More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This changed dramatically in the 160s BCE. In 168–167 BCE, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid king of Syria, profaned the temple and persecuted Judaism.
In 164 BCE the Maccabees reconquered and purified the temple; the end of Seleucid rule followed twenty years later (142 BCE).
The Maccabean period lasted a century, from the victory of 164 BCE to the entrance of the Romans into Jerusalem in 63 BCE.
The rise of the Maccabees within the Jewish polity was just as phenomenal. They began as insignificant country priests and became high priests and kings, the rulers of an independent state.
During the reigns of John Hyrcanus (135–104 BCE) and Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE), many Jews opposed Maccabean rule. These opponents were not “hellenizers” and “lawless” Jews who supported Antiochus’s attempt to destroy Judaism, but loyal Jews who had had enough of the Maccabees’ autocratic ways.
The new dynasty owed everything to the Romans and therefore supported them wholeheartedly. The founder of the dynasty was Herod the Great (37–4 BCE). He tried to be the king over all his subjects, not just the Jews.
A few mop-up operations remained, notably the taking of Masada (73 or 74 CE), but for all practical purposes, the war was over. The Second Temple period came to an end.
This was the age of sects (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, the Qumran community, the Jesus movement (Christians), Sicarii, Zealots, and others) and sectarian literature; apocalypses and varied speculations about God’s control of human events, the nature of evil, and the secrets of the end time; the growth of the synagogue, liturgical prayer and scriptural study; the “golden age” of Diaspora Judaism, especially in Egypt, which produced a rich literature in Greek, seeking to package Jewish ideas in Hellenistic wrapping; and Judaism’s intense interaction with its ambient culture, producing in some
...more
The earliest of these works, completed around the year 200 CE, was the Mishnah. The Mishnah in turn was the subject of two gigantic commentaries (or more accurately, works that claimed to be commentaries): the Talmud of the land of Israel
In contrast, periodization based on religious or cultural factors is ideologically charged. The bias may be either Jewish or Christian, because both Jews and Christians have a stake in the interpretation of ancient Judaism.
If we accept the claims of the rabbis themselves, the rabbinic period begins much earlier than the second century CE. 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.
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.
What once was late is now deemed early! While “early Judaism” lacks the anti-Jewish overtones of “late Judaism,” it is chronologically vague, and therefore other, more precise expressions are preferable.
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.
Second Temple Judaism, in contrast, was not a tribal society. When the Jews returned from Babylonia, they returned not as tribes but as clans.
Instead of kings, in Second Temple Judaism the priests wielded temporal power. In Maccabean times they even assumed the title “king,” but they were ousted by Herod the Great and his descendants.
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.
The Jews saw (and see) themselves as the heirs and continuators of the people of preexilic Israel; the Jews also felt (and still feel) an affinity for their fellow Jews throughout the world, in spite of differences in language, practice, ideology, and political loyalty.
Timeline
The relationship of Jews and Judaism to gentiles and gentile culture is a complex topic that consists of three distinct but interrelated themes: political (to what extent should the Jews submit to foreign domination?), cultural (to what extent should the Jews absorb gentile ideas and practices?), and social (to what extent should Jews mingle and interact with gentiles?).
The answer was provided by Jeremiah. This prophet had warned the inhabitants of Jerusalem that their rebellion against the king of Babylonia was also a rebellion against God. The prophet counseled surrender.
The dominion granted the Babylonians was only temporary; after a predetermined amount of time, whether the three generations of Jeremiah 27 or the “seventy years” of Jeremiah 25:12 and 29:10, the Babylonian Empire will fall and the Jews will return from exile in triumph and glory.
The Jews who returned, or who were preparing to return, to the land of Israel were reassured by an anonymous prophet that an emancipation proclamation issued by a gentile king was precisely the redemption forecast by Jeremiah (Isa. 45:1–13; see too Ezra 1:1).
The Jews who stayed behind in Babylonia, like all the Jews of the Diaspora communities that would flourish during the subsequent centuries, were willing to forgo even their temple and their land. For both communities, then, complete redemption would need to await the promised day of the Lord.
For more than a thousand years, the Jews of antiquity lived under the rule of the Persians, the Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, the Romans and their Christian continuators, and the Parthians/Sassanians. They seldom rebelled, even when provoked.
One ancient historian says that this war was provoked by Hadrian’s decision to rebuild Jerusalem as a pagan city.
Another ancient historian claims that the war was provoked by a prohibition of circumcision.
In the rabbinic imagination, Hadrian was another Epiphanes, another gentile ruler who sought to destroy Judaism, but for us Hadrian’s motives, as well as those of Epiphanes, remain obscure.
Seventy years after the destruction of the First Temple, the Second Temple was built in fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy. The Jews had no doubt that the prophecy would be fulfilled again, but sixty years had already elapsed and nothing had happened. By the 130s CE, the Jews must have been very restive as they contemplated the rapid approach of the septuagintal year.
end this survey where I began, with Jeremiah. In spite of these four exceptions, the basic political stance of the Jews of both the land of Israel and the Diaspora was not rebellion but accommodation. The Jews must support the state until God sees fit to redeem them.
Between the “us” of Judaism and the “them” of polytheism was a boundary that separated the holy from the profane.
This conception of Hellenism gave rise in turn to the conception of “Hellenistic Judaism” as an antonym for “Palestinian Judaism.”
When used as a descriptive epithet for the culture of the world from Alexander the Great to the first century BCE or CE, “Hellenism” ought to mean not “Greek culture” but the amalgamation of various cultures.
As we shall see, valid distinctions can be drawn between the Judaism of the Diaspora and that of Judea, between the Judaism of Greek-speaking Jews and that of Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews. These distinctions, however, are not between “Hellenistic Judaism” and “non-Hellenistic Judaism”; they are variations within the hellenized Judaism of antiquity.
The basic problem that confronted all the Jews of antiquity was how to preserve Jewish identity while living within Hellenistic culture.
King Solomon built the temple of God with the aid of Phoenician architects and on the standard plan of Syrian temples (1 Kgs. 5–7). The psalmist modeled some of his poems on Canaanite hymns to Baal (Ps. 29) and Egyptian hymns to Aton (Ps. 104). The author of Proverbs drew upon the wisdom of Amenemope (Prov. 22:17–23:11). When the Israelites began to worship Baal alongside their own God and to incorporate Canaanite practices into their religion, however, the prophets objected vociferously.
In the Second Temple period, the integration of the Jews in the Hellenistic world manifested itself in three areas: material culture, language, and philosophy and way of life.
Hebrew was virtually unknown to Egyptian Jewry. Even Philo, certainly the most learned and literate Jew produced by the Jewish community of Alexandria, was no Hebraist; in all likelihood his knowledge of Hebrew did not extend beyond select words and phrases of the Torah.
The centuries that witnessed the height of rabbinic creativity also witnessed the birth of Armenian, Coptic, and Syriac literatures, all of which were heavily imbued with Greek ideas. By the Byzantine period, knowledge of the Greek language was no longer a necessary criterion for hellenization.
But usually the term “hellenization” involves more than just pots, pans, and language. It also involves a way of thought and a way of life.
Some apostates were motivated by the desire to partake fully of the delights of Hellenistic civilization. Particularly onerous in their eyes were the laws that prevented social and sexual intercourse between Jew and gentile. They wanted to “belong.”
Others were “uprooted intellectuals” who could accept the truths of Greek philosophy but had difficulty accepting the truths of Judaism. In a polytheistic world they could not believe in monotheism, in a society that revered philosophy they could not accept revelation, and in a universal culture they could not abide distinctiveness. These three categories of apostasy are not mutually exclusive.
Two centuries later in Alexandria, Philo describes a group of “extreme allegorists” who argued that the laws of the Torah, including the laws of circumcision, Sabbath, and forbidden foods, were meant to be observed not literally but allegorically (an interpretation that would find its way into some elements of early Christianity).
Both in the Diaspora and in Israel, even in rabbinic times, there were always some Jews who were prepared to obliterate the distinction between Jew and gentile and between Judaism and Hellenistic culture. Universalistic trends had always existed in Judaism, even in preexilic times, especially in intellectual circles.
Sometimes it is hard to determine whether a phenomenon that appears in both Judaism and other forms of Hellenistic culture is to be attributed to the influence of one upon the other or to parallel development.
The book of Judith, originally written in Hebrew, is a typical Greek novella or romance, complete with a heroine in distress, narrow escapes, and a happy ending. The Genesis Apocryphon, an elaboration in Aramaic of the stories of Genesis, employs Hellenistic literary techniques (warning dreams, the pathos of the hero) to dress up its narrative. One member of the Maccabean circle in Jerusalem wrote an epic poem in Greek, apparently paraphrasing the Bible.
In his numerous essays on the Torah, Philo tried to demonstrate that the God of Judaism was very like the God of Plato and that the stories of Genesis are not mere amusing diversions but hide profound philosophical truths. This allegorical approach to Scripture was developed even further by Origen, Ambrose, and other fathers of the church, but its first great exponent was Philo, and its origins reach back to Alexandrian Jewry of the third century BCE.
Adopting a page from Greek political theory, Judah the Maccabee had the people declare by acclamation that Hanukkah was to be celebrated annually in commemoration of the great victory over Epiphanes (1 Macc. 4:59). A generation later, Simon the Maccabee had himself declared the high priest through acclamation (1 Macc. 14:41). In Greek political theory, the power to declare festivals, appoint priests, and so on, was vested in the people (the demos), but such an idea was completely foreign to Judaism. The Maccabees, the alleged opponents of foreign ways, adopted a Hellenistic practice for their
...more
“To hellenize or not to hellenize” was not a question the Jews of antiquity had to answer. They were given no choice. The questions that confronted them were “How?” and “How far?”
They further observed that different nations had different moral characteristics, both good and bad (Egyptians are superstitious, Arabs are thieves, Greeks are fast-talking tricksters, and so on), but 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 of nations. 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
...more
