From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

by Shaye J.D. Cohen

wares

“What is Plato if not Moses speaking Attic Greek?”

one Neoplatonist.

For some of these Christians, Judaism was attractive because of Christianity.

they were attending synagogues and observing the Jewish festivals.26

dimmed.

In

their eyes, the souls of gentiles did not need to be saved, because all righteous gentiles who observe certain basic norms of (what we would call) religion and ethics were guaranteed a share in the world to come

but action.

and prohibitions (esp. the prohibitions) constituted the essence of religio.

involvement in human affairs would have studied philosophy, not “religion.”

Jews denied the gods of the nations and claimed that their God alone was the true God, the Lord of the universe.

who “hates the customs of the Jews” or “does not abide by the ancestral customs.” He defines a convert to Judaism as a gentile who, through circumcision, “adopts the ancestral customs of the Jews.” These definitions omit the theological tenets of

For Philo too, the essence of conversion is the adoption of the way of life of the Jews.

Maimonides (1138–1204) formulated a creed for Judaism as well.

Maimonides said, loyal Jews; those who rejected any one of them were sinners and heretics, hardly deserving the name Jew at all.

The most important sacrifice was the Tamid (“continual offering” or “perpetual offering”) that was burned on the altar every morning and afternoon (Num.

utmost,

They ministered before the Lord on behalf of the people.

contrast between sacrifice and prayer is the contrast between elitism and populism and between fixed form and free form.

and occasionally the entire people turned to God in prayer. These prayers are both public and private, prose and poetry, original and traditional, spontaneous and highly studied—but they are not obligatory rituals (they are not “statutory”). Sometimes, especially in cases of emergency, the Israelites would pray at the temple, but these prayers were not part of the temple cult.

history (Deut. 26:1–11), but these are the only exceptions. The act of sacrifice was silent; neither the priest nor the worshiper was required to say anything. The cult of the Second Temple too was silent. A writer of the second century BCE admires the remarkable silence that prevailed in the temple as the priests scurried about, performing their sacred tasks.

background music. The central element of the cult was the sacred ballet of the priests, not the musical accompaniment

Since they were prohibited by Deuteronomy from building temples and offering

sacrifices in their own localities, how were they to worship God?

“prayerhouses.”

“gatherings” but probably should be translated “meetinghouses.”

five passages in the Psalms state that prayer is superior

or equal (119:108; 141:2) to the sacrificial cult.

The background to this process is the dilemma encountered in many religions: how to stimulate piety and encourage creativity while maintaining order and preventing chaos.

overregulation of the liturgy would render the prayers perfunctory and devoid of meaning, just as centuries

animal sacrifice outside of Jerusalem being prohibited by Deuteronomy—

statutory liturgy as outlined in the Mishnah: (a) the recitation of the Ten Commandments and the Shema; (b) praise of God; and (c) petitions to God. Finally I shall describe (d) the public study of Scripture.

The Shema consists of three paragraphs

“Hear [Shema], O Israel:

The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.”

benedictions are a quintessentially Jewish mode of worship that was adopted by Christianity

The rabbinic prayer book still uses benedictions

special kind of hymn is the Qedushah (Sanctification; literally, “Holiness”), the antiphonal recitation of Isaiah

While the earliest direct evidence for

Under the Latin title Sanctus, it also entered the Christian liturgy.

“The Eighteen,” a series of eighteen petitions, each in the form of a benediction.

Psalm 119 can imagine no greater joy than meditating on the words of the Lord. “Oh, how I love your law [Torah]! It is my meditation all day long. . . . With open mouth I pant, because I long for your commandments”

In Babylonia, the Torah was divided into fifty-four sections, and the entire Torah was read through every year. In the land of Israel, the Torah was subdivided into more numerous sections, and the cycle of readings was completed every three or

three and a half years. The cycle of readings in first-century Judea (if indeed there was a cycle) is unknown to us.

explained and interpreted.

The purpose of all these rituals was, as the Torah repeatedly says, to make Israel a “holy” people

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to democratize religion.

But 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.