that is, his own kingship exercised through properly appointed officials (a true priesthood; possibly a true king); and in the mean time Israel
...more
Even among particular groups within ancient Judaism there is no guarantee of uniformity: as Schechter remarked, the rabbis had many faults, but consistency was not one of them.
