From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

by Shaye J.D. Cohen

the Pharisees claimed that life is governed jointly by Fate and free will.

In the words of Rabbi Aqiva’s pithy maxim, “Everything is foreseen [by God], but free will is granted [to humans].”

The rabbinic version of this idea is that humans were created with two inclinations, the good and the wicked, and that life is a continuous struggle of the good inclination against the wicked.

Some texts connect the origins of sin with the fall of Adam and Eve51.

rabbinic Judaism recognizes the power of sin yet believes that even without any intercessory figure, humanity is capable of finding favor in God’s eyes. The means to this end are repentance, prayer, Torah study, and good deeds.

The third paragraph of the Shema ends with the declaration that God redeemed the Israelites from Egypt: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God” (Num. 15:41). The Mishnah therefore calls this paragraph “the exodus from Egypt” and sees redemption as its theme.

The notion of individual responsibility is always joined with corporate responsibility. As if to underscore this point, the first paragraph of the Shema gives requirements in the second-person singular (“you [sg.] shall”), the second and third paragraphs in the plural (“ you [pl.]”).

Psalm 79, ascribed by many scholars to the Maccabean period:

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.

Sects suffer from both persecution and a persecution complex, which uses the sufferings of the present to prove loyalty to God.

for the prophets the “end of days” is simply a day in the future; it is neither the “end” of history nor the inauguration of a new order.

At this final battle, according to Ezekiel, the Israelites are merely spectators to the display of God’s might: God destroys the enemy. The Israelites do nothing except clear the battlefield and bury the corpses.

Many other texts, however, attribute to a messiah (or to an equivalent figure with a different title; cf. the “son of man” in Dan. 7) the task of destroying the forces of evil, either in battle or in judgment.

God also has covenants with the Davidic house and the Aaronide line that cannot be abrogated.

many Jews, especially in the first century CE, felt that they were living on the edge of history and expectantly awaited the promised deliverance.

During the Second Temple period, the temple was supplemented by the synagogue, a lay institution; the sacrificial cult was supplemented by prayer, a cultic practice open to all; and the priest was supplemented by the scribe, the learned teacher.

beginning in the sixth century BCE, the doctrine of sin, retribution, and repentance was individualized.

The democratization of religion had as its goal the sanctification of daily life.

The new regimen of study, prayer, ritual, and ethics was incumbent not upon some priestly or monastic elite but upon the entire community. All (male) Jews were equally obligated.

Although theology figures prominently in the literature that is extant from the period between the Maccabees and the Mishnah, Judaism was defined more by its practices than its beliefs.

no Jew of antiquity gave a creedal definition of Judaism.

fundamental tensions are never resolved.

Straddling the boundary between public and private were synagogues.

As a province in an empire, the land of Israel (called Yehud in Persian times, Coele Syria in Hellenistic times, Judea (also spelled Judaea) in early Roman times, and Palaestina (or Palestine) after the defeat of Bar Kokhba)

By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (mid-fifth century BCE), the royal family had disappeared, and the high priest was emerging as the leading political figure.

By the fourth century BCE at the latest, the high priest was the uncontested head of the Jews, not merely the head of the temple.

by converting the high priesthood into a powerful office, the Persians shaped the politics of the entire Second Temple period.

The two major institutions controlled by the high priest were the temple and the Sanhedrin.

During the Second Temple period, at least three other temples were erected, but none of them competed effectively with the temple of Jerusalem.

“One temple for the one God,” explains Josephus.

After the destruction of the temple, the priests continued to assert their privileged status within Jewish society, thereby competing with the rabbis for authority.

The synagogue is a tripartite institution: a place of prayer, a place of study, and a place of meeting.

The rabbis, too, often associate the bet midrash (“school” or “academy”) with the bet keneset (“meetinghouse” or “synagogue”).

some scholars contend that Ps. 74:8 refers to the destruction of synagogues by Epiphanes).

in reality there were many kinds of synagogues, during both the Second Temple and rabbinic periods, with varying functions, architecture, religious rituals, and social settings.

When the Jews returned from Babylonia to Judea in the sixth century BCE, their reconstituted society consisted of clans (Ezra 2; Neh. 7), not tribes.

The synagogue was the most common form of Jewish association, but it was not the only one.

Without a claim to exclusive truth, a group is not a sect

generally in the ancient world, elementary education did not go beyond paternal instruction in a craft.

Josephus describes the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes as if they were “schools”

A different type of school is the disciple circle, a handful of disciples grouped around a master.

Disciple circles were the normal pattern for higher education in both Jewish and Greco-Roman antiquity.

The first solid evidence for the institutionalization of higher education in the period of the Second Temple is provided by Ben Sira (ca. 200 BCE), who writes (Sir. 51:23–28):

Draw near to me, you who are uneducated, and lodge in my ho...

He invites them to “lodge in my house of instruction,” bet midrashi (lit., “sit in my house of inquiry”).

Although the social settings are quite different, the disciple circle of Jesus closely resembles the disciple circles of the rabbis in the second century.

What made Jewish society “Jewish” was Judaism and its institutions. Everywhere in Greco-Roman society were priests and temples, associations and schools, but the peculiarities of Judaism made the Jewish versions of these institutions, for all of their similarities to their Greco-Roman counterparts, essentially Jewish.

Now at this time there were three schools of thought among the Jews, which held different opinions concerning human affairs; the first being that of the Pharisees, the second that of the Sadducees, and the third that of the Essenes. As for the Pharisees, they say that 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. The sect of Essenes, however, declares that Fate is the mistress of all things, and that nothing befalls men unless in accordance with her decree. But the Sadducees do away with Fate, holding that there is no such thing and that human actions are not achieved in accordance with her decree, but that all things lie within our own power.

In their original usage, however, the Latin word secta and its equivalent Greek word, hairesis, lacked any negative connotation and were neutral terms for “school” (a group of people) or “school of thought” (a group of ideas).

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.