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“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”
(Romans
8:2)
Hellenistic
Judaism – Britannica
Hellenistic Judaism (4th century BCE–2nd century CE)
The Greek period (332–63 BCE)
Hellenism and Judaism
Contact between Greeks and Semites goes back to Minoan and
Mycenaean times and is reflected in certain terms used by Homer and other early
Greek authors. It is not until the end of the 4th century, however, that Jews
are first mentioned by Greek writers, who praise them as brave,
self-disciplined, and philosophical.
Seleucid king of the Hellenistic Syrian Empire
Seleucid king of the Hellenistic Syrian EmpireAntiochus
III, coin, late 3rd–early 2nd century BCE; in the Art Institute of Chicago.
After being conquered by Alexander the Great (332 BCE),
Palestine became part of the Hellenistic kingdom of Ptolemaic Egypt, the policy
of which was to permit the Jews considerable cultural and religious freedom.
When in 198 Palestine was conquered by King Antiochus III (reigned 223–187 BCE)
of the Syrian Seleucid dynasty, the Jews were treated even more liberally,
being granted a charter to govern themselves by their own constitution—namely,
the Torah. Greek influence, however, was already apparent. Some of the 29 Greek
cities of Palestine attained a high level of Hellenistic culture. The mid-3rd
century-BCE Zenon papyri, which contain the correspondence of the business
manager of a high Ptolemaic official, present a picture of a wealthy Jew,
Tobiah, who through commercial contact with the Ptolemies acquired a veneer of
Hellenism, to judge at least from the pagan and religious expressions in his
Greek letters. His son and especially his grandsons became ardent Hellenists.
By the beginning of the 2nd century, the influence of the Hellenistic Age in
Judaea was quite strong; indeed, it has been argued that, if the Seleucids had
not forcibly intervened in Jewish affairs, Judaean Judaism would have become
even more syncretistic than Alexandrian Judaism. The apocryphal writer Jesus
ben Sirach so bitterly denounced the Hellenizers in Jerusalem (c. 180 BCE) that
he was forced by the authorities to temper his words.
In the early part of the 2nd century BCE, Hellenizing Jews
took control of the high priesthood itself. As high priest from 175 to 172,
Jason established Jerusalem as a Greek city, with Greek educational institutions.
His ouster by an even more extreme Hellenizing faction, which established
Menelaus (died 162 BCE) as high priest, occasioned a civil war in which
Menelaus was supported by the wealthy aristocrats and Jason by the masses. The
Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who initially granted exemptions and
privileges to the Jews, intervened at the request of Menelaus’s party.
Antiochus’s promulgation of decrees against the practice of Judaism led in 167
BCE to the successful revolt of the priest Mattathias (died 166 BCE) and his
five sons—the Maccabees (Hasmoneans; see also Hasmonean dynasty). It has been
conjectured that one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The War of the Sons of Light
Against the Sons of Darkness, mirrors the fierceness of this struggle.
The extreme tactics employed by the Hasmoneans in their
struggle with Hellenizing Jews, whose children they forcibly circumcised,
indicate the inroads that Hellenism had already made. On the whole, the chief
supporters of the Hellenizers were members of the wealthy urban population,
while the Maccabees were supported by the peasants and the urban masses. Yet
there is evidence that the ruthlessness exhibited by the Hasmoneans toward the
Greek cities of Palestine had political rather than cultural origins and that
in fact they were fighting for personal power no less than for the Torah.
Indeed, some of the Jews who fought on the side of the Maccabees were idol
worshippers. In any event, the Maccabees soon reached a modus vivendi with
Hellenism: thus, Jonathan (died 143/142 BCE), according to the Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus (c. 38–c. 100 CE), negotiated a treaty of friendship with
Sparta; Aristobulus I (died 103 BCE) actually called himself Philhellene (a
lover of Hellenism); and Alexander Jannaeus (died 76 BCE) hired Greek
mercenaries and inscribed his coins in Greek as well as in Hebrew. Greek
influence reached its peak under King Herod I of Judaea (reigned 37–4 BCE), who
built a Greek theatre, amphitheatre, and hippodrome in or near Jerusalem.
Social, political, and religious divisions
During the Hellenistic period the priests were both the
wealthiest class and the strongest political group among the Jews of Jerusalem.
The wealthiest of the priests were the members of the Oniad family, who held
the hereditary office of high priest until they were replaced by the
Hasmoneans; the Temple that they supervised also functioned as a bank, where
the wealth of the Temple was stored and where private individuals also
deposited their money. From a social and economic point of view, therefore,
Josephus is justified in calling the government of Judaea a theocracy.
Opposition to the priests’ oppressive rule arose among an urban middle-class
group known as scribes (soferim), who based their interpretation of and
instruction in the Torah on an oral tradition probably going back to the time
of the return from the Babylonian Exile (538 BCE and after). A special group of
scribes known as Hasidim, or “Pietists,” became the forerunners of the
Pharisees, or “Separatists”—middle-class Jewish scholars who reinterpreted the
Torah and the prophetic writings to meet the needs of their times. The Hasidim
joined the Hasmoneans in the struggle against the Hellenizers, though on
religious rather than political grounds.
Josephus held that the Pharisees and the other Jewish
parties were philosophical schools, and some modern scholars have argued that
the groupings were primarily along economic and social lines; but the chief
distinctions among them were religious and go back well before the Maccabean revolt.
Some modern scholars have sought to interpret the Pharisees’ opposition to the
Sadducees—wealthy, conservative Jews who accepted the Torah alone as
authoritative—as based on an urban-rural dichotomy, but a very large share of
Pharisaic concern was with agricultural matters. To associate the rabbis with
urbanization seems a distortion. The chief support for the Pharisees came from
the lower classes, whether in the country or in the city.
The equation of Pharisaic with “normative” Judaism can no
longer be supported, at any rate not before the destruction of the Temple in 70
CE. According to the Palestinian Talmud (the annotations and interpretations of
the Oral Law compiled by Palestinian Jewish scholars in the 3rd and 4th
centuries CE), there were 24 types of “heretics” in Palestine in 70 CE, thus
indicating much divergence among Jews; this picture is confirmed by Josephus,
who notes numerous instances of religious leaders who claimed to be prophets
and who obtained considerable followings.
The chief doctrine of the Pharisees was that the Oral Law
had been revealed to Moses at the same time as the Written Law. In their
exegesis and interpretation of this oral tradition, particularly under the
rabbi Hillel (1st century BCE–1st century CE), the Pharisees were flexible, and
their regard for the public won them considerable support. That the Maccabean
ruler John Hyrcanus I (reigned 135–104 BCE) broke with them and that Josephus
set their number at merely “more than 6,000” at the time of King Herod indicates
that they were less numerous and less influential than Josephus would have his
readers believe. The Pharisees stressed the importance of performing all the
commandments, including those that appeared to be of only minor significance;
those who were particularly strict in their observance of the Levitical rules
were known as ḥaverim (“companions”). They believed in the providential
guidance of the universe, in angels, in reward and punishment in the world to
come, and in resurrection of the dead, all of which were opposed by the
Sadducees. However, in finding a modus vivendi with Hellenism, at least in form
and in terminology, the Pharisees did not differ greatly from the Sadducees.
Indeed, the supreme council of the Great Synagogue (or Great Assembly) of the
Pharisees was modeled on Hellenistic religious and social associations. Because
they did not take an active role in fostering the rebellion against Rome in
66–70 CE, their leader, Johanan ben Zakkai, obtained Roman permission to
establish an academy at Yavneh (Jamnia), where in effect the Pharisees replaced
the cult of the Temple with a regimen of study and prayer.
The Sadducees and their subsidiary group, the Boethusians
(Boethosaeans), who were identified with the great landowners and priestly
families, were more deeply influenced by Hellenization. The rise of the
Pharisees may thus be seen, in a sense, as a reaction against the more profound
Hellenization favored by the Sadducees, who were allied with the philhellenic
Hasmoneans. From the time of John Hyrcanus the Sadducees generally held a
higher position than the Pharisees and were favored by the Jewish rulers.
Religiously more circumscribed than the Pharisees, they rejected the idea of a
revealed oral interpretation of the Torah, even though they had their own
tradition, the sefer gezerot (“book of decrees” or “decisions”). They similarly
rejected the inspiration of the prophetic books of the Bible, as well as the
Pharisaic beliefs in angels, rewards and punishments in the world to come,
providential governance of human events, and resurrection of the dead. For them
Judaism centered on the Temple; but, about 10 years before the Temple’s
destruction in 70 CE, the Pharisees prevented the Sadducees from entering it,
and in effect the Sadducees disappeared from Jewish life.
Not constituting any particular party were the unlearned
rural masses known as ʿamme ha-aretz (“people of the land”), who were
found among both the Pharisees and the Sadducees and even among the Samaritans.
The ʿamme ha-aretz did not give the prescribed tithes, did not observe the
laws of purity, and were neglectful of the laws of prayer; so great was the
antagonism between them and the learned Pharisees that the biblical verse
“Cursed be he who lies with any kind of beast” was applied to their daughters.
The antipathy was reciprocated, for in the same passage in the Babylonian
Talmud (the annotations and interpretations of the Oral Law compiled by
Babylonian Jewish scholars in the 5th century CE) are added the words, “Greater
is the hatred wherewith the ʿamme ha-aretz hate the scholar than the
hatred wherewith the heathens hate Israel.” That there was social mobility,
however, is clear from the Talmudic dictum, “Heed the sons of the ʿamme
ha-aretz, for they will be the living source of the Torah.”
Proselytes (converts) to Judaism, though not constituting a
class, became increasingly numerous in Palestine and especially in the Diaspora
(the Jews living beyond Palestine). Scholarly estimates of the Jewish
population of this era range from 700,000 to 5,000,000 in Palestine and from
2,000,000 to 5,000,000 in the Diaspora, the prevailing opinion being that about
one-tenth of the population of the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the
Christian era was Jewish. Such numbers represent a considerable increase from
previous eras and must have included large numbers of proselytes. In a probable
allusion to proselytism, in 139 BCE the Jews of Rome were charged by the
praetor with attempting to contaminate Roman morals with their religion. The
first large-scale conversions were conducted by John Hyrcanus and Aristobulus
I, who in 130 and 103 BCE, respectively, forced the people of Idumaea in
southern Palestine and the people of Ituraea in northern Palestine to become
Jews. The eagerness of the Pharisees to win converts is attested in The Gospel
According to Matthew (23:15), which states that the Pharisees would “traverse
sea and land to make a single proselyte.” To be sure, some of the proselytes,
according to Josephus, did return to their pagan ways, but the majority apparently
remained true to their new religion. In addition, there were many
“sympathizers” with Judaism (known as sebomenoi, “fearers of the Lord”), who
observed one or more Jewish practices without being fully converted.
Outside the pale of Judaism in most, though not all,
respects were the Samaritans, who, like the Sadducees, refused to recognize the
validity of the Oral Law; in fact, the break between the Sadducees and the
Samaritans did not occur until the conquest of Shechem by John Hyrcanus (128 BCE).
Like the later so-called Qumrān covenanters (the monastic group associated
with the Dead Sea Scrolls), they were opposed to the Jewish priesthood and the
cult of the Temple, regarded Moses as a messianic figure, and forbade the
revelation of esoteric doctrines to outsiders.
Scholars have revised the conception of a “normative”
Pharisaic Judaism dominant in Palestine and a deviant Judaism dominant in the
Diaspora. On the one hand, the picture of normative Judaism is broader than at
first believed, and it is clear that there were many differences of emphasis
within the Pharisaic party. On the other hand, supposed differences between
Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism are not as great as had been formerly
thought. In Palestine, no less than in the Diaspora, there were deviations from
Pharisaic standards.
Despite the attempts of the Pharisaic leaders to restrain
the wave of Greek influence, they themselves showed at least superficial
Hellenization. In the first place, as many as 2,500 to 3,000 words of Greek
origin are found in the Talmudic corpus, and they supply important terms in the
fields of law, government, science, religion, technology, and everyday life,
especially in the popular sermons preached by the rabbis. When preaching, the
Talmudic rabbis often gave the Greek translation of biblical verses for the
benefit of those who understood only Greek. The prevalence of Greek in ossuary
(burial) inscriptions and the discovery of Greek papyri in the Dead Sea caves
confirm the widespread use of Greek, though it seems few Jews really mastered
it. Again, there was a superficial Hellenization in the frequent adoption of
Greek names, even by the rabbis; and there is evidence (Talmud, Soṭa [a
tractate in the Mishna]) of a school at the beginning of the 2nd century CE
that had 500 students of “Greek wisdom.” At the end of the 2nd century, long
after the rabbis prohibited the people from teaching their sons Greek (117),
Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (135–220), the editor of the Mishna, the authoritative
compilation of the Oral Law, could still remark, “Why talk Syriac in Palestine?
Talk either Hebrew or Greek.” The synagogues of the period are modeled after
Hellenistic-Roman basilicas, with inscriptions in Greek and even pagan motifs.
Many of the anecdotes told about the rabbis have Socratic and Cynic parallels.
There is evidence of discussions between rabbis and Athenians, Alexandrians,
Roman philosophers, and even the emperor Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161);
despite all of these discussions, only one rabbi, Elisha ben Abuyah (early 2nd
century), appears to have embraced gnosticism, accepting certain esoteric
religious dualistic views. The rabbis never mention the Greek philosophers
Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) or the Hellenistic
Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus (c. 15 BCE–c. 45 CE), and they never use any
Greek philosophical terms; the only Greek author whom they name is Homer.
Again, the parallels between Hellenistic rhetoric and rabbinic hermeneutics are
in the realm of terminology rather than of substance, and those between Roman
and Talmudic law are inconclusive. Part of the explanation of this may be that,
although there were 29 Greek cities in Palestine, none was in Judaea, the real
stronghold of the Jews.
Religious rites and customs in Palestine: the Temple and
the synagogues
Until its destruction in 70 CE, the most important
religious institution of the Jews was the Temple in Jerusalem (the Second
Temple, erected 538–516 BCE). Although services were interrupted for three
years by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167–164 BCE) and although the Roman general
Pompey (106–48 BCE) desecrated the Temple in 63 BCE, Herod lavished great
expense in rebuilding it. The high priesthood itself became degraded by the
extreme Hellenism of high priests such as Jason and Menelaus, and the
institution declined when Herod began the custom of appointing high priests for
political and financial considerations. That not only the multitude of Jews but
the priesthood itself suffered from sharp divisions is clear from the bitter class
warfare that ultimately erupted in 59 CE between the high priests on the one
hand and the ordinary priests and the leaders of the populace of Jerusalem on
the other.
Although the Temple remained central in Jewish worship,
synagogues had already emerged as places for Torah reading and communal prayer
and worship during the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE, if not even
earlier. In any case, in the following century Ezra stood upon a pulpit of wood
and read from the Torah to the people (Nehemiah). Some scholars maintain that a
synagogue existed even within the precincts of the Temple; certainly by the
time of Jesus, to judge from the references to Galilean synagogues in the
Christian Scriptures, synagogues were common in Palestine. Hence, when the
Temple was destroyed in 70, the spiritual vacuum was hardly as great as it had
been after the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE).
The chief legislative, judicial, and educational body of
the Palestinian Jews during the period of the Second Temple was the Great
Sanhedrin (council court), consisting of 71 members, among whom the Sadducees
were an important party. The members shared the government with the king during
the early years of the Hasmonean dynasty, but, beginning with Herod’s reign,
their authority was restricted to religious matters. In addition, there seems
to have been a Sanhedrin, set up by the high priest, which served as a court of
political council, as well as a kind of grand jury.
Religious and cultural life in the Diaspora
During the Hellenistic-Roman period the chief centers of
Jewish population outside Palestine were in Syria, Asia Minor, Babylonia, and
Egypt, each of which is estimated to have had at least one million Jews. The
large Jewish community of Antioch—which, according to Josephus, had been given
all the rights of citizenship by the Seleucid founder-king, Seleucus I Nicator
(died 280 BCE)—attracted a particularly large number of converts to Judaism. In
Antioch the apocryphal book of Tobit was probably composed in the 2nd century
BCE to encourage wayward Diaspora Jews to return to their Judaism. As for the
Jews of Asia Minor, whose large numbers were mentioned by Cicero (106–43 BCE),
their not joining in the Jewish revolts against the Roman emperors Nero
(reigned 54–68 CE), Trajan (reigned 98–117), and Hadrian (reigned 117–138)
would indicate that they had sunk deep roots into their environment. In
Babylonia in the early part of the 1st century CE, two Jewish brothers,
Asinaeus and Anilaeus, established an independent minor state; their followers
were so meticulous in observing the Sabbath that they assumed that it would not
be possible to violate it even in order to save themselves from a Parthian
attack. In the early 1st century CE, according to Josephus, the royal house and
many of their entourage in the district of Adiabene in northern Mesopotamia
were converted to Judaism; some of the Adiabenian Jews distinguished themselves
in the revolt against Rome in 66.
The largest and most important Jewish settlement in the
Diaspora was in Egypt. There is evidence (papyri) of a Jewish military colony
at Elephantine (Yeb), Upper Egypt, as early as the 6th century BCE. These
papyri reveal the existence of a Jewish temple—which most certainly would be
considered heterodox—and some syncretism (mixture) with pagan cults.
Alexandria, the most populous and most influential Hellenistic Jewish community
in the Diaspora, originated when Alexander the Great assigned a quarter of the
city to the Jews. Until about the 3rd century BCE the papyri of the Egyptian
Jewish community were written in Aramaic; after that, with the exception of the
Nash papyrus in Hebrew, all papyri until 400 CE were written in Greek.
Similarly, of the 116 Jewish inscriptions from Egypt, all but five are written
in Greek. The process of Hellenistic acculturation is thus obvious.
The most important work of the early Hellenistic
period—dating, according to tradition, from the 3rd century BCE—is the
Septuagint, a translation into Greek of the Hebrew Scriptures, including some works
not found in the traditional Hebrew canon. The name of the work (from the Latin
septuaginta, “70”) derived from the belief that 72 translators, 6 from each of
the 12 tribes, worked independently on the entire text and produced identical
translations. As revealed in the Letter of Aristeas and the works of Philo and
Josephus, the Septuagint was itself regarded by many Hellenized Jews as
divinely inspired. The translation shows some knowledge of Palestinian exegesis
and the tradition of Halakhah (the Oral Law); but the rabbis themselves, noting
that the translation diverged from the Hebrew text, apparently had ambivalent
feelings about it, as is evidenced in their alternate praise and condemnation
of it, as well as in their belief that another translation of the Scriptures
into Greek was needed. The fact that “Torah” was translated as nomos (“law”)
and tzedaqa as dikaiosynē (“justice”) indicates how deeply the authors of
the Septuagint believed that Judaism could be accurately expressed using Greek concepts.
The fact that the temple at Leontopolis in Egypt was
established (c. 145 BCE) by a deposed high priest, Onias IV, clearly indicates
that it was heterodox; as merely the temple of a military colony, it never
really offered a challenge to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is significant that
the Palestinian rabbis ruled that a sacrifice intended for the temple of Onias
might be offered in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias made little impact upon
Egyptian Jewry, as can be seen from the silence about it on the part of Philo,
who often mentions the Temple in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias, however,
continued until it was closed by the Roman emperor Vespasian (reigned 69–79 CE)
in 73.
The chief religious institutions of the Egyptian Diaspora
were synagogues. As early as the 3rd century BCE, there were inscriptions
mentioning two proseuchai, or Jewish prayer houses. In Alexandria there were
numerous synagogues throughout the city, of which the largest was so famous
that it is said in the Talmud that he who has not seen it has never seen the
glory of Israel.
Egyptian Jewish literature
In Egypt the Jews produced a considerable literature (most
of it now lost), intended to inculcate in Greek-speaking Jews a pride in their
past and to counteract a sense of inferiority that some of them felt about
Jewish cultural achievements. In the field of history, Demetrius near the end
of the 3rd century BCE wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea; perhaps
intended to refute an antisemitic Egyptian priest and author, it shows
considerable concern for chronology. In the 2nd century BCE a Jew who used the
name Hecataeus wrote On the Jews. Another, Eupolemus (c. 150 BCE), like
Demetrius, wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea; an indication of its
apologetic nature may be seen from the fragment asserting that Moses taught the
alphabet not only to the Jews but also to the Phoenicians and to the Greeks.
Artapanus (c. 100 BCE), in his own book On the Jews, went even further in
romanticizing Moses—by identifying him with Musaeus, the semi-mythical Greek
poet, and Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and culture, by asserting that
Moses was the real originator of Egyptian civilization, and by claiming that
Moses taught the Egyptians the worship of Apis (the sacred bull) and the ibis
(sacred bird). Cleodemus (Malchus), in an attempt to win for the Jews the regard
of the Greeks, asserted in his history that two sons of Abraham had joined
Heracles in his expedition in Africa and that the Greek hero had married the
daughter of one of them. On the other hand, Jason of Cyrene (c. 100 BCE) wrote
a history, of which 2 Maccabees is a summary, glorifying the Temple and
violently attacking the Jewish Hellenizers, but his manner of writing history
is typically Hellenistic. In addition, 3 Maccabees (1st century BCE) is a work
of propaganda intended to counteract those Jews who sought to win citizenship
in Alexandria. The Letter of Aristeas, though ascribed to the Egyptian king
Ptolemy II Philadelphus (308–246 BCE), was probably composed by an Alexandrian
Jew about 100 BCE to defend Judaism and its practices against detractors.
Egyptian Jews also composed poems and plays, now extant
only in fragments, to glorify their history. Philo the Elder (c. 100 BCE) wrote
an epic, On Jerusalem, in Homeric hexameters. Theodotus (c. 100 BCE) also wrote
an epic, On Shechem; it was quite clearly apologetic, to judge from the
fragment connecting the name of Shechem with Sikimios, the son of the Greek god
Hermes. At about the same time, a Jewish poet wrote a didactic poem, ascribing
it to the pagan Phocylides, though closely following the Bible in some details;
the author disguised his Jewish origin by omitting any attack against idolatry
from his moralizing. A collection known as The Sibylline Oracles, containing
Jewish and Christian prophecies in pagan disguise, includes some material composed
by a 2nd-century-BCE Alexandrian Jew who intended to glorify pious Jews and
perhaps win converts.
A Jewish dramatist of the period, Ezekiel (c. 100 BCE),
composed tragedies in Greek. Fragments of one of them, The Exodus, show how
deeply he was influenced by the Greek dramatist Euripides (484–406 BCE).
Whether or not such plays were actually presented on the stage, they edified
Jews and showed pagans that the Jews had as much material for drama as they
did.
The greatest achievements of Alexandrian Judaism were in
the realm of wisdom literature and philosophy. In a work on the analogical
interpretation of the Law of Moses, Aristobulus of Paneas (2nd century BCE)
anticipated Philo in attempting to harmonize Greek philosophy and the Torah. He
used allegory to explain anthropomorphisms in the Bible and asserted that the
Greek philosophers were indebted to Moses. The Wisdom of Solomon, dating from
the 1st century BCE, shows an acquaintance with the Platonic doctrine of the
preexistence of the soul and with a method of argument known as sorites, which
was favored by the Stoics (see Stoicism). During the same period, the author of
4 Maccabees showed an intimate knowledge of Greek philosophy, particularly of
Stoicism.
By far the greatest figure in Alexandrian Jewish literature
is Philo, who has come to be recognized as the first Jewish theologian. His use
of Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato, to explicate the ideas of the
Torah and his formulation of the Logos (Word, or Divine Reason) as an
intermediary between God and the world helped lay the foundations of
Neoplatonism, gnosticism, and the philosophical outlook of the early Church
Fathers. Philo was a devotee of Judaism neither as a mystic cult nor as a
collateral branch of Pharisaic Judaism. With his profound knowledge of Greek
literature—and despite his almost total ignorance of Hebrew—he tried to find a
way in which Judaism could appropriate Hellenic thought.
There was also a Jewish community in Rome, which numbered
perhaps 50,000. To judge from the inscriptions in the Jewish catacombs, it was
predominantly Greek-speaking. References by Roman writers, particularly Tacitus
(56–120 CE) and the satirists, have led scholars to conclude that the community
was influential, that it observed the Sabbath and the dietary laws, and that it
actively sought converts.
The Hellenization of the Diaspora Jews is reflected not
merely in their literature but even more in various papyri and art objects. As
early as 290 BCE, Hecataeus of Abdera, a Greek living in Egypt, had remarked
that under the Persians and Macedonians the Jews had greatly modified the
traditions of their fathers. Other papyri indicate that at least three-fourths
of Egyptian Jews had personal names of Greek rather than Hebrew origin. The
only schools mentioned are Sabbath schools intended for adults; this suggests
that Jews were extremely eager to gain admittance for their children to Greek
gymnasia, where quite obviously they would have had to make compromises with
their Judaism. Again, there are a number of violations from the norms of
Halakhah (which precluded the charging of interest for a loan): most notably, 9
of 11 extant loan documents charge interest. There are often striking
similarities between Jewish and Greek documents of sale, marriage, and divorce
in Egypt, though some of this—as with the documents of the Elephantine Jewish
community—may be due to a common origin in the law of ancient Mesopotamia. The
charms and apotropaic amulets are often syncretistic, and the Jews can hardly
have been unaware of the religious significance of symbols that were still very
much filled with meaning in pagan cults. The fact that the Jewish community of
Alexandria was preoccupied in the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE with
obtaining rights as citizens—which certainly involved compromises with Judaism,
including participation in pagan festivals and sacrifices—shows how far they
were ready to deviate from earlier norms. Philo mentions Jews who scoffed at
the Bible, which they insisted on interpreting literally, and others who failed
to adhere to biblical laws that they regarded as mere allegory; he writes too
of Jews who observed nothing of Judaism except the holiday of Yom Kippur. But
despite such deviations, pagan writers constantly accused the Diaspora Jews of
being “haters of mankind” and of being absurdly superstitious. Christian
writers later similarly attacked the Jews for refusing to give up the Torah.
The Jews of Egypt were at least loyal in their contributions of the Temple tax
and in their pilgrimages to Jerusalem on the three festivals. Virulent
antisemitism and massacres perpetrated by non-Jews in Egypt apparently
discouraged actual apostasy and intermarriage, which were not common.
Palestinian literature
During this period, literature was composed in Palestine in
Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek; the original language of many of these texts
remains disputed by scholars, and the works that have survived were apparently
composed by more than one author over a considerable period of time. Of the
works originally composed in Hebrew, many—including Ecclesiasticus, 1
Maccabees, Judith, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Baruch, Psalms of
Solomon—existed only in Greek during the remainder of the Hellenistic period.
They and many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are generally conscious imitations of
biblical books, often reflecting the dramatic events of the Maccabean struggle
and often tinged with apocalyptic themes (involving the dramatic intervention
of God in history). The literature in Aramaic consists of biblical or
Bible-like legends or Midrashic (interpretive) additions (Testament of Job,
Martyrdom of Isaiah [see Isaiah, Ascension of], Paralipomena of Jeremiah, Life
of Adam and Eve, Genesis Apocryphon [from the Dead Sea Scrolls], book of Tobit,
History of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon) and of apocalypses
(the First Book of Enoch [perhaps originally written in Hebrew], Assumption of
Moses, Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, Second Book of Esdras, and Apocalypse of
Abraham). In Greek the chief works by Palestinians are histories of the Jewish
war against Rome and of the Jewish kings by Justus of Tiberias (both are lost)
and, by Josephus, History of the Jewish War, originally in Aramaic, and Jewish
Antiquities (both written in Rome).
Of the wisdom literature composed in Hebrew, the book of
the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus (c. 180–175 BCE),
modeled on the book of Proverbs, identified Wisdom with the observance of the
Torah. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, probably written in the latter
half of the 2nd century BCE, patterned on Jacob’s blessings to his sons, is
thought to belong to eschatological literature related to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The identification of Wisdom and Torah is stressed in the Mishnaic tract Pirqe
Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), which, though edited about 200 CE, contains
the aphorisms of rabbis dating back to 300 BCE.
Books such as the Testament of Job, Genesis Apocryphon, the
Book of Jubilees (now known to have been composed in Hebrew, as seen by its
appearance among the Dead Sea Scrolls), and Biblical Antiquities (falsely
attributed to Philo; originally written in Hebrew, then translated into Greek,
but now extant only in Latin), as well as the first half of Josephus’s Jewish
Antiquities, often show affinities with rabbinic Midrashim (interpretive works)
in their legendary accretions of biblical details. Sometimes, as in Jubilees
and in the Pseudo-Philo work, these accretions are intended to answer the
questions of heretics, but often, particularly in the case of Josephus, they
are apologetic in presenting biblical heroes in a guise that would appeal to a
Hellenized audience.
Apocalyptic trends, given considerable impetus by the
victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greeks, were not (as was formerly
thought) restricted to Pharisaic circles. They were (as is clear from the Dead
Sea Scrolls) found in other groups as well and are of particular importance for
their influence on both Jewish mysticism and early Christianity. These books,
which have a close connection with the biblical Book of Daniel, stress the
impossibility of a rational solution to the problem of theodicy. They also
stress the imminence of the day of salvation, which is to be preceded by
terrible hardships, and presumably reflected the current historical setting. In
the First Book of Enoch there is stress on the terrible punishment inflicted
upon sinners in the Last Judgment, the imminent coming of the messiah and his
kingdom, and the role of angels.
The sole Palestinian Jewish author writing in Greek whose
works are preserved is Josephus. His account of the war against the Romans in
his Life—and, to a lesser degree, in the Jewish War—is largely a defense of his
own questionable behavior as the commander of Jewish forces in Galilee. But
these works, especially Against Apion and Jewish Antiquities, are also defenses
of Judaism against antisemitic attacks. The Jewish War often quite deliberately
parallels the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (c. 460–c. 404
BCE); and the Jewish Antiquities quite deliberately parallels the Roman
Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 20 BCE), a work that dates from
earlier in the same century.
The Roman period (63 BCE–135 CE)
New parties and sects
Map of the Roman client kingdoms in the Levant during the
time of Herod the Great and his sons, showing territorial divisions among
Archelaus, Antipas, and Philip with different colors. The map outlines Herod's
kingdom boundaries, borders fixed by Augustus in 4 BCE, and other regional
boundaries, with key cities, the Mediterranean Sea, Dead Sea, and Lake Tiberias
labeled.
Roman client kingdoms during the time of Herod the Great
and his sons
Under Roman rule a number of new groups, largely political,
emerged in Palestine. Their common aim was to seek an independent Jewish state.
They were also zealous for, and strict in their observance of, the Torah.
After the death of King Herod, a political group known as
the Herodians, who apparently regarded Herod as the messiah, sought to
reestablish the rule of Herod’s descendants over an independent Palestine as a
prerequisite for Jewish preservation. Unlike the Zealots, however, they did not
refuse to pay taxes to the Romans.
The Zealots, whose appearance was traditionally dated to 6
CE, were one of five groups that emerged at the outset of the first Jewish war
against Rome (66–73 CE), which began when the Jews expelled the Romans from
Jerusalem, the client king Agrippa II fled the city, and a revolutionary
government was established. The Zealots were a mixture of bandits, insurgents
from Jerusalem, and priests, who advocated egalitarianism and independence from
Rome. In 68 they overthrew the government established by the original leaders
of the revolt and took control of the Temple during the civil war that followed;
many of them perished in the sack of Jerusalem by the Roman general (and later
emperor) Titus (reigned 79–81) or in fighting after the city’s fall. The
Sicarii (Assassins), so-called because of the daggers (sica) they carried,
arose about 54 CE, according to Josephus, as a group of bandits who kidnapped
or murdered those who had found a modus vivendi with the Romans. It was they
who made a stand at the fortress of Masada, near the Dead Sea, committing
suicide rather than allowing themselves to be captured by the Romans (73).
A number of other parties—various types of Essenes,
Damascus covenanters, and the Qumrān–Dead Sea groups—were distinguished by
their pursuit of an ascetic monastic life, disdain for material goods and
sensual gratification, sharing of material possessions, concern for
eschatology, strong apocalyptic views in anticipation of the coming of the
messiah, practice of ablutions to attain greater sexual and ritual purity,
prayer, contemplation, and study. The Essenes differed from the Therapeutae, a
Jewish religious group that had flourished in Egypt two centuries earlier, in
that the latter actively sought “wisdom” whereas the former were
anti-intellectual. Only some of the Essenes were celibate. The Essenes have
been termed “gnosticizing Pharisees” because of their belief, shared with the
gnostics, that the world of matter is evil.
The Damascus sect (New Covenanters) was a group of
Pharisees who went beyond the letter of the Pharisaic Halakha. Like the Essenes
and the Dead Sea sects, they adopted a monastic lifestyle and opposed the way
in which sacrifices were offered in the Temple.
Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea ScrollsThe Great Isaiah Scroll, the largest and
one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. American physicist Willard Libby dated
this scroll's linen wrapper in his carbon-14 dating research and found a date
of between 167 BCE and 233 CE.
The discoveries of scrolls in the caves of Qumrān,
near the Dead Sea, beginning in 1947, focused attention on the groups that had
lived there. On the basis of paleography, carbon-14 testing, and the coins
discovered in the caves, most scholars accept a 1st-century date for them. A
theoretical relationship of the communities with John the Baptist and the
nascent Christian groups remains in dispute, however. The sectaries have been
identified variously as Zealots, an unnamed anti-Roman group, and especially
Essenes. That the groups had secret, presumably apocalyptic teachings is clear
from the fact that some of the scrolls are in cryptographic script and reversed
writing; yet, despite the sectaries’ extreme piety and legalistic conservatism,
they apparently were not unaware of Hellenism, to judge from the presence of
Greek books at Qumrān.
It has long been debated whether gnosticism originated in
the apocalyptic strains of Judaism that were prevalent when the Temple was
destroyed in 70. Although it is doubtful that there is any direct Jewish source
of gnosticism, some characteristic gnostic doctrines are found in certain
groups of particularly apocalyptic 1st-century Jews—the dichotomy of body and
soul and a disdain for the material world, a notion of esoteric knowledge, and
an intense interest in angels and in problems of creation.
Origin of Christianity: the early Christians and the Jewish
community
Although it attracted little attention among pagans and
Jews in its early years, the rise of Christianity was by far the most important
“sectarian” development of the Roman period. Largely owing to the discoveries
at Qumrān, many scholars now regard primitive Christianity, with its
apocalyptic and eschatological interests, as part of a broad spectrum of
attitudes within Judaism itself, rather than as peripheral to Jewish
development or to the norm set by Pharisaic Judaism. Indeed, Jesus himself may
now be classified as an apocalyptic prophet whose announced intentions were not
to abrogate the Torah but to fulfill it. It is possible to envision a direct
line between Jewish currents, both in Palestine and the Diaspora in the
Hellenistic Age, and Christianity—particularly in the traditions of martyrdom,
proselytism, monasticism, mysticism, liturgy, and theology and especially with
the doctrine of the Logos (Word) as an intermediary between God and the world
and as the connection of faith and reason. The Septuagint in particular played
an important role both theoretically, in the transformation of Greek philosophy
into the theology of the Church Fathers, and practically, in converting Jews
and Jewish “sympathizers” to Christianity. In general, moreover, Christianity
was more positively disposed toward Hellenism than was Pharisaism, particularly
under the leadership of Paul, a thoroughly Hellenized Jew.
Even after Paul proclaimed his opposition to observance of
the Torah as a means of salvation, many Jewish Christians continued the
practice. Among them were two main groups: the Ebionites—probably the people
called minim, or “sectaries,” in the Talmud—who accepted Jesus as the messiah
but denied his divinity; and the Nazarenes, who regarded Jesus as both messiah
and God yet still regarded the Torah as binding upon Jews.
The number of Jews converted to any form of Christianity
was extremely small, as can be seen from the frequent criticisms of Jews for
their stubbornness by Christian writers. In the Diaspora, despite the strong
influence of Hellenism, there were relatively few Jewish converts, though the
Christian movement had some success in winning over Alexandrian Jews.
There were four major stages in the final break between
Christianity and Judaism: (1) the flight of the Jewish Christians from
Jerusalem to Pella across the Jordan in 70 and their refusal to continue the
struggle against the Romans, (2) the institution by the patriarch Gamaliel II
of a prayer in the Eighteen Benedictions against such heretics (c. 100), and (3
and 4) the failure of the Christians to join the messianic leaders
Lukuas-Andreas and Bar Kokhba in the revolts against Trajan and Hadrian in
115–117 and 132–135, respectively.
Judaism under Roman rule
When Pompey entered the Temple in 63 BCE as an arbiter both
in the civil war between John Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus I and in the struggle
of the Pharisees against both Jewish rulers, Judaea in effect became a puppet
state of the Romans. During the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar (c.
49–45 BCE), the Idumaean Antipater (died 43 BCE) ingratiated himself with
Caesar and was rewarded by being made governor of Judaea; the Jews were
rewarded through the promulgation of a number of decrees favorable to them,
which were reaffirmed by Augustus (reigned 27 BCE–14 CE) and later emperors.
Antipater’s son Herod, king of Judaea, an admirer of Greek culture, supported a
cult worshipping the emperor and built temples to Augustus in non-Jewish
cities. Because he was by origin an Idumaean, he was regarded by many Jews as a
foreigner. (The Idumaeans, or Edomites, had been forcibly converted to Judaism
by John Hyrcanus.) On several occasions during and after Herod’s reign,
Pharisaic delegations sought to convince the Romans to end the
quasi-independent Jewish government. After the death of Herod’s son and
successor, Archelaus, in 6 CE, Herod’s realms were ruled by Roman procurators,
the most famous (or infamous) of whom, Pontius Pilate (died 36), attempted to
introduce busts of the Roman emperor into Jerusalem and discovered the intense
religious zeal of the Jews in opposing this measure. When the emperor Caligula
(reigned 37–41) ordered that a statue of himself be erected in the Temple, a
large number of Jews proclaimed that they would suffer death rather than permit
such a desecration. In response, the governor of Syria, Petronius, succeeded in
getting the emperor to delay. The procurators of Judaea, being of equestrian
(knightly) rank and often of Oriental Greek stock, were more anti-Jewish than
the governors of Syria, who were of the higher senatorial order. The last
procurators in particular were indifferent to Jewish religious sensibilities;
and various patriotic groups, to whom nationalism was an integral part of their
religion, succeeded in polarizing the Jewish population and bringing on the
first war with Rome in 66. The climax of the war, as noted earlier, was the
destruction of the Temple in 70, though, according to Josephus, Titus sought to
spare it.
The papyri indicate that the war against Trajan—involving
the Jews of Egypt, Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia (though only to a minor
degree those of Palestine)—was a widespread revolt under a Cyrenian
king-messiah, Lukuas-Andreas, aimed at freeing Palestine from Roman rule. In
132–135 the same spirit of freedom inspired another uprising, the Second Jewish
Revolt, led by Bar Kokhba, who may have had the support of the greatest rabbi
of the time, Akiba ben Joseph (40–c. 135). The result was Hadrian’s decrees prohibiting
circumcision and public instruction in the Torah, though these were soon
revoked by Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161). Having suffered such tremendous
losses on the field of battle, Judaism turned its dynamism to the continued
development of the Talmud.
Louis H. Feldman