Lethargic Man (anag.)

Long-term readers may have noted a theme running through my Judaism-related posts, which is my reading ancient texts scouring them for clues as to how much ancient practice of the Oral Torah, which rabbinical propaganda portrays as going back to Moses at Sinai, actually antedated rabbinical Judaism (which arose from Pharisaic Judaism having to reinvent itself following the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, to recentre Judaism upon the home and the synagogue).

Well, I won't be blogging about this any more: I've just read a book that has given me all the answers (along with the sources for them, of which by this point, a surprising number are already on my bookshelf): The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal, by Yonatan Adler. The author's thesis is to sidestep the question of when the Torah was written, and instead look into when the literary and archaeological evidence indicates that people were actually keeping the commandments of the Torah.

The answer appears to be rather later than one would have naïvely thought. In area after area, there's no real evidence for people having kept the Torah before the Hasmonean period.

That said, the author has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about not viewing early evidence through the lens of later Jewish norms, and is so keen to do so (and perhaps also to push his hypotheses) that he occasionally develops a blind spot to contravening evidence, especially if it does not rest on firm foundations.

A couple of examples: The author adduces lots of evidence that the synagogue as it existed in the first century and the couple of preceding centuries, was a place where the Torah was taught, rather than a place of prayer, even though it was called a [place of] prayer. The author suggests this name may be a hangover from an earlier institution, in the third century BCE, in which synagogues were used for prayer, of which there is some evidence from a couple of dedicatory inscriptions; but the author concludes from this "we ought to exercise extreme caution in adducing Ptolemaic-era epigraphic and papyrological evidence as a reliable indicator for the existence of something closely resembling the first-century synagogue as early as the late third of second century BCE". Surely the point is not that the C3 BCE synagogue resembles the C1 CE synagogue; it's that the synagogue as an institution exists at all! After all, the synagogue today doesn't resemble that of Josephus' time, but we still call both synagogues!

My second example concerns observance of Shabbos. There's plenty of evidence once again of Shabbos observance from Hasmonean times onward, but not really any from earlier. Even the few biblical mentions of Shabbos outside of the Torah take place in a context in which the overwhelming majority of people are not observing the Shabbos. Yet, when the author mentions a papyrus thought to date to the mid-third century BCE, recording the number of bricks received by its writer from the fifth to the eleventh of the Egyptian month of Epeiph, in which instead of an amount on the seventh, the author records only "Sábbata", he concludes, "Whether or not those involved (presumably Judeans) would have regarded work on the Sabbath to have been forbidden by dint of something like Torah law is difficult to know from this singular document. Possibly, the term refers to a traditional Judean holiday, weekly or otherwise [!—MSG], when Judean workers would have taken a break from their normal labors as others would have on their customary holidays."

That said, all of the above is just nitpicking, none of which really destroys the author's point.

I learned in a Limmud talk some years ago, I forget from whom or about what, that the Talmud's portrayal of the masses as עַם הָאָרֶץ, literally "people of the land", but used to mean people ignorant of Jewish law, which has taught generations of Torah scholars to look down their noses at the ignoramuses of antiquity, conceals a secret the rabbis of the Talmud were eager to cover up. Rabbinical propaganda portrays a tradition of proto-rabbinical teaching going back all the way to Biblical times. However, the reality is that both rabbinical Judaism and their teaching, viz. the Talmud, were innovations in a religion which abhorred innovation (even one and three quarter millennia before the Chasam Sofer and his infamous חִדֻשׁ אָסוּר מִן הַתּוֹרָה), and it took a long time for the Talmud first to be even known about, and then to be accepted, by all parts of world Jewry. I have heard that one of the reasons the Jewish community in the kingdom of Ḥimyar in present-day Yemen was so large in the fifth and early sixth centuries was because it had become a refuge for Jews who rejected the Talmud, once it had become universally accepted in Babylonia. (I have also heard that even as late as the ninth century, when the Ashkenazi community emerged into history, they (the Ashkenazim, which at that time meant the Jews of France and the Rhineland) knew of the Talmud, but did not yet consider it binding.)

It had never occurred to me before reading this book that the same thing must have happened beforehand with the Torah: There was a time when it was barely known, then a time in which it was known but not widely accepted, before it came to be universally accepted by, as this book demonstrates, the Hasmonean period.

In the final chapter, the author seeks to try and identify in which period, and why, Torah observance did come to be universally accepted. Now, I've written before about how my understanding of Chanukah has been turned upside-down again and again. I'd thought I'd come to the end of this, but now it seems it's happened again. In the author's second hypothesis, he questions the account in 1 and 2 Maccabees that Antiochus IV had sought to outlaw Jewish practices such as circumcision, Shabbos observance and kashrus. This is only mentioned in accounts written later; the contemporary account in the Book of Daniel mentions only disruption of the Temple cult. Could it be, the author argues, that the Hasmoneans, having won their revolt, sought to weld the people together through a document that provided them both an origin story and a set of national practices, and adopted the Torah, previously only known to the literate elite, for this purpose? In that case, the accounts in 1 and 2 Maccabees would be a case of the victors rewriting history to once again portray their innovation as an ancient practice, much as the rabbis would later do (and which the author paints certain passages in the Bible as doing to).

At that point, my jaw would have hit the floor had it not been that the author had already presented an alternative hypothesis, in which Torah practice became accepted in the earlier Hellenistic period.

Jewish learning notes index