Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 79

No one set of beliefs and ideas constituted »Judaism« in antiquity. A range of ideologies were in circulation and in flux. The canon itself was not yet fixed early in the first century CE and various Jewish groups cleaved to different constellations of practices, texts, and oral traditions. Jewishness was not a religion of the book in the years before the war but was based primarily on a set of non-textual pillars. Jewishness had a few core elements. One was ethnicity. Religious belonging and ethnic or national identity were hard to disentangle, and though conversion existed, birth family was the primary indicator of God-allegiance. Second was what E. P. Sanders has termed »covenantal nomism«. By this he means that Jews shared in common an idea that God has chosen the Jewish people, Israel, as God’s own and bound them into a covenant that entailed a set of divinely ordained obligations. Though there was a potent idea of Torah, the word itself indicated both a text and a way of behaving Jewishly in the world (law).

Jews may have agreed that they were bound to God’s law, but they were far from in agreement as to what this meant. At a minimum it included the maintenance of a sacrificial cult and the sanctity of a ruling priesthood. It meant adherence to some sort of sacred calendar, Sabbath observance, and dietary restrictions of some kind. It meant monotheism and an aversion to idolatry. Jews also shared foundation narratives and forefathers. But no single one of these baselines was interpreted uniformly across groups, and many were hotly disputed.

However, although the spectrum of Jewish belief was not linear, we can plot a set of points around which various groups clustered politically and ideologically. Jewish elites tended to come from the priestly families and affiliate primarily as Sadducees. Wealthy and international, the hierocracy had a history of accommodation to imperial demands and found ways to adapt Jewish ideals in the face of external threat or opportunity. On the other side of the spectrum cluster more conservative Jewish interpreters of tradition—groups less willing to adapt to foreign rule or culture, and committed to a rhetoric of religious purity and separation. Among these groups we can count groups the sources call Ḥasidim (or Essenes, (»pious ones«), and others from the earliest Maccabean rebels to the Dead Sea Sectarians.

Jewish religious conservatism and pietism took a range of forms and claimed a range of theological genealogies. While it is difficult to extrapolate from individual, unprovenanced texts to social movements, we can read in the preserved Jewish materials of the late Persian and Hellenistic periods a set of significant theological innovations, introducing several ideas generally not found in the biblical canon.

The Deuteronomic (Sinaitic) covenant and Pentateuchal theology in general presume a just and legible cosmos. Obedience to God’s law would have left visible traces in the world. Deuteronomy 28 promises an almost Edenic fecundity, prosperity, and peace to those who obey the covenant. God and Israel meet and engage in this world—impiety and disobedience activate natural disasters and empower Israel’s enemies. There is no idea of heaven and hell in the core texts of the Hebrew Bible. God’s justice played out in history.

At some point, for some Jews, this theology and theodicy failed to meet the needs of a people in extremis—surely the evil prosper! Not satisfied to believe either that the suffering they endured was in any way just or that God was unjust and the world meaningless, they developed new (apocalyptic) interpretations of the covenant that allowed it to console in times of crisis. Two such innovations had enormous impact: the first is eschatology, according to which divine justice was deferred to an end time (eschaton) determined by God. Cognate to this is the development of a concept of an afterlife, especially one where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished. A second related set of ideas can be gathered around the idea of messianism, a belief that a divinely anointed leader or leaders would arise and bring about not only the end of current historical trials, but usher in a new age of divine dominion, piety, and peace. Though nowhere uniformly systematized, these ideas were in broad circulation in first-century Judea.

In the violent years leading up to the outbreak of the war against Rome, Josephus identified certain rebels on whom he placed blame for the conflict. He calls some Zealots, others Sicarii, and he derides these agitators collectively and individually with a colorful vocabulary meant to depict them as self-serving charlatans. Josephus wants his Roman and Jewish readers to believe that Jewish rebels were not animated by authentic Jewish ideas but were instead power-hungry regional strong men and pretenders who betrayed true Judaism.

As well as these, another group of criminals came into being, less bloodstained in action but with a more blasphemous agenda, who ruined the calm of the city just as much as the assassins. These were the cheats and imposters, peddling revolution and political change under the guise of divine inspiration. They managed to excite the people to a frenzy and had them trooping out into the desert in the belief that God would there reveal to them signs presaging their liberation [… another was an] Egyptian false prophet. This man was a charlatan who presented himself as a prophet of proven accuracy. On arrival in the country he gathered a following of about 30,000 who fell for his propaganda and led them out of the desert by a route which brought them to the Mount of Olives [… from there] to force entry into Jerusalem, overpower the Roman garrison and any resistance from the people, and establish himself as an absolute ruler.¹⁵

It is clear that a set of religious ideas with an apocalyptic bent lurk beneath Josephus’s bias. While Judea was in economic crisis in the middle of the first century, it is also clear that the Jewish rebels were catalyzed by an ardent and authentic theology.

Reading between the lines in Josephus and with the literary texts we have from this era, we can surmise that many rebel groups had taken apocalyptic ideology and translated it into manifestos of political action. Refusing to bow to foreign power, as to idols, and clinging to the freedom promised by God and covenant, the rebels hastened a war in which foreign dominion would be ended once and for all. In the crosshairs of this religio-political ire was not only Rome, but also priestly and other Judean elites whom the rebels saw as selling Judaism out, literally, through taxation and economic exploitation, and figuratively by backing Roman interests.

The set of religious ideas inciting the actors behind Josephus’s words, and also in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Daniel, 1 Enoch, and other Hellenistic Jewish texts, are not only part of the explanation for the war of 66, but they have a durable and significant afterlife, critical to understanding the rebellions of the second century, the Jesus movement, and even rabbinic theology.¹⁶