Comments on: Four Views of Second Temple Judaism

By: Monique

Monique — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:49:33 +0000

I’m with you on #4.

By: Patrick George McCullough

Patrick George McCullough — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:58:51 +0000

Thanks for that comment, Mark. I haven't actually read that work by Sanders myself. It is a bit unfair of me to publicize Boustan's comments about Sanders, since they were an off-the-cuff response to a question I had in the seminar. I'm not sure which work Boustan is most directly addressing. If we're talking about Paul and Palestinian Judaism, the emphasis is certainly on belief rather than practice. If you search through the book on Amazon, for instance, "pilgrimage" occurs once and "festival" occurs twice. In fact, he describes his purpose in the book quite apart from these kinds of practices. Here is a relevant quote: "A pattern of religion, defined positively, is the description of how a religion is perceived by its adherents to function. 'Perceived to function' has the sense not of what an adherent does on a day-to-day basis, but of how getting in and staying in are understood: the way in which a religion is understood to admit and retain members is considered to be the way it 'functions'. This may involve daily activities, such as prayers, washing and the like, but we are interested not so much in the details of these activities as in their role and significance in the 'pattern': on what principles they are based, what happens if they are not observed and the like. A pattern of religion thus has largely to do with the items which a systematic theology classifies under 'soteriology'. 'Pattern of religion' is a more satisfactory term for what we are going to describe, however, than 'soteriology'. . . ." (17, emphasis in original). I will have to take a look at Judaism: Practices and Belief to see what he does with practice there. Thanks for bringing it up!

By: Mark Goodacre

Mark Goodacre — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:20:33 +0000

Thanks for the post, Pat. I don’t entirely agree with you about Sanders. His book on Judaism is called subtitled “Practice and Belief”. I think it’s important to note too that he in no way tries to downplay the varieties of Judaism. The point of his “common Judaism” is to find a “common denominator” Judaism, which means looking for some commonalities in among the admitted variety.

By: Michael Carden

Michael Carden — Thu, 07 May 2009 07:52:04 +0000

Oh yes, I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why I identified the Samaritans as one group who clearly did reject the Jerusalem Temple and its cult. Still do, in fact And if I might pick up on slaveofone’s point re the Old Testament Hebrew/Greek/(Aramaic) scriptures, I would note that clearly one of the issues being contested in these texts (all of which I would classify as post-’exilic’ or ’second’ Temple) is that of the Temple; which one is the right one and what’s gone wrong in Jerusalem are two constant motifs. The Twelve Minor Prophets is a prime example. The northern sanctuaries are constantly pilloried and defamed but then just when everything seems right in Jerusalem, up pops Malachi which is clearly a case of “trubble a’ mill’ in Zion. Similar patterns can be seen in Isaiah and 1 Enoch. So it’s clear that questions of Temple and cult are important sites of contestation in (Second) Temple Judaism from Persian through to Roman periods.

By: Patrick George McCullough

Patrick George McCullough — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:13:56 +0000

Thanks, Michael. I think I would agree with you, and your examples are helpful for clarification. From our discussions this quarter, I think Boustan (and I would follow him) would be hesitant about using the “anti-Temple” category as it tends to get thrown around quite a bit–particularly from silence.

I have a sense that there may be more of a diversity of views on this area as well and not simply a dividing line between “for” and “against” the Jerusalem Temple and cult.

By: Patrick George McCullough

Patrick George McCullough — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:08:59 +0000

Thanks, Chris. That’s a helpful perspective on these. I hadn’t thought about these as a continuum. I’ll have to ask Boustan what he thinks of that. One qualification is the fact that the methodology in #4 is a bit different than the others–particularly with its focus on social history. At first glance, I can’t think of how that methodological concern fits into the continuum idea, but otherwise, it seems to fit.

By: Patrick George McCullough

Patrick George McCullough — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:04:26 +0000

Thanks for that, Dave. By the way, after your first sentence, that whole paragraph is one single sentence. That is quite a feat!

By: slaveofone

slaveofone — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:20:03 +0000

And perhaps this is a good time for the Hebrew Bible enthusiast (myself!) to chime in and suggest that #4 is pretty evident from our exilic/post-exilic texts themselves! Not only do we have a multiplicity and/or conflict of views between individual “books” and/or the way one scriptural text interprets another (take, for instance, the “book” of Job, which teaches us that YHWH’s justice is arbitrary and capricious and that humanity is of little worth in the grand scheme of creation, which is directly antithetical to most biblical messages elsewhere; or the difference between Exodus’ insistence that YHWH will hold a parent’s sin against their children and children’s children (Exod 34:7), which is counter to other texts which say only the one who sins will fall under judgment (Ezek 18:20); or Chronicle’s insistence that the Davidic line has continued even after the exile and that the promise to David’s line is still operative compared to the claim from second and third Isaiah that the promise to David has now been transferred to the people or “remnant” of Israel and that this began with Cyrus taking on the Davidic mantle and anointing–see also Ezra 1) but we also have popular versus official forms of Jewish religion and belief, the difference between Jewish religion and belief inside the land versus outside the land (see, for example, Esther, or the existence of alternate Jewish temples in Egypt like Onias’ or the one in Elephantine/Yeb), and even different forms of texts in use at the same time (such as the Greek scriptures, which were considered by many Jews to be the inspired, authoritative holy word of YHWH, superior even to the Hebrew—not simply a “translation” and therefore inferior or merely adequate—or the Pesherim of the Qumranites, who viewed their interpretative explications of prophetic works to be inspired and authoritative).

By: Michael Carden

Michael Carden — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:15:45 +0000

I would also lean towards number 4 myself. I would also give another line of demarcation and that is attitudes to the Temple. Obviously there would be a large number who accept the centrality of the Jerusalem Temple. They would then be divided between those who acccepted the Temple establishment of the day and those who rejected it as corrupt. These would then be divided into those who would still remain attached to the Temple despite its corrupt estalishment and those who believed that the Temple had lost its sanctity and needed a through cleansing or even replacement. Some of those might well have accepted the Temple at Leontopolis in Egypt as a replacement for the Jerusalem Temple. Clearly some Jews must have done because it had a long history and was finally closed down by the Romans after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Then there wee those who rejected the Jerusalem Temple outright. Principal amongst these, of course, were the Samaritans.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:23:56 +0000

This seems a sensible delineation of the views, and #4 seems the most sensible of the bunch. In effect what Boustan is suggesting is a spectrum with view #1 at one end and view #2 at the other. Views #3 and #4 fall in between, each leaning a bit to one side or the other. I think we would find similar spectrums for most debatable topics. The views that always seem best to me are the ones that don’t tilt too far in one direction. That is the moderate views are most sensible, as far as I’m concerned. Thanks for this, Patrick. It was helpful.