From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

by Shaye J.D. Cohen

The Judaism created by the rabbis of antiquity gradually became the dominant form of Judaism, and it remained the dominant form until the nineteenth century. The rabbis were the “winners” of ancient Jewish history. But in the second to sixth centuries, the rabbis were not nearly as dominant as they would become later, and the concept “the rabbinic period” slights the rabbis’ opponents (the losers) and falsely implies that after 70 CE all Jews accepted the rabbis as their leaders and followed the way of rabbinic Judaism.

The rabbis believed themselves to have been the bearers of a sacred tradition revealed by God to Moses, and thus the direct heirs of the communal leaders of the Jews throughout the generations.

According to this belief (or “myth”), by which the rabbis legitimated themselves and their teachings, the rabbinic period begins with “Moses our rabbi.” Only fundamentalist Jews today accept the historicity of this perspective, but modern scholars, especially Jewish scholars, have been influenced by it as well.

For the believer, rabbinic Judaism is normative Judaism, and the rabbis were always at the center of Jewish history. For the historian, however, “the rabbis” and “the rabbinic period” become meaningful entities only after 70 CE. I shall return to this point in chapters 5 and 7.

shift. The religion, society, and culture of the preexilic kingdoms of Judah and Israel differ in many important ways from those of the period after the destruction of the temple in 587 BCE. The practices, ideas, and institutions that were elaborated during the Second Temple period formed and still form the basis of the religion known as Judaism.

How does Israelite religion differ from Judaism? In many respects, of course, it doesn’t. The two are linked by a common belief in the one supreme God, who created the world, chose the Israelites/Jews to be his people, and entered into a covenantal relationship with them; by a shared attachment to the Holy Land of Israel, the holy city of Jerusalem, and the holy temple; and by the same sacred calendar and many of the same religious observances. Even more important than these commonalities is the fact that the Jews of all times have always seen themselves not merely as the successors to, but also as the continuators of, the legacy of preexilic Israel. Christianity claimed (and to some extent, still claims) to be the true Israel, but this claim was accompanied by an assertion of newness. Christianity is the fruit of a new creation, a new revelation, and a new covenant (a New Testament).

Preexilic Israel was a tribal society living on its ancestral land. Membership in a tribe, and consequently the rights of citizenship (e.g., the right to own land), depended exclusively on birth. There was no established process by which a foreigner could be absorbed into the Israelite polity. Second Temple Judaism, in contrast, was not a tribal society. When the Jews returned from Babylonia, they returned not as tribes but as clans. The entire tribal structure had been destroyed.

They accounted for the triumph of evil by positing the existence of numerous supernatural beings who opposed God’s dominion and everything that was good and true. Mirroring this cosmic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil is the struggle of good and evil spirits within each person. Some of these schemes are so dualistic that we may debate whether they should be called monotheistic (expressing a belief in one God).

Preexilic Israel was ruled by kings and guided by prophets; Second Temple Judaism was not.

Only in the rabbinic period did alleged descendants of the Davidic line emerge again as communal leaders.

Prophets no longer enjoyed the prestige and authority that had been theirs in preexilic times. In Second Temple Judaism, prophets became apocalyptic seers, mystics, healers, and holy men. A new type of authority figure emerged to replace the classical prophet: the scribe, whose authority derived not from his pedigree and institutional setting (like the priest), not from his charismatic personality and direct contact with God (like the prophet), but from his erudition in the sacred Scriptures and traditions. Various sects as well claimed authority on the basis of their superior erudition. The party against which this superior erudition was brandished usually was the priesthood.

Second Temple Judaism is a “book religion.” At its heart lies the Hebrew Bible, the book that Jews call Tanak (or Tanakh) and Christians call the Old Testament. Preexilic Israel produced the raw materials out of which most of the Bible was constructed, but it was Second Temple Judaism that created the Bible, venerated the very parchment on which it was written, and devoted enormous energies to its interpretation. This process is called canonization.

Gabriele Boccaccini, Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought 300 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); and other works by the same author.

These texts, beginning with Daniel, regularly combine the two basic elements of the political theology of Jeremiah: the gentiles rule the Jews to punish them for their sins; the gentiles will continue to rule the Jews until the immutable sequence of empires has run its course and the predetermined day of their destruction has arrived.1

Ancient Jewish history provides numerous other instances of appeals to the imperial power for the adjudication of some dispute or the bequest of some favor. The early Christians adopted the same stance toward the state (Rom. 13:1–7).2

In antiquity, religious persecutions were something of a rarity. The polytheistic and polyethnic empires of both Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean basin tolerated religious and cultic diversity.

What provoked the persecution by Epiphanes remains an enigma in spite of intense study by many scholars, but a persecution there was, and the war that it sparked is history’s first recorded struggle for religious liberty.

In one usage, “Hellenism” means the culture, society, and way of life brought to the peoples of the East by Alexander the Great and his successors.

According to this view, Hellenistic Jews were the Jews who lived in the Diaspora, spoke Greek, wrote literature in Greek, and adulterated their religion with ideas and practices imported from the Hellenistic world.

Hellenistic culture was not merely a debased version of the culture of classical Athens. Its substrate was Greek, its language of expression was Greek, its social elites were Greek (Macedonian), but it absorbed ideas and practices from all the cultures with which it came into contact, thereby assuming many and diverse forms. The natives adopted the ways of the Greeks, and the Greeks adopted the ways of the natives, and the results of these two processes may be called “Hellenism.”

The basic problem that confronted all the Jews of antiquity was how to preserve Jewish identity while living within Hellenistic culture. How could they balance the conflicting claims of universalism and particularism, the desire to be part of the larger world and the desire to be separate and distinct?

The Wisdom literature of the Bible (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes) completely ignores the distinctive elements of Israelite cult, history, and theology; freely draws on the wisdom literature of the ancient East, especially Egypt; and emphasizes the common morality and ethics applicable to all peoples.

Genesis Apocryphon,

neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever explained these differences by appeal to what we would call a racial theory. Instead, they argued that climate, soil, and water determine both the physical and moral characteristics

Therefore the notion of anti-Semitism is inappropriate to antiquity, even if many of the motifs and arguments of the anti-Jewish literature of antiquity are familiar from their subsequent reuse in the anti-Semitism of the medieval and modern worlds.

Furthermore, the social and economic tensions that produced the virulent anti-Semitism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century...

Not a single ancient text says or implies that the Jews were hated or feared because of their economic power.

When they accused the Jews of atheism, they were objecting to the fact that the Jews refused to worship the gods of the gentiles.

But when the Christians accused the Jews of being “Christ-killers” and of denying the Trinity, they meant something much more serious. In their eyes the Jews were cursed by God, doomed to hell, and denied salvation in the hereafter, concepts that are foreign to the perception of Judaism by the polytheists of antiquity.

In sum, anti-Semitism did not exist in antiquity, but anti-Judaism did. Anti-Judaism was the consequence of political strife between the Jews and their neighbors in both Judea and the Diaspora.

The Canaanites, who still lived in substantial numbers on the land, were the sole group that was prohibited (according to Deuteronomy) because it was the sole group that posed a threat to Israelite identity.

In preexilic times, conversion to Judaism did not yet exist because birth is immutable. An Ammonite or an Aramaean could no more become an Israelite in preexilic times than an American can become a citizen of Liechtenstein in our own. Mere residency in the land does not confer citizenship, and a social system that defines a citizen solely as the child of a citizen has no legal mechanism by which to assimilate a foreigner.

The Jews began to redefine themselves as a culture, a way of life, a religion, and it was Judaism, not the religion of preexilic Israel, that prohibited intermarriage but permitted conversion.

What did change after 70 CE was that Jews, or at least the rabbis, were no longer as eager to sell their spiritual wares to the gentiles. The motives of the mission to the gentiles are obscure, but whatever they may have been—whether to hasten the messianic deliverance, to save souls, to garner political support—the rabbis were not interested.

They were not active messianists. In their eyes, the souls of gentiles did not need to be saved, because all righteous gentiles who observe certain basic norms of (what we would call) religion and ethics were guaranteed a share in the world to come (see chap. 7).

Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Josephus, Jeremiah, and Polybius,” History and Theory 21 (1982): 366–81.

In the eyes of the ancients, the essence of religion was neither faith nor dogma, but action. Humanity was commanded by the gods to perform certain acts and to refrain from certain acts, and these commandments and prohibitions (esp. the prohibitions) constituted the essence of religio.

In antiquity a contemplative person who sought systematic answers to questions about the nature of the gods and their involvement in human affairs would have studied philosophy, not “religion.”

the pervasive influence of Christianity on our thinking makes us equate “religion” with theology or faith. This equation is perhaps true for Christianity, but is false not only for ancient polytheism but also for the Judaism of antiquity.

A gentile who “Judaizes” adopts the distinctive ways and manners of the Jews, not necessarily their theology or philosophy.1

Each of these statements is a creed, a fixed formula that summarizes a religion’s essential articles of belief (its dogmas) and is sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority.

Creeds serve as an admission test for converts and as a statement of loyalty for the faithful.

The Jews of antiquity devoted much energy to theological speculation and achieved almost unanimous agreement on certain theological principles, as we shall see, but the boundaries of Jewish communities were not defined by beliefs.

Nowhere, however, does the Hebrew Bible prescribe or regulate the worship of God through prayer.

In the technical sense, “prayer” means a request or petition presented to a deity, but I use the term here to include any speech addressed to God or intended to establish communion between God and humans.

None of these texts implies that prayer was part of the temple cult; lay Jews prayed at and toward the temple, but the temple liturgy consisted of sacrifices, not prayer.

Neither Leviticus nor Numbers nor Deuteronomy nor Ezekiel mentions prayer as an integral part of the sacrificial cult.

The act of sacrifice was silent; neither the priest nor the worshiper was required to say anything.

The temple was the site of God’s name, the holiest place on earth, and the center of Israelite religion, but its cult was exclusively sacrificial.

This is a new type of piety whose origins are not clear. Perhaps it derives from the tradition that enjoins the constant study and pursuit of “Wisdom,” here equated with Torah. Perhaps it emerged under Hellenistic influence, reflecting the Socratic view that the soul is ennobled and made virtuous through the acquisition of knowledge. In any case, this idea had a profound influence on the Judaism of the Second Temple and rabbinic periods.