More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The injunction of the Shema that the Israelites are to place the words of God upon their heart, hand, forehead, and doorposts (Deut. 6:6–9), clearly a metaphorical demand for constant meditation on God’s commandments, was, by the second century BCE, interpreted literally, giving rise to the custom of wearing tefillin, phylacteries (Matt. 23:5), and affixing mezuzot to the doorposts.
New prohibitions were added to those provided by the Torah, new rituals were invented, and new meanings were attached to the observance of the rituals and prohibitions.
one of the hallmarks of Judaism, in contrast to Israelite religion, is the transferal of sanctity from the temple to areas outside of it, from the priests to the laity, and from the temple cult to actions of daily life.
for the broader reaches of the population, the worship of God through prayer and Torah study brought a measure of sanctity and communion with God that the Torah never envisioned.
The development of the synagogue meant that the temple, for all its uniqueness, was no longer the only place where people could communicate with God.
The Holiness Code (Lev. 19) imagines that the quest for holiness includes the proper observance of the Sabbath and the sacrificial cult as well as helping the poor and loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
This emphasis on ethics and universal virtues is the legacy of the wisdom tradition.
Whether Jewish piety lends itself more readily than Christian piety to a focus on external observances rather than inner spirituality is a question that a historian cannot answer.
women figured prominently in the early Jesus movement.
The theme of this paragraph is the recognition of the suzerainty of God, what the Mishnah calls “the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven.”
Thus, according to the Mishnah, the three themes of the Shema are the kingship of God, reward and punishment, and redemption.
the Shema, by virtue of its central place in the liturgy, serves well as a convenient outline of Jewish beliefs,
“Should you [the Ammonites and Moabites] not possess what your god Chemosh gives you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that the LORD our God has conquered for our benefit?” (Judg. 11:24, part of a letter of Jephthah to the king of the Ammonites)—
By the sixth century BCE, the prophetic view was clearly triumphant. At the very beginning of the Second Temple period, Second Isaiah hailed the God of Israel as the creator of the world and mocked the gods of wood and stone as things of naught (Isa. 44).
In its rabbinic interpretation, the Shema proclaims the existence of the one God who is king of the universe as well as king of the Jews.
By Hellenistic times, the phrase Heis Theos, “God is One!” (or “There is one God!”), became a Jewish slogan, but monotheism is an ambiguous concept.
The Hebrew Bible occasionally refers to angels,
During the Second Temple period, the role of angels increased dramatically in Jewish theology.
Each of the nations in God’s cosmic empire had its own angelic supervisor called a “prince”; Michael was the prince of Israel, who stood up for his people in times of distress (Dan. 10:13, 21; 12:1).
For Philo and other Greek-speaking Jews, the Logos, God’s “speech” or “reason” (often mistranslated “Word”), served even more than the angels to mediate between God and the world. 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.
Logos is God’s intermediary with us.
The Logos of Philo resembles the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8.
Like the Logos, Wisdom assists God during the act of creation (or should we say that God’s Wisdom was manifested in the creation?).
The third and second centuries BCE, however, witnessed the emergence of Satan as a clearly defined being.
Protection from these malevolent forces could be obtained through prayer and piety or through amulets and spells (cf. Tobit).
medical care often took the form of exorcisms, the “abjuring” or “casting away” of the demonic force.
(Gen. 1 neglected to mention that the angels were created by God, but the gap was filled by rabbinic lore, as it had been by Jubilees 2:2),
Any prayer directed to any supernatural being other than God, whether that being was allied with God or opposed to him, violated rabbinic monotheism.
Maimonides defined monotheism to be the belief in only one supernatural being.
Jews like Philo, who believed in the Logos, did so in order to understand how God could create the world while maintaining a respectable philosophical distance from it. Nevertheless Philo and other Logos-believing Jews did not worship the Logos, nor did they believe that it would ever become incarnate in a human body.
many biblical passages say that the occupant of the temple was not God but God’s “Name” (Deut. 12:11) or “Glory” (1 Kgs. 8:11).
The Jews would have agreed with the Athenians that the worship of the gods was silly and useless (e.g., 1 Kgs. 18:27; Ps. 115:4–8), but for the Jews the nearness of God was as real as the nearness of the general Demetrius Poliorcetes was for the Athenians. Although the God of the Jews was the king of the universe, he also was near enough to hearken to the prayers of humanity.
This paradox is highlighted in a remark of a fourth-century rabbi: “Pagan gods seem to be near [because their images are so near] but in reality are far away [because they do not hearken to prayer]; but the Holy One, blessed is he, seems distant [because of his transcendence] but there is none closer than he [because he hearkens to prayer].”43
The god of the philosophers is a different sort of being altogether: abstract (the Prime Mover, the First Cause, the Mind or Soul of the Universe), immutable, and relatively unconcerned with the affairs of humanity.
many of the Targumim, the Aramaic translations of Scripture, reduce or eliminate scriptural anthropomorphisms.
Popular piety does not need or want an immutable and shapeless Prime Mover; it wants a God who reveals himself to people, listens to prayer, and can be grasped in human terms. This is the God of the Shema, the Bible, and the liturgy.
through his mercy he allows the punishment to be spread over a span of three or four generations.
accumulated guilt devolved upon the third and fourth generation only if the children wickedly persisted in the sinful ways of the parents (Exod. 20:5).
“The parents [MT: fathers] have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” was a widely quoted proverb of the time (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2).
“The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child” (Ezek. 18:20). This notion was a major departure from the system that God himself revealed to Moses in Exodus 34.
the book concludes that God’s ways are unknowable and that humanity must not presume to understand what is beyond its ken.
Many of the gnostic systems are both nonmonotheistic and anti-Jewish in that they identify the evil Creator with the God of the Jews (who is also the God of the Hebrew Bible). Nevertheless, most scholars now agree that these nonmonotheistic, anti-Jewish ideas have their ultimate origins, at least in part, in the Jewish speculations of the Second Temple period.
In Sheol, much like the Greek Hades, there is no judgment and no reward.
Neither Job nor Ben Sira (about 200 BCE) knows anything of reward and punishment in the hereafter.
clearer account is provided by Daniel 12:2–3, a description of the events of the end time: Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky; and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.
the death of righteous martyrs provided the impulse for belief in immortality and resurrection.
close ally of the doctrine of bodily resurrection is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Because of its affinities with the speculations of Greek philosophy, this doctrine was popular with Greek-speaking Jews, notably Philo (although 2 Maccabees 7 explicitly refers to bodily resurrection). When Josephus describes the three Jewish sects, he presents them as “philosophies” arguing about the immortality of the soul.47
Prophets are watchmen who, upon the approach of danger, sound the trumpet to warn the people so that they may escape (Ezek. 33).
astrology, which swept the entire Hellenistic world in the third century BCE,
Yet the Pharisees said, “Certain events are the work of Fate, but not all; as to other events, it depends upon ourselves whether they shall take place or not.”
