From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

by Shaye J.D. Cohen

Around the year 200 BCE, Ben Sira depicted the scribe as the one “who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High. He seeks out the wisdom of all the ancients, and is concerned with prophecies” (Sir. 38:34–39:1).

When the book of Daniel, which was written in the 160s BCE, came to be canonized, it was included not in the Prophets, a section already complete, but in the Writings.

Ben Sira divided the curriculum of the scribe into law, wisdom, and prophecies. This classification reflects the ancient distinction between priest, sage, and prophet. Four hundred years before Ben Sira, the Israelites rejected Jeremiah’s prophecies of doom and insisted that life would proceed normally: “For instruction [Torah] shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet” (Jer. 18:18).

In Jeremiah’s time, Torah, counsel, and the word of God were sought from living people; in Ben Sira’s time, they were sought through the study of books, and the master student was the scribe.

According to Josephus, all twenty-two books of the canon were inspired by God and therefore are authoritative and free of contradictions. All were written by prophets who lived before the reign of Artaxerxes (465–425 BCE, the period of Ezra). All were transmitted accurately by the priests. The canon is divided in three parts: the five books of Moses, the thirteen prophetic writings, and four books of hymns and precepts.

The late books certainly include Chronicles, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and of course, Daniel, which was written (utilizing older material in the first part) only in the 160s BCE.

Several others may be late as well: Job, Song of Songs, Jonah, Joel, sections of Proverbs, the second half of Zechariah, and many of the psalms.

Some nonbiblical books were written in Persian or early Hellenistic times (Tobit, 1 Enoch, Ben Sira) and thus are virtually contemporary with many of the works included in the Writings.

Works that remained the esoteric possessions of sects and other such groups were never canonized by the people as a whole.

In Judaism, however, the “sacred writings” were the possession of the entire community, not the jealously guarded preserve of any one group.

the definition of canon was not a subject that interested the Jews of antiquity.

The Jews of the Second Temple period saw themselves as living in a postclassical age. They collected and treasured the works of the ancients because they knew that God spoke more directly and more clearly to their ancestors than to themselves.

The study of Scripture led to the creation of three new literary genres: scriptural translation, paraphrase, and commentary.

A free or adventurous interpretation no longer did any harm since the sacred original was left untouched. The folk imagination provided many episodes and sagas completely unknown to Scripture, and the scholarly imagination was permitted to exercise itself in interpretations that, sometimes at least, completely ignored or destroyed the intent of the original.

two of the major implications of canonization: the replacement of prophecy by apocalypse and the growth of scriptural interpretation.

Prophecy of the biblical kind ceased during the Persian or early Hellenistic period.

apocalypse, whose best-known representative is the book of Daniel, marks the final evolution of classical prophecy.

apocalypses are revelations from God that address some of the fundamental concerns of the human condition: life, death, fate, sin, and theodicy.

if the eighth to sixth centuries BCE were the golden age of prophecy, the second and first centuries BCE were an age of silver, or perhaps bronze.

Unlike the prophet, the apocalyptic seer speaks neither publicly nor clearly.

Even after the angel has spoken to the seer and explained the meaning of his vision, the message remains obscure; only the wise will understand it (Dan. 12). What was mysterious before the revelation is only slightly less mysterious after it.

In particular, one view that became widespread was the theory of four empires, which postulated that either Israel or the world would come under the dominion of four successive empires, each worse than the previous.

This tension between fate or predetermination (for the nation or the world) and free will or repentance (for the individual) appears frequently in Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism

In the third and fourth centuries CE, the rabbis stated that “the Oral Torah,” the body of rabbinic laws and scriptural interpretations, was not to be written (or at least was not to be used in written form in the sessions of the rabbinic schools), because to do so would challenge the authority of the written Torah.

Many eschatological schemes present the end of time as a new creation, and the pseudepigraphy allows the witnesses to the first creation to describe the second as well.

Josephus, Fourth Ezra, and the rabbis defined the biblical canon on the basis of their belief that “the accurate succession of the prophets” ceased around the time of Ezra.

First Maccabees records that the Jews took a certain course of action that would remain valid “until a true prophet should appear” and instruct them otherwise (1 Macc. 4:46; 14:41 AT). True prophets were a phenomenon of the past and the future, not the present.

Other heirs of the prophetic tradition were “holy men,” miracle workers, “charismatic” healers, foretellers of the future, and mystics.

Judean society in the first century BCE and the first century CE was marked by the presence of numerous predictors of the future, holy men, and healers.

The canonization of the Tanak meant the creation of a scripturally oriented society. People studied Scripture, memorized it, and tried to live by it.

As Josephus remarks, Jews were prepared to die for their Torah, but what Greek was prepared to die for the classics of Greek literature?

The Torah clearly ranked (and ranks) the highest. It was canonized first and placed at the head.

does the oral derive from the written, supplement it, or interpret it? The answer is all three.

The Hebrew word midrash literally means “research” or “investigation,” but through rabbinic usage the term has come to mean “the investigation of Scripture.”

The Greek word historia has the same literal meaning as the Hebrew midrash, “research” or “investigation,” but while the Greek word came to mean “an investigation into the past,” hence “a work that presents the results of research into the past,” the Hebrew term came to mean “investigation into Scripture,” hence “a work that presents the results of research into Scripture.”

The verb used is darash. But in two texts of the Persian (or early Hellenistic) period, the object of the verb no longer is God. “For Ezra had set his heart to study [lidrosh] the Torah of the LORD” (Ezra 7:10). “Salvation is far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statutes” (Ps. 119:155). Ezra seeks not God but the Torah of God. The wicked are accused not of failing to seek God (Isa. 9:13 [12]; Jer. 10:21), but of failing to seek his statutes. With the canonization of the Torah, Jews no longer seek God directly. They seek God through the Torah.

living culture cannot live in accordance with the dictates of an immovable text. Either a way must be found to introduce flexibility into the text, or the text sooner or later will need to be rejected.

Historians must try to determine what the Constitution meant in its eighteenth-century context, but the Supreme Court must determine what it means for contemporary society.

The Jews of the Greek Diaspora had different needs from those of the land of Israel, and so their scriptural interpretations often seem quite different, but they both are following the same process.

The identification of biblical laws and heroes with philosophical principles and moral qualities is known as allegory.

The rabbis agreed with Philo that Scripture has levels of meaning, but they, like their compatriots in the Second Temple period, did not as a rule engage in allegorical exegesis.

One of the tasks of exegesis was to set these matters right: to reconcile Torah law with the legal, social, and institutional reality of the Second Temple period and, later, of the rabbinic period as well.

characteristic of the exegesis of the land of Israel is the effort to affirm the continuing validity of the biblical prophecies and narratives by discovering contemporary situations through which they were fulfilled. The biblical texts contain types or paradigms.

The exodus from Egypt is a type for all future redemptions, just as the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar is a...

Typological exegesis plays an important role in the New Testament and in rabbinic Judaism.

All Jews agreed that the words of the prophets contained eternal verities—this belief is one of the hallmarks of canonization—but which verity referred to the events of the day was a question that aroused some dispute.

Scriptural authors borrow motifs and ideas from each other, and in the process they reinterpret them.

The very existence of this translation is significant because it implies that Judaism was a “book” religion.

the Septuagint translation was aimed at an internal, Jewish audience.

by the time of the church father Origen (first half of the third century), several different Greek translations of the Tanak were extant; Origen, for the sake of the church, edited them and tried to clarify their differences.