From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Third Edition

Shaye Cohen

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780664219116
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645484
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This is the third edition of Shaye J. D. Cohen's important and seminal work on the history and development of Judaism between 164 BCE to 300 CE. Cohen's synthesis of religion, literature, and history offers deep insight into the nature of Judaism at this key period, including the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, the function of Jewish religion in the larger community, and the development of normative Judaism and other Jewish sects. Cohen offers students more than just history, but an understanding of the social and cultural context of Judaism as it developed into the formative period of rabbinic Judaism. This new edition includes a brand-new chapter on the parting of ways between Jews and Christians in the second century CE. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah remains the clearest introduction to the era that shaped Judaism and provided the context for early Christianity.

1

Ancient Judaism

Chronology and Definitions

The goal of this book is to interpret ancient Judaism: to identify its major ideas, to describe its salient practices, to trace its unifying patterns, and to assess its relationship to Israelite religion and society. The book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, but to make the argument easier to follow, in the first section of this chapter, I briefly survey the chronology of ancient Judaism, and in the second section I discuss some of the difficulties of periodization. In the third section, I outline the major themes of each chapter. I conclude with a brief discussion of unity and diversity in ancient Judaism.

CHRONOLOGY

In 587 BCE, many of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah were exiled to Babylonia, thereby inaugurating the exilic period. (BCE = before the Common Era; and CE = of the Common Era—religiously neutral equivalents of BC = before Christ; and AD = anno Domini, “Year of the Lord.”) In 587, Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed and the kingdom was no longer. With the Persian conquest of Babylonia in 539 BCE, the Judeans (or Jews) were permitted by the conqueror, Cyrus the Great, to return to their homeland. Some of them took advantage of his offer. At least two waves of Babylonian Jews returned to the land of Judea during the 530s and 520s BCE. After some complex and bitter feuding with the community of those who never had been exiled, the Jews rebuilt the temple and dedicated it in 516 BCE. Jeremiah and Ezekiel were active at the beginning of the exilic period; Second Isaiah and his school (the anonymous authors of Isa. 40–66), Haggai, and Zechariah (the author of Zech. 1–8) were active at its end.

The Persian period lasted only two hundred years, from 539 BCE (the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great) to 334 or 333 BCE (the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great). The most important achievement of the period, aside from the restoration of the temple, was the activity of Ezra (probably 458 BCE, although many scholars prefer a date about thirty years later) and Nehemiah (445 and 432 BCE). Ezra led another wave of returnees from Babylonia, tried to dissolve the marriages with non-Jews that had been contracted primarily by the priesthood and the aristocracy, and read “the book of the instruction (Torah) of Moses” to the people. Nehemiah had a more variegated career, including the fortification and repopulation of the city of Jerusalem, the cancellation of the debts of the poor, and a long list of religious reforms. The generation of Ezra and Nehemiah is the last to be treated by the biblical historians. Malachi was the last of the prophets (actually “Malachi” is probably not a name but a common noun for “my messenger” or, with a slightly different punctuation, “his messenger”; in other words, the book of Malachi is anonymous), and he probably lived just before Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra and Nehemiah mark the end of “the Bible” and “biblical Israel” (see next section and chap. 6).

The conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great inaugurated the Hellenistic period. After Alexander’s death (323 BCE), his empire was divided by his generals. Twenty years of fighting followed. Finally the dust settled (301 BCE), and Judea was part of the kingdom of Egypt (ruled by the Macedonian Ptolemies). A century later (200 BCE), Judea was conquered by the Macedonian kings of Syria (the Seleucids). In the sphere of cultural history, the Hellenistic period endured for centuries, perhaps until the Arab conquests of the seventh century CE. From the perspective of political history, however, the Hellenistic period was much shorter. For most inhabitants of the Levant, it ended when the rule of the Macedonian kings of Egypt and Syria was replaced by that of Rome in the first century BCE. For the Jews, it was even shorter.

Throughout the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the Jews maintained a quiescent attitude toward their rulers. There is no indication of any serious uprising by the Jews against the empires that ruled them. This changed dramatically in the 160s BCE. In 168–167 BCE, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid king of Syria, profaned the temple and persecuted Judaism. In the temple he erected an altar to Zeus, and everywhere he attempted to compel the Jews to violate the laws of the Torah. Various groups of Jews rebelled against the king, the most prominent of them being the clan of Mattathias the Hasmonean and his son Judah the Maccabee (hence the entire dynasty is often called Maccabean or Hasmonean). In 164 BCE the Maccabees reconquered and purified the temple; the end of Seleucid rule followed twenty years later (142 BCE).

The most striking feature of the Hellenistic period is its spectacular finish, but in their own quiet and poorly attested way, the fourth and third centuries BCE emerge as an important transition period in the history of Judaism. These centuries witnessed the growth of the Diaspora, the “scattering” of the Jews throughout the world; the beginnings of the canonization of Scripture; the writing of the earliest nonbiblical works that have been preserved; the gradual transformation of prophecy into apocalypse; the emergence of a class of scribes, laypeople learned in the sacred traditions. Some books of the Bible were written during this period, all of them anonymous, but they are impressive in both number and importance (e.g., Jonah and Job). The latest book in the Bible, Daniel, was written at the very end of the Hellenistic period, during the dark days of the Antiochian persecution.

The Maccabean period lasted a century, from the victory of 164 BCE to the entrance of the Romans into Jerusalem in 63 BCE. During their tenure, the Maccabees gradually increased their power and prestige. They began as rebels against the Seleucid Empire, but less than ten years after Judah’s death, his brother was appointed high priest by a relation of Antiochus Epiphanes! By the 140s and 130s BCE, the Seleucids had little choice but to accept the independence of the Maccabean state. The rise of the Maccabees within the Jewish polity was just as phenomenal. They began as insignificant country priests and became high priests and kings, the rulers of an independent state. They pursued an aggressive foreign policy, seeking alliance with Rome against the Seleucids and carving out for themselves a kingdom larger than that of David and Solomon.

Their fall from power was caused by both internal and external enemies. During the reigns of John Hyrcanus (135–104 BCE) and Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE), many Jews opposed Maccabean rule. These opponents were not “hellenizers” and “lawless” Jews who supported Antiochus’s attempt to destroy Judaism, but loyal Jews who had had enough of the Maccabees’ autocratic ways. The Seleucids and the Greek city-states of the region never fully accepted Maccabean independence, but the most potent external threat came from a power that first entered the scene as a friend and ally. At first, while the Seleucid Empire was still strong, the Romans accepted a treaty of alliance with the Maccabees (1 Macc. 8); as the proverb says, “An enemy of my enemy is my friend.” However, as Seleucid power waned and Maccabean power increased, the Romans realized that it was no longer to their advantage to support the Judean state since the Maccabees had become as much a threat to Roman interests in the area as the Seleucids had been. After the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE, they realized that the Maccabees were a nationalist element that could not be combined easily with their own imperial vision, so the Maccabees were pushed aside and a new dynasty was created.

The new dynasty owed everything to the Romans and therefore supported them wholeheartedly. The founder of the dynasty was Herod the Great (37–4 BCE). He tried to be the king over all his subjects, not just the Jews. Herod benefacted pagan cities and temples as well as Jewish cities and the temple of Jerusalem. He also built numerous fortresses, the most famous of which was Masada. To pay for all these projects, he imposed heavy taxes, and because he felt insecure in his rule, he killed numerous members of the aristocracy whose claims to prestige and status within the Jewish community were stronger than his own. He also killed many of his wives and children, suspecting them (sometimes rightly) of plotting rebellion.

The Roman-Jewish symbiosis was at its peak during the reigns of Herod the Great and his grandson Herod Agrippa I (41–44 CE). But the Romans were moving away from rule over the Jews through vassal kings to rule through Roman administrators, called procurators or prefects. These were a motley lot, and for the most part they were not very sensitive to the needs of the populace. Some were brutal (notably Pontius Pilate), others corrupt, most incompetent. As a result of their mistakes, ethnic strife in the country between Jews and pagans, social unrest in the Jewish polity, and severe economic problems, a war broke out against the Romans in 66 CE, about 128 years after the Romans first entered Jerusalem (from 63 BCE to 66 CE is 128 years, not 129, because there is no year 0). This is the “great revolt” or the “first revolt.”

Taken by surprise, the Romans suffered a few serious defeats at first, but in the summer of 67 CE Vespasian marched from Syria into Galilee and began the slow and deliberate reconquest. By the year 68 the entire country, except for Jerusalem and a few isolated strongholds, had been pacified. Vespasian was in no rush, however, to storm Jerusalem. The Jews were killing each other in their own power struggles; most important, there also was a power vacuum in Rome in the wake of Nero’s suicide in June of 68 CE. Vespasian had everything to gain and nothing to lose by taking his time. He played his cards correctly, with the result that in July of 69 CE, he had himself proclaimed emperor. He spent the rest of that year securing his power. A new emperor needs a victory to prove his worth, and Vespasian entrusted the war to his son Titus. After a brutal siege, in the summer of 70 CE Jerusalem was retaken and the temple was destroyed. A few mop-up operations remained, notably the taking of Masada (73 or 74 CE), but for all practical purposes, the war was over. The Second Temple period came to an end.

The war of 66–70 was the first Jewish revolt against the Romans but not the last. In 115–117, the Jews of Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica (in modern-day Libya) rebelled against the Romans. The Jews of the land of Israel apparently did not participate in this war to any significant extent, and the causes and course of the war are most obscure. (During the same years the Jews of Babylonia, alongside their Parthian rulers, fought the Romans who had invaded their country, but from all indications this was a separate war altogether and need not be considered in this book.) The other major rebellion is that of Bar Kokhba (132–135), sometimes called the “second revolt.” The causes and course of this war are most obscure as well, but from all indications the wars of 115–117 and 132–135 were serious affairs, with serious consequences. The war of 115–117 resulted in the decimation of Egyptian Jewry, which had been the largest and most important Jewish community of the Roman Diaspora. The Bar Kokhba war resulted in the paganization of the city of Jerusalem (now rebuilt under the name Aelia Capitolina) and the changing of the country’s name from Judea to Palaestina (Palestine).

The latter part of the Second Temple period, that is, the period from the rise of the Maccabees (160s BCE) to the destruction of the temple (70 CE), was a rich and significa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword to the First Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• 1 Ancient Judaism: Chronology and Definitions
• 2 Jews and Gentiles
• 3 The Jewish “Religion”: Practices and Beliefs
• 4 The Community and Its Institutions
• 5 Sectarian and Normative
• 6 Canonization and Its Implications
• 7 The Emergence of Rabbinic Judaism
• 8 Ways That Parted: Jews, Christians, Jewish Christians (ca. 100–150)
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Glossary of Technical Terms
• Index