From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

by Shaye J.D. Cohen

The purpose of all these rituals was, as the Torah repeatedly says, to make Israel a “holy” people (Exod. 19:6; Lev. 19:2; Deut. 7:6).

The goal of these innovations was threefold: (a) to ensure that every moment of a Jew’s life was spent in service to God; (b) to bring the Jew into contact with the sacred; and (c) to democratize religion. The first goal is shared by the piety of the Torah and the piety of the Second Temple period, but the second is a development, and the third is a radical transformation of the legacy of the Torah.

The development of prayer and Torah study meant that the sacrificial cult was no longer the only means for reaching God. The emergence of scribes and other sages meant that the priests no longer had a monopoly on religious truth. The synagogue is a lay institution, prayer and Torah study are activities open to all, and the scribe is but a learned layperson.

The Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible has a different perspective. It is universalist in outlook and cosmopolitan in spirit so that Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes ignore all the Israelite rituals and focus instead on virtues that are respected by all peoples (see esp. the code of a gentleman: Job 29–31).

For all ancient thinkers, the core of Judaism was the recognition of God’s sovereignty; this recognition was made manifest, in turn, by observing the requirements of the Torah, ritual and ethics alike.

androcentric, that is, it placed men at the center and assumed men to be the norm.

The subordination of women to men was understood to be perfectly normal and right.

Women are not “you,” they are “yours”—a big difference. They are included in the covenant only by virtue of the fact that they are “yours.”

What the rabbis and Philo mean is that women ought not to take a role in Jewish public life or to assert their authority in public, for a public role is unseemly for a woman.

In sum, women’s Judaism remains elusive. It is relatively easy to collect references from ancient Jewish literature to show what men thought was the proper place of women in law and society, but it is difficult to reconstruct the experience of being a Jewish woman in antiquity.

We cannot be sure, but the limited amount of evidence available suggests that most Jewish women found ways to make their Judaism meaningful, so much so that non-Jewish women found the life of Jewish women attractive.

At first the Israelites believed that their God is merely the God of their nation, mightier than the other gods but not materially different from them. The prophets, however, taught that the God of Israel is the Lord of the entire universe, controlling the destiny of all peoples, and that the Israelites must worship this one God alone.

I shall briefly examine the four major tensions in the new conception of God. They are universalism versus particularism, monotheism versus polytheism, immanence versus transcendence, the God of the philosophers versus the God of the Bible.

God is both the Lord of all, the supreme deity, and also the national God of Israel, who chose Israel from among all the nations and revealed his Torah to it alone.

monotheism is an ambiguous concept. Clearly it means the belief in one supreme God, but that belief may or may not involve a denial of the existence of other supernatural beings.

The Jewish monotheism of antiquity did not exclude belief in many and diverse supernatural beings aside from God.

Logos has a wide variety of meanings, but the most common one is the manifestation of God that comes into contact with the material world and is perceptible by humans.

Because of its obscurities and ambiguities, the passage does not make clear whether Wisdom is merely an attribute of God or whether she is a being endowed with some measure of autonomy and independence.

The impulse to believe that myriads of angels serve the Lord both in this world and in the world above was apparently the belief in God’s cosmic majesty. The more exalted God became, the more he required retainers to sing his glory

The impulse to believe that myriads of demons and spirits delight in attacking humanity was apparently the desire to explain the origins of evil in the universe.

Monotheism demanded monolatry, the worship of only one God from among many supernatural beings.

Any prayer directed to any supernatural being other than God, whether that being was allied with God or opposed to him, violated rabbinic monotheism. At best, it was the heresy of belief in two heavenly powers. At worst, it was polytheism.

The God of the Hebrew Bible is for the most part an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic being, that is, a God who has the form and emotions of humans. He (God is a he) walks and talks, has arms and legs, becomes angry or happy or sad, changes his mind, speaks to humans and is addressed by them, and closely supervises the affairs of the world.

The masses needed (and need!) a God who is accessible and understandable.

major issue throughout this period is the justice of God, known since Leibniz as theodicy. God is the king over his people and over the universe, and it is the responsibility of a king to maintain justice in his domain.

The basic thesis of almost every book in the Hebrew Bible is that God controls human affairs (or at least, the affairs of the Israelites), rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked.

Although God’s control is evident in many ways, most spectacularly through the display of miracles, the Bible itself is aware that the ways of God are sometimes unclear since his ways are not the ways of humanity.

Although God “forgives iniquity” (a better translation would be “tolerates iniquity”), he insists that the guilty party be punished, but through his mercy he allows the punishment to be spread over a span of three or four generations.

Just as the desecration of the temple and the persecution of Judaism provided the impulse for visions of national redemption (see below), the death of righteous martyrs provided the impulse for belief in immortality and resurrection.

That martyrs would be resurrected to life eternal was a doctrine that played an enormous role in the development of Christianity.

“Everything is foreseen [by God], but free will is granted [to humans].”

Why God created humanity in this way was a mystery, although the end would bring a new creation in which sin would have no place (see below).

Why evil? Why has God given dominion to the gentile nations?

As I shall discuss more fully in chapter 5, one of the hallmarks of “sectarian” ideology is exclusivity: only the members of the group are righteous in God’s eyes, and only they properly understand God’s will.

But even if they could not satisfactorily explain the present, they knew that justice would be established in the future.

The democratization of religion had as its goal the sanctification of daily life. Every act and every moment was to be in the service of God.

But all of these theological tenets were susceptible to diverse interpretations, and no one in antiquity thought to promote any single interpretation or set of interpretations as exclusively correct. In other words, no Jew of antiquity gave a creedal definition of Judaism.

But the Jews of the country, who were a substantial part of the population, constituted a “nation” or “religious community” that was recognized by the state and allowed to have its own institutions and jurisdiction.

As a result, throughout the Second Temple and rabbinic periods, the Jews of the country were citizens of two parallel political systems. The first was the “civil” administration of the state, which was implemented on the local level by cities and villages and on the provincial level first by vassal kings (e.g., Herod the Great and Herod Antipas) and then by governors (e.g., the procurators/prefects of the first century CE). The second was the “national” or “religious” administration of the Jewish polity, which, for most of the Second Temple period, was led by the high priest.

The two major institutions controlled by the high priest were the temple and the Sanhedrin. Let us examine each of these briefly.

As the focal point of the religion, the temple was the central communal institution not just for the Jews of the land of Israel but also for those of the Diaspora.

The ideology of the temple also served as a binding force: it represented oneness and exclusivity. Only one place was suitable for God’s home on earth, and that place was the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

One of the most elusive institutions of the Second Temple period is the Sanhedrin (a Hebrew word from the Greek, meaning literally “a sitting together,” “session” or “assembly”). According to the Gospels and Acts, the Sanhedrin was a supreme court chaired by the high priest and composed of members drawn from various groups (Sadducees, Pharisees, priests).

According to rabbinic tradition, however, the Sanhedrin was a legislative as well as a judicial body, chaired by a pair of rabbinic sages and composed entirely of members of the rabbinic elite.

Josephus and the New Testament agree that the high priest was the chair of the Jewish polity and that the Sanhedrin served him, and this claim is probably correct.

A sect is a group that “deviates” from the norm and separates from the church;

A heresy is an “inauthentic” or “illegitimate” doctrine;

a tenet, by contrast, is an “official” or “esse...

In other words, sects and heresies are religious groups and doctrines o...

A sect is a small, organized group that separates itself from a larger religious body and asserts that it alone embodies the ideals of the larger group because it alone understands God’s will.