Diversity and Unity in Judaism before Jesus

    Circumcision

    According to Gen. 17:10, God made a covenant with Abraham that all his male descendants would be circumcised. Thus, the biblical narrative locates the origins of Jewish circumcision in the establishment of God’s relationship with his chosen people. But, be that as it may, the Jews weren’t the only people of the Ancient Near East who circumcised their males. The practice was widely attested among Egyptians (as a rite of passage into manhood), Canaanites, and other ethnic groups. But the Israelites attached deep significance to the rite, considering it a holy obligation rather than a cultural more. In the biblical prophets, “uncircumcised” was identified with “unclean” (Isa. 52:1). This notion appears later in post-biblical Judaism where uncircumcision takes on connotations of sexual immorality.

    When the early Christians debated about whether Gentile converts to Christianity needed to be circumcised, the church council decided they did not but abjured converts to abstain from sexual immorality—implying a connection between the two (Acts 15:29).^[10] There were occasionally efforts to undermine the practice. In the second century B.C.E, some of the Hellenizing Jews—those who sought to imitate the Greek culture of their then-overlords—tried to use surgical procedures to reverse their circumcision (1 Macc. 1:15). But most Jews considered circumcision non-negotiable. When Antiochus Epiphanes outlawed the practice, some Jewish mothers endured torture and death rather than neglect circumcision (1 Macc. 1:60-61). In the second century C.E., one of the precipitating factors behind the hard-fought Bar Kokhbah rebellion was a decree by the Roman emperor Hadrian outlawing the mutilation of the genitals within the Empire. Even though the law was designed primarily to ban castration, it effectively would have outlawed circumcision as well—thus destroying one of the main distinctives of the Jewish people.

    So not all who were circumcised were Jewish, but all who were truly Jewish were circumcised. No doubt the Christians’ laxity on the matter was one of the factors that contributed to the division between the synagogue and the church.

    Torah

    Certainly one of the features that united Jews was their reverence for the Torah, or Laws of Moses. There’s a broad scholarly consensus that beginning in the time of Ezra (in the mid-fifth or early fourth century B.C.), the books traditionally associated with Moses were elevated to a place of great authority in Judaism. It was in this period that the foundation was laid for the Jews’ “canon” of Scriptures. That’s not to say that all the Mosaic laws were unknown or ignored in Israel before Ezra’s time, nor would I argue that these texts didn’t possess some kind of special, divine authority in pre-exilic Yahwism. Some of the prophets testify to the existence of the Mosaic laws well before the time of Ezra (see, e.g., Amos 8:5; Jer. 17:21-27), and the writer of deuteronomic history was clearly aware of their existence as well (e.g., 1 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6). But there was certainly no wide knowledge or observance of the Mosaic statutes prior to Ezra’s time. For example, the Book of Nehemiah states that the Jewish community in Jerusalem was unaware of the biblical commandment to observe the Feast of Booths and that the celebration hadn’t been held since the days of Joshua (see Neh. 8:13-17). Ezra’s work placed the Mosaic law firmly at the center of Israelite piety rather than the periphery. Post-Ezra prophetic texts associate proper piety explicitly with observance of Mosaic law, as in the Book of Malachi: “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel . . .” (Mal. 4:4; see also, Dan. 9:11-13).

    In part, the new prominence of the books of Moses was due to the policies of the Persian Empire, which encouraged the standardization of law codes among its subject peoples. Ezra, a priest and scribe, was appointed governor of Yehud (as the Persians called Judah), and was given the authority to impose Jewish ancestral laws on his people. Chapters 8-10 of the Book of Nehemiah recall a convocation in which the Jewish people of Jerusalem (and its environs) gathered for a public reading of the Law of Moses, led by Ezra. While the gathering was primarily a religious affair, it had political connotations as well: Ezra was, after all, the governor of the Jews. He was empowered to command the Jews to obey the Laws of Moses.

    So, from at least Ezra’s time on, Judaism was in the process of becoming the first “religion of the Book”—a faith centered on accepted Scriptures. In the Second Temple period, the Torah came to be recognized as holy Scripture. The prophetic writings, while probably considered in some sense “inspired,” weren’t accorded the status of Scripture until sometime later in the era. And even in the time of Jesus, not all Jews seem to have regarded the Prophets and Writings (the poetic and wisdom texts, along with the Book of Daniel) as Scripture in the same sense as the Torah was accepted. The Sadducees, in particular, seem to have rejected the authority of the Prophets while arguments on the value of some of the Writings continued even among the rabbis for some decades into the Common Era. Apparently, one didn’t have to accept the Song of Solomon as Scripture in order to be considered a good Jew, but one did have to accept Numbers.

    Accepting the authority of the Torah was a minimum requirement for being Jewish, but it wasn’t diagnostic of Judaism. Samaritans possessed their own version of the Pentateuch, but by Ezra’s time, they certainly weren’t considered Jewish. The Christians, too, revered the Laws of Moses, but they were eventually excluded from the Jewish fold. Neither circumcision nor acknowledgement of the Pentateuch was a sufficient criterion for identification as Jewish.^[11]

    The Jerusalem Temple

    The true acid test, it seems, was one’s attitude toward the Jerusalem temple establishment. Since the time of King Josiah’s religious reforms (622 B.C.E.), the temple in Jerusalem had been the only truly legitimate site for Jewish sacrificial worship. Not that other temples didn’t exist since there were at least two that we know of: one in the Transjordanian region and one in Egypt at the Jewish colony known as Elephantine. But these temples were both situated so that their doors faced Jerusalem, reminding the patrons of these sites that the true House of the Lord was located in his holy city. Correspondence between the Elephantine Jews and the Jerusalem Jews was discovered in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and these texts reveal the high regard that the Egyptian Jews gave to the Jerusalem temple.

    There was certainly room to criticize the Temple and the practices that took place there. Such criticism had long existed in Judaism, dating back to the biblical prophets (e.g., Isa.1:11-15; Eze. 8:7-15; Mal.1:6-14). Josephus reports that the Essenes had their own priests, not trusting any outside their order to perform their sacrifices (Ant. 18.19). The Dead Sea Scrolls Community, too, had little regard for the way the priests ran the Temple, but they never denied the legitimacy of the institution. All Jews believed that God’s presence dwelt in a special way in Jerusalem. To repudiate Jerusalem was essentially to repudiate Judaism.

    Herein lay the distinction between Jews and Samaritans: both groups regarded Abraham as their forefather; both worshipped the Lord; both honored the Torah of Moses. But the Samaritans held no special regard for Jerusalem. Though they had offered to assist in rebuilding the Temple in the days of Zerubbabel (Ezra 4:1-3), they apparently considered Jerusalem at that time to be but one holy site among many. Later, when the rift between the Samaritans and Jews deepened, the rhetoric intensified. The Samaritans would argue that only their worship site on Mt. Gerizim was legitimate, and that the Jerusalem temple was a fraud. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Christians and Jews would divide over the issue of whether or not the Temple should be rebuilt. In Christian rhetoric, the destruction of the Temple was an obvious sign that the age of sacrifice was passed, and Judaism itself had become obsolete.

Conclusion

    Judaism of the Second Temple period—the time before and just after Jesus—was a complex institution. It included a variety of perspectives, sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing with one another. At times, some sects were willing to deny that their opponents were truly Jewish. At other times, it seems that groups of differing opinions could join together in common cause against the Gentiles, or against heretics who stepped beyond the boundaries drawn by Scripture and tradition. Sometimes, the diversity of the era gave way to internecine strife, as when the Hellenized Jews attempted to impose their views on the traditional Jews of Jerusalem (1 Macc. 1:11-15) or when the “Wicked Priest” persecuted the Dead Sea Scroll Community’s “Teacher of Righteousness.” But without doubt, the diversity of Second Temple Judaism was one of the characteristics that allowed the faith to survive the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and two disastrous rebellions against Rome. As Qohelet tells us, a cord of multiple strands is not easily broken (Ecc. 4:12), and the spirit of Judaism could not be broken, in spite of the loss of one of its most central icons, the Jerusalem Temple.

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