recent reading: the early history of god: yahweh and other deities in ancient israel

Mark S Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel

So this is like a companion piece to the other recent book on ancient Jewish religion I just read, Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. While Cohen's book was a new one for me, Smith's is a reread.

This is an important thing, the reread.

Maybe some people have better memories than I do. But even if I thought I remembered Smith's book clearly, I don't know how I would use that memory to reevaluate his work in light of everything I had read since -- I don't know how I could rely just on the memory of it to make the new connections a rereading will make. If those decades of other books had been read specifically with Smith's book in mind, that would be one thing, but that would have been a very directed course of reading, and then we would still be having this same conversation about some other book that I hadn't been keeping mentally open while reading everything else.

Anyway, I read The Early History of God at some point in the mid to late nineties, and thought of it again while reading Cohen's book, and realized that I don't own a copy. When I went to buy a copy, I discovered that in the intervening years, Smith had published a second edition.

Let's talk about that first.

This is the model citizen of a second edition of a scholarly book.

He talks about the work that has happened in the field since the first edition, both overall, and as it pertains to his conclusions; because this is ancient history, he addresses the change in the overall balance of archaeological evidence; the impact the first edition has itself had on the field, and the response people have had to it and uses people have put it to; addresses some of his critics and supporters; does some sometimes-catty Inside Baseball stuff; and so on, and this is not a few paragraphs, this is not a few pages, this goes on for a substantial amount of the book, separated by section. In a field that changes not only because of the input of scholars but because of new archaeological or linguistic evidence, this is exactly how things should be. It should not be this remarkable that he did it this way. And yet -- and yet, and yet.

What a wonderful book this is.

So briefly, Smith's book is about the development of monotheism in Israel from Canaanite polytheism, and the way the Canaanite god Yahweh was elevated and combined with the god El (oh, get it, El-evated) to become the only god worshiped, and what happened to the other gods of the pantheon -- some of whom, like Baal, are familiar from the Old Testament. It tells a clear story of monotheism as something that developed slowly, with great struggle. Broadly, Smith describes two periods -- convergence, in which Yahweh absorbs the characteristics and qualities of other gods in order to justify his elevation (and/or as a consequence of his elevation), and differentiation, in which the difference between Yahweh and other gods is underscored and it is made clear that the worship of other gods is not simply the worship of Yahweh under another name.

For instance, the names El and Baal both appear in the Old Testament -- that is, the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh -- numerous times. The Jewish and Christian explanation for this has always been, for as long as we have had any comment on this, that El is another name for God -- for Yahweh -- and that Baal is a name for a foreign god that Jews were sometimes condemned for worshiping. As an explanation for Baal, this is reasonable enough. But El is known to have been worshiped as a god independent of Yahweh by other Semitic peoples -- and if you don't read the Old Testament with the assumption that Yahweh and El are the same god, certain passages seem to be describing two gods with very different characteristics.

Again, as I've said before, the conventional narrative that the Jews were led out of Egypt, conquered Canaan after wandering the desert for forty years (or any other length of time), and then imposed on Canaan -- now Israel -- a monotheistic religion they had followed since the time of the patriarchs, with laws developed during those years in the desert ... is at best a Robin Hood theory, a theory with a grain of truth blown into mythological proportions. It is a story that describes things that would leave tremendous archaeological evidence where none has been found.

It is much more likely that Canaan became Israel through an internal cultural revolution in which monotheists calling themselves Israel -- who may have shared a common ethnic bond -- overthrew the ruling elite of Canaan, whether through force, religious conversion, political revolution, what have you. This is also a story that is much more consistent with the fact that the Jewish scriptures are filled with the struggles of Jewish leaders to get their people to keep worshiping God-and-God-alone, to abandon foreign gods and foreign religious practices -- even before the Exile (when those "foreign religious practices" are the ones that the people themselves grew up with while living in Babylon after being forced out of Israel for a couple generations), those "foreign religious practices" may very well have been native religious practices that were being rejected by the Yahweh-loyalists, who developed and refined their theology and practices over a period of centuries.

There is some early material on source criticism and redaction criticism which I'm not going to get into because a) it doesn't quote well and b) I'm not qualified to paraphrase it without a refresher on the state of the field in redaction criticism, but it was a good pointer to sources on the latter. However, he succinctly makes a point I may come back to if I get into source criticism here: "While the death knell for source theory was sounded often over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, it has not been supplanted by a more persuasive model. Tigay's work in particular suggests that source criticism comports with what is known for the composition and transmission of ancient texts outside the Bible. Moreover, old-fashioned source criticism and redaction criticism could be combined and modified to order to provide a satisfactory range of models of textual composition that would attend to the interrelated processes of memorization and reading, writing and interpretation." Indeed, this is basically what I was taught while in college and grad school, around the same time Smith was writing this overview (the second edition came out while I was in grad school, but it should be no surprise that public university libraries that own the previous edition of a book do not necessarily immediately order the new edition when it comes out, especially in cash-poor states).

Also especially interesting to me:

"The common models for the origins of Israel in the land (conquest, infiltration, and peasant-revolt) have all been inundated by evidence derived from surveys and excavations. Regional variations call into question the viability of a single master thesis to explain the situation on the ground."

"Conquest" is the Biblical Exodus narrative or close variations, i.e. the idea that Canaan became Israel because foreign invaders came in and made it so, whereas "peasant-revolt" is the religious uprising I was talking about. The upshot of what Smith gets into is that the tide of archaeological evidence continues to make certain Biblical accounts of ancient Israel more and more difficult to support -- not only the Exodus but the United Monarchy period (the idea that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were unified under a single monarchy, beginning with Saul, who was succeeded by David and his line; an idea for which there is very little historical support and a growing amount of evidence suggesting the contrary).

Most of our sources for Canaanite religion are Ugaritic texts, which for instance tell us about:

"the deities El, the aged and kindly patriarch of the pantheon; his consort and queen mother of the divine family, Asherah; the young storm-god and divine warrior, Baal; his sister, Anat, likely a martial deity; and finally, the solar deity. Scholars of religion have frequently assumed that because these deities were Canaanite, they were not Israelite ... that Israelite had always been monolatrous; Israel worshipped only Yahweh, although it did not deny the existence of other deities." Furthermore, when these Canaanite gods were worshiped by Jews alongside Yahweh, scholars often assumed that this was the result of syncretism (itself a convoluted and interesting topic and difficult to untangle here, but in short, the result of blending two religious traditions -- analogous to the creation of a creole language when two languages meet*) and/or confined to "popular" or "folk" religion, emphatically never part of Israel's official or state religion.

*("The union of religious phenomena from two historically separate systems or cultures," in Smith's phraseology, though as with any brief discussion of syncretism, tarrying too long here opens questions about whether it is syncretism when Methodists do yoga, when French-Catholic Beats embrace Buddhism, when your humble Protestant-progressive narrator wears a St Dismas medallion, so let us move quickly down the path before the shadows grow too long to find our way out.)

(Like gnosticism, what is at stake in the longer conversation is this: syncretism is a modern idea that originates not in religion but outside it in a conversation about it, in the same way that terminology in biology does not originate in animals and plants but in the attempts at explaining them, but unlike something you can look at in a microscope there is a great temptation to learn the terminology and then perceive the data according to the terms you've just flashcarded, rather than really, actually, truly seeing anything -- okay, now hurry, hurry, down the path we go --)

This remains one of the conventional views, and I've referenced it before. It's the view I was taught: Israel, whether as a religious movement or a nation, began with the religious view that many gods exist but it is appropriate only to worship one of them (monolatry) and in the flurry of theological activity during and following the Exile period, developed the stricter view that only one God in fact exists (monotheism), which became strictly held enough by the first century CE that while Roman gentiles saw no conflict in worshiping Yahweh among their own deities, non-Christian Jews found the idea of elevating Christ to godhood an unthinkable and alien perversion of monotheism.

That view in of itself seemed, at one point, kind of radical compared to the Biblical view of a pure monotheism that began with -- well, with Adam, as far as the literal story, but in terms of the establishment of the religion, with the time of the patriarchs. But as radical as it may seem compared to the Bible story, it was embraced by scholars all over the spectrum who agreed on little else -- scholars who argued for and against the historicity of the Exodus, the United Monarchy, and the patriarchs themselves, Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, atheist scholars, scholars who believe Noah's Flood was a historical event, scholars who believe it is the Jewish version of a story told all over the world.

Smith spells out four points about Israel made by the Biblical point of view in order to discuss how they have been addressed by various scholarly models:

"First, Israel's ethnic identity was originally separate from other peoples of the land.

"Second, Israel was not originally among the peoples in the land.

"Third, specific cultic objects were alien to Israel.

"Finally, Yahweh was the only deity of Israel.

"Some scholarly works have used these biblical claims as elements in their historical reconstructions of Israelite religion. Syncretism of Israelite religion with Canaanite religion remains a historical reconstruction among biblical scholars.  ... some scholars ... argue that neither Baal nor Asherah was hardly a deity in Israel ... others vigorously defend the biblical witness to Israelite worship of Baal and Asherah."

What we're arguing for in this book and this blog entry is a different model than the above, one that Smith articulated, building on earlier work, and that has grown in acceptance (and for which the evidence has grown considerably) in the last thirty years: that Israel wasn't just a monolatrous cult that sprung out of the polytheistic sea of its surroundings, but rather began polytheistically, and retained at least some polytheistic practitioners (not just "among the common folk" but among the elite, the religious and secular leaders) until ... some point. In either model, the post-Exile religious revival is a period of intensely monotheistic fervor characterized by the association of deep monotheistic devotion to the Jewish God -- Yahweh, also titled as El in texts eventually collected and redacted into the Jewish scriptures -- with Israelite cultural, national, and ethnic identity. On this point, and this is important, both models agree with the traditional Biblical view.

One of the things that is very interesting, though, is that even in this wider polytheistic model, the Israelite pantheon was quite small compared to Israel's neighbors. Israelite worship included very few gods: Yahweh, El, Asherah, and Baal, primarily. (Although as Smith points out, by the time we get to the period in question -- the first millennium BCE -- most of the cultures in the Levant had greatly reduced the number of deities to which they maintained cults, down to rarely more than a dozen, compared to 200 in Ugarit in the previous millennium.)

Smith lays out the shape of his argument that I've already summarized:

"This religious spectrum in early Israel changed, due in large measure to two major developments; the first was convergence, and the second was differentiation. Convergence involved the coalescence of various deities and/or some of their features in the figure of Yahweh. This development began in the period of the Judges and continued during the first half of the monarchy. At this point, El and Yahweh were identified, and perhaps Asherah was no longer continued as an identifiably separate deity. Features belonging to deities such as El, Asherah, and Baal were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion of Israel."

1) "the period of the Judges" is the period right before the United Monarchy, before Judah and Israel had a king. If you're familiar with the story of David, you know Saul, the first king, who became king because -- in the Biblical account -- the people said they were tired of being ruled by these fair-minded judges and they wanted to be a kick-ass nation with a king. (Alternately, as much as they liked Samuel -- prophet and judge -- they hated his sons who would succeed him.) So Saul became the first king of Israel, and Israel and Judah were eventually united under David.

2) "El and Yahweh were identified" means "merged together" in this usage, though that is likely clear from context.

3) It's important to note that the processes we're talking about are familiar from other ancient religions. Smith is not arguing for an event unique in Jewish religion, except insofar as it resulted in monotheism/monolatry. But the processes of identifying previously unrelated deities together -- this happens all the fucking time in the ancient world. Any account of Egyptian religion, for instance, is littered with it.

"Israelite monolatry developed through conflict and compromise between the cults of Yahweh and other deities. Israelite literature incorporated some of the characteristics of other deities into the divine personage of Yahweh. Polemic against deities other than Yahweh even contributed to this process. For although polemic rejected other deities, Yahwistic polemic assumed that Yahweh embodied the positive characteristics of the very deities it was condemning."

"The second major process involved differentiation of Israelite cult from its 'Canaanite' heritage. Numerous features of early Israelite cult were later rejected as 'Canaanite' and non-Yahwistic. This development apparently began first with the rejection of Baal worship in the ninth century [BCE], continued in the eighth to sixth centuries with legal and prophetic condemnation of Baal worship, the asherah, solar worship, the high places, practices pertaining to the dead, and other religious features."

Differentiation is a familiar process not only from the ancient world but from, well, always: we don't do this because X does this and part of who we are is not-X. Like a lot of American boys, I was circumcised at birth independent of religious consideration, but by the time thirtysomething came out a generation later, Presbyterian Hope and Jewish Michael go back and forth about whether to circumcise their baby son because Hope gets hung up on whether this "means he's Jewish," and Michael has been putting off the question of how to raise their children. Now, there's no reason the boy can't be circumcised and be a Christian, obviously, and for generations in this country the practice was common for what were perceived to be medical/hygienic reasons. But for Hope the question is one of religious identity: Jews are circumcised, and Christians aren't -- not because of a proscription, though, but ultimately (though she doesn't say this) because Jews are.

There have been periodic movements within Christian groups to abandon Christmas traditions like the Christmas tree or even the celebration of Christmas itself, because of perceptions that the holiday is a) ultimately a secular one with a religious name or b) a pagan celebration with a Christian name. Again: we don't do Y because X does Y and we are not-X. These are simple but familiar examples; moral panics by Christian (and occasional Jewish or Muslim) groups surrounding Harry Potter or D&D because they "promote magic" are similar, especially if they are not predicated on the argument that magic is "real" or that children will somehow accidentally summon demons by waving a pretend wand around. We are this, and at our core we are not that.

So too in ancient Israel: we are Israel now, not Canaan. These practices were Canaan's practices, and we are Canaan no longer. Do them no longer. These practices were associated with other gods, or with religious observances we have not adopted as part of our Yahweh cult, so abandon them. To some extent, this is necessary not just to promote loyalty to Yahweh but to reinforce the clear line between X and Y, us and them, to build that sense of identity. And one thing is clear in all of these reconstructions, from the Biblical story to Smith: the Yahwists were very invested in that sense of identity.

The conventional view as I was taught it has generally portrayed the monarchy as often hostile to or resistant to the establishment of the Yahwist monolatry as the religion of Israel (punctuated with a few notable exceptions chronicled in the Biblical account), hence our many stories of prophets railing about what jerks these kings be and how they're gonna get what's coming to them. Smith's reconstruction instead casts the monarchy (from 1000-587 BCE) as involved in the creation of the Yahwist monolatrist cult as the national religion, but also tolerating and sometimes encouraging the worship of other gods. This is in keeping with the practices of state religions in Egypt -- Akhenaten aside -- and Mesopotamia at large.

"Royal religion was both conservative and innovative. It incorporated practices traditional in popular religion, such as the cult of Baal, the symbol of the asherah, high places, and practices pertaining to the dead. During the second half of the monarchy, religious programs ... contributed to the differentiation of Israelite religion from its Canaanite past." The monarchy heavily influenced the association of storm and solar imagery with Yahweh, which eventually influenced the religious revivalists of the Exile and post-Exilic period who created the aforementioned strict monotheism.

(There are knowledge gaps, of course, when it comes to weighing who likely contributed what first, and who merely favored it or encouraged it once it was contributed. We have more data from Judah than from Israel, and more data from the second half of the monarchy period than from either the first half -- especially the early monarchic period, which is why the historicity of the United Monarchy itself is still in question -- or the Judges period. But the differences in data are not just in volume. The Biblical account, and the ways in which we are accustomed to speaking of "ancient Israel," both obfuscate the fact that there are non-trivial cultural, language, social, and material-culture differences between Judah and Israel in these periods. The depth and significance of those differences is, thanks to that data gap, not always fully understood. If a given word appears eleven times in Judah and once in Israel, it's tempting to assume it means the same thing all twelve times and will mean the same thing the next time you see it too. But the Israelite data set isn't always large enough to make that conclusion comfortable.)

Smith brings up the point I made in my Cohen post:

"The study of Israelite religion often involves studying practices more than creedal beliefs because the Bible more frequently stresses correct practices than correct beliefs or internal attitudes. Christian scholars, however, tend to focus more on beliefs or internal attitudes because Christian theology has often emphasized this aspect of religion. The study of Israelite monotheism as complicated by this factor, as monotheism has usually been defined as a matter of belief in one deity whereas monolatry has been understood as a matter of practice ... however, if ancient Israelite religion is to be viewed primarily as a matter of practice, then the modern distinction between monotheism and monolatry os problematic. Nonetheless, the distinction is retained in this study for two reasons. First, the appearance of both monolatry and monotheism remains a matter of current interest. Second, the distinction between the two phenomena emerged within Israelite religion."

"Early Israelite culture cannot be separated easily from the culture of 'Canaan.' The highlands of Israel in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 - 587 BCE) reflect continuity with the 'Canaanite' (or better, West Semitic) culture during the preceding period both in the highlands and in the contemporary cities on the coast and in the valleys. ... Though Hebrew and Canaanite are the linguistic labels applied to the languages of the two periods in this region, they cannot be easily distinguished in the Iron I period. ... Canaanite and Hebrew [languages] so closely overlap that the ability to distinguish them is premised more on historical information than linguistic criteria." So too for material culture -- "both" cultures used the same kinds of storage jars, cooking pots, overall pottery tradition, four-room houses, and rock-cut tombs, among other examples.

Smith goes on to describe, in specificity I am not going to reproduce here, specific religious terms that are the same in "both languages," including many terms for various sacrifices and offerings; priests and other religious figures; and divine forgiveness resulting from the performance of a ritual. Features unique to Israelite culture, which are just as important, include the tradition of Yahweh's sanctuary in the south "variously called Sinai, Paran, Edom, and Teiman, and Israel's early tradition of the Exodus from Egypt."

Interestingly, "that Israel was in some form distinguished from Canaan ca. 1200 [BCE] is clear from an inscribed monument of the pharaoh Merneptah," which refers to Canaan and Israel separately as areas within the Syro-Palestine region. Canaan here is written with a determinative denoting a land, while Israel is written with a determinative denoting a people, meaning Israel may have existed as a distinct ethnic group in this time, and was recognized as such.

HOWEVER.

The problem with assuming too much from ancient textual evidence is that formal precise grammar as we think of it is a modern invention -- which is not to say that grammar instruction for scribes or the nobility did not exist, because obviously literacy is a specialized skill in the ancient world. But where in the modern world we can split hairs and make much of minor grammatical differences, in the ancient world -- or the Medieval world -- or any time before now -- these are very often just mistakes. Even calling them mistakes is not quite right, because that assumes a level of intent that did not exist -- furthermore, we have access to grammar guides and authoritative style guides that tell us the right and wrong way to use determinatives, which this scribe did not, and we know that scribes of his era used these determinatives inconsistently, even though we know how they were "supposed" to be used. People did not generally attempt to write as precisely and clearly as we do now. The Bible itself, for instance, is full of grammatical errors, despite the fact that the texts we have were edited many, many times, with ample opportunity to find and correct those errors. A monument goes through no such editing process.

(It's not like we moderns are consistent either. We say podium when we "mean" lectern. So if we say podium every time, in what sense do we actually "mean" lectern? You know?)

So what I'm saying here is that we know that Canaan and Israel are separately mentioned on a monument in the 13th century BCE. It is very hard to say more than that with accuracy. But it does seem to be the case that from a very early point, Israel -- whatever its political position -- considered itself culturally distinct from Canaan:

"In sum, the Israelites may have perceived themselves as a people different from the Canaanites. Separate religious traditions of Yahweh, separate traditions of origins in Egypt for at least some component of Israel, and separate geographic holdings in the hill country contributed to the Israelites' sense of difference from their Canaanite neighbors inhabiting the coast and the valleys."

Yahweh and El

Now here's where we get to some interesting stuff.

The monotheism of Israel, the monotheism that Christianity built its foundations on, is centered around the worship of the god Yahweh. So too, needless to say, for the monolatry that preceded it. However.

Yahweh is not even the original god of Israel.

Whaaaaaat.

It's right there in the name, and this of course is one reason why the identification of Yahweh and El is so important, not only to the Yahwist monotheistic cult but to the Christians who made the Old Testament part of their Bible. Israel has El's name right there, and he was clearly the chief god, the Zeus, the Odin, of the pantheon. But there is just as clearly a tradition that began very early of Yahweh -- the son of El -- having a special relationship with Israel:

"When the Most High ('elyon) gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of divine beings.
For Yahweh's portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage."

That's Deuteronomy 32:8-9, in which Yahweh (who we know to be a warrior-god from Sinai, Paran, Edom, or Midian, in the south) is identified as the god overseeing Israel. As Smith points out, one indication that the identification of El and Yahweh began early is that we have no polemics against El the way we do against Baal.

One side effect of the identification of Yahweh with El, by the way?

The name El began to be used as a generic noun 'el meaning "god," as a result of which we have the Judeo-Christian tradition of referring to the Judeo-Christian deity as simply God -- because while El is named, over and over again, in the Jewish Scriptures, the nameness of that name has been worn off.

(Of course, translations tend to obscure the difference between Yahweh and El by translating them both as God, or by titles like Most High, Lord, etc.)

For instance, Joshua 22:22:

'el 'elohim yhwh, 'el 'elohim yhwh

God of gods is Yahweh, God of gods is Yahweh

This "X of X" superlative is a common Hebrew construction -- Christians are familiar with "king of kings" to refer to Jesus, but the phrase is borrowed from the Old Testament books of Ezra and Daniel. Ecclesiastes opens with the phrase "vanity of vanities," and one of the most oddball books of the Old Testament, the almost certainly secular collection of love poems, is Song of Songs.

Consider Yahweh's introduction of himself to Moses:

"In this passage Yahweh appears to Moses: 'And God said to Moses, "I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shadday, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them.'" Like so many Biblical passages, the meaning here must have been obvious to its original readers, became obscure over time, and has been read and reread by generations of Jewish and Christian readers who have thought little of it. The original readers likely understood the explanation that Yahweh and El were the same, that in some sense the worship of Yahweh was more recent than the worship of El; they may have been aware that Yahweh and El were originally considered different deities. (As Smith notes several times, there is no evidence of a surviving cult of El; the Yahwists absorbed it completely, rather than competing with it as with the cult of Baal. Or perhaps, rather than saying the Yahwists absorbed the cult of El, we should be thinking of this as the cult of El having converted en masse to Yahwism very very early -- the cult of El in Israel in essence creating the cult of Yahweh in Israel, since Yahweh is not native to the region. I don't know.)

It's from El that we get a lot of the characteristics we associate with "God" -- the creator of the earth (which has been true of El since the second millennium BCE), the wise elderly bearded figure on a throne, a fatherly figure or literal father, the head of a divine council, an ageless figure, a wise figure, a figure who passes judgment. Soon, Yahweh -- originally the son of El and a vigorous young warrior god -- is described in Biblical and extracanonical (that is, apocryphal Jewish texts like Tobit, Esdras, Ben Sira) texts as an elderly bearded patriarch. By the time Daniel -- the last book of the Old Testament -- is written, Yahweh is "the ancient of days" and "the Most High," an epithet originally used for El.

The polytheistic tradition that surrounded El with a divine council and described him as a perfect king, reflecting ideals of earthly royal power into heavenly analogues, contributed imagery that wasn't stripped away as polytheism became monolatry, and the clear but never fully explained presence of other unnamed divine beings around El/Yahweh in the Bible probably contributed in part to the development of Jewish beliefs in angels. Because Jewish religion is concerned with practice rather than belief and angels are not an important part of that practice, we're on shakier ground when we talk about the early history of Jewish beliefs in angels and other non-deity supernatural beings -- but in the Cohen entry I talked about how the existing belief in angels became more sophisticated in the Second Temple era, so all I'm talking about here is how the belief in El's pre-Yahwist divine council could have turned into, or been retrofitted for, the belief in angels. (This is again where the fact that most of us, your humble blogger included*, read the Bible in translation obfuscates things: where many translations may say "angel" again and again throughout the Bible, a word meaning "messenger," "servant," or "watcher" is actually what is written in the earliest books, and only in later books are these early verses reinterpreted to refer to angels.)

*(Non-academics may not be aware, but a key difference between the Master's programs that I did and a PhD program is that a PhD program in the humanities always has a language requirement, specifically to show fluency in a language relevant to your field -- which in my case would have meant an ancient language like Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. Although I did a lot of foreign language study in college, it wasn't in Biblical languages, nor at that level of fluency.)

Yahweh and Baal

Baal is probably the foreign god most familiar to Bible readers. He comes up fairly often when prophets are railing at the Israelites to stop worshiping him, or condemning people who do so.

His name also appears in a number of Biblical names. Divine names are often used as part of peoples' names, if that's not clear, referred to as the theophoric element -- Micha-El, Dani-El, those stand out as common today; Yehoshuah -- anglicized as either Joshua or Jesus depending on the context -- is a name with several possible etymologies, one of which includes the theophoric element Yahweh.

As far as names with a Baal theophoric element, there are several in Chronicles (a series of two Biblical books retelling much of Biblical history up to the point of the return from Exile), for instance, that are changed to remove the theophoric element in 2 Samuel -- indicating a shift in attitudes toward Baal sometime in the second half of the monarchy period. Eshbaal (possibly "man of Baal") becomes Ishboshet ("man of shame"), while Meribbaal ("Baal is my master or advocate") becomes Mephiboshet (possibly "from the mouth of shame").

"Eshbaal and Meribaal belonged to the clan of Saul, in which Yahwistic names are also attested, such as Jonathan, the son of Saul. Why would a Yahwistic family give Baal names, if Baal were a god inimical to Yahweh? The answer is perhaps implicit in the name of another family member provided in the genealogy of Saul's clan in 1 Chronicles 8:30 and 9:36. In this verse, Baal is the name of Saul's uncle. The name is hypocoristic (i.e. lacking a divine name) and is usually interpreted as "(Yahweh is) lord." ... [There are] three possibilities. In Saul's family, either ba'al was a title for Yahweh, or Baal was acceptable in royal, Yahwistic circles, or both. The same range of possible interpretations underlies the names of Eshbaal and Meribbaal; both were possibly Yahwistic names, later understood as anti-Yahwistic in import. The later defensiveness over these names points to the fact that the language of Baal, though criticized during the monarchy, was used during the Judges period."

Baal and Yahweh, before his identification with El, were similar gods with overlapping characteristics -- young warrior gods who basically filled similar niches and were natural competitors. "The question why the cults of Baal and Yahweh were considered irreconcilable beginning in the ninth century needs to be addressed ... El was not a threat to the cult of Yahweh in ancient Israel. Phoenician Baal, on the contrary, represented a threat in the ninth century and onward, especially thanks to the efforts of Ahab and Jezebel to elevate him in the northern kingdom."

Josiah, one of the more important religious reformers, purged the Jerusalem Temple of Baal's cultic objects, but the prophet Jeremiah claims that Baal worship was not only permitted by the monarchy in the southern kingdom right up to its end, it was responsible for the fall of the northern kingdom and of Samaria. This is a pretty common claim for prophets, of course, and you hear the same thing from politicians and pundits these days -- everything's going to shit because Obama.

Yahweh absorbs a lot of Baal's good stuff too, though, like he did with El -- specifically his storm god portfolio, not only his rivalry with cosmic enemies like the sea (which is abstracted in but still critically important to the creation story) but his mighty stormy chariot, as in Habukkuk 3 here:

Was your wrath against the rivers, O Yahweh?
Was your anger against the rivers,
or your indignation against the sea,
when you rode upon your horses,
upon your chariot of victory?
You trampled the sea with your horses,
the surging of the mighty waters.


Yahweh and Asherah

Asherah is a mother goddess who appears in several Mesopotamian pantheons. In the Ugaritic pantheon, she is the consort of El. In addition to Asherah the goddess, there is the asherah, a cultic object of some kind -- not a female figurine like you might expect from the name (though there are also female figurines found all over Iron Age Israel that were likely fertility charms, and may have had cultic use), but a wooden pole that is possibly meant to have represented a stylized tree. As Smith discusses in the introduction to the second edition, there has been a flurry of activity attempting to establish that redactors have obfuscated the fact that "the Hebrew God" originally had a consort, but most of the books on this topic make claims that go way too far.

Asherah was El's consort. Yahwah became identified with El. However, there is no real support for the idea that Asherah came along with El for the ride, or that the cult of Asherah existed in Israel in the Yahwist period -- which is to say, in the overall period in which we refer to this culture, to these people, as "Israel." Books referring to her as "God's Wife" and arguing that she continued to occupy this role until a late date, or that folk religion continued to honor her even as she was removed from official records and Biblical texts, are thus far making arguments with little evidence to support them -- but they do sell.

That said, the ambiguity of the asherah cultic object has helped those scholars make that argument, because its nature and use is so unclear. It may have been used in the worship of asherah, it's just unusual that we would have so little other evidence of this cult. Or its use may have been a leftover from earlier religious practices, originally associated with Asherah and El, carried over as a result of Yahweh's identification with El.

Consider the yule log.

"Yule" is not Christmas, but a Germanic midwinter festival. The burning of the Yule log probably originates with this festival (although it is not attested until Christian times), but Yule as a whole and the Yule log specifically became associated with Christmas as the region and the peoples within it became Christianized.

Today, at Christmas time, you can watch the Yule log on television or Netflix, and not only does it have nothing to do with a midwinter festival, it really has nothing to do with whether you're Germanic or not. It became part of Anglo-American Christmas culture.

People tend to vilify the way the Christianization in the West has assimilated and redefined pre-Christian practices -- and in a great many cases it is appropriate to vilify the way specific peoples and regions were converted to Christianity -- but this yule log business is just a natural process. This is just the way cultures work. It isn't cultural appropriation -- these are the same people, changing their own culture over time on a generational scale -- and, absent specific political or authoritarian forces of coercion, it has no more moral content than shifts in fashion or pronunciation. It is simply what happens to cultures over time.

For a Martian terralogist to observe these Yule log practices and argue in favor of a living, vibrant Germanic Yule cult in the California suburbs, public acknowledgment and historical record of which is being suppressed by the authorities, would be ... off base.

The asherah may very well be a yule log. History is full of yule logs.

That said! While there is little evidence of Asherah worship, evidence is not entirely absent.

"There is one passage that may point to Asherah as an Israelite goddess at some point in early Israel. Genesis 49 reports Jacob's blessings to his twelve sons. Vawter, Freedman, and O'Connor argue that 24-26, part of the blessings to Joseph, represent a series of divine epithets, including two titles of Asherah... 'the blessings of Breasts-and-Womb.'"

There follows some discussion about which goddess or goddesses could be referred to here, with Asherah as by far the most likely choice, though she is not explicitly identified, and even the implicit identification comes down to "it is rather more likely to be Asherah than any other goddess, given the Ugaritic character of the other epithets and her relationship to El in the Ugaritic pantheon."

In the archaeological evidence, there has been recovered a cultic stand depicting a naked female with her hands on the heads of lions flanking her. There are reasonable theories suggesting its identification with either Asherah (one of the designs is a tree called an asherah, named for the goddess), Astarte (whose cult was active outside of Israel in the period and was associated with lions in Egypt), or Anat. Given that it also includes designs likely associated with either Baal or Yahweh as well as a solar disk, it was probably associated with polytheistic practices. If it has been dated correctly, it dates to the 10th century BCE.

Whether or not this tells us about Israelite religion, though, is still an open question, because of where the stand comes from -- Taanach, which according to the Biblical account did not become fully Israelite until after the rise of the Davidic dynasty, which is later than this dating. Finding evidence of worship of Asherah and/or other goddesses alongside Baal and/or Yahweh in a city established to include Canaanite worshipers doesn't even challenge the Biblical account, in other words, much less the traditional historical account of monolatry. We don't know who in the city used this stand.

Other notions

"The rise of writing as an authoritative medium also contributed to the development of Israelite monolatry in the period of the monarchy. [This] feature of Israelite religion generally distinguish[es] it from Israel's neighbors, as far as the evidence indicates."

There is no Ugaritic Bible. This is another thing Christians take for granted, the existence of the Jewish Scriptures, the breadth and depth of the Old Testament. Now, it took a long time for it to actually be collated into the Bible, longer than Christians tend to realize, but long before there was a "Bible," there was the Torah, along with the histories, books of prophecy, and other books that circulated before being collected with it. Scribes didn't become authorities until the Second Temple period, but writing was important before then, as evidenced by how much religious writing Israel produced, and how much it preserved. Much is made of the contradictions in the Bible, but in order to generate those contradictions you need to have a sufficient volume of material in the first place, and that in of itself is significant and set Israelite religion apart.

Rabbinical Judaism, of course, would become an even more literacy-driven religion.

So far we've talked about specific deities. But Israelite religion also encompassed, to some degree, worship of the solar deity, especially associated with the royal family; and the continuation of Canaanite ritual practices associated with the dead, such as the offering of drinks and cereal to corpses. This continued at least sporadically right through the Second Temple period, as did prayers to the dead for help.

There is also a section on child sacrifice (mlk or Moloch sacrifice) -- obviously a disturbing topic, and not my area of expertise, but various forms of child sacrifice were performed in parts of the ancient world especially in times of famine. It's like finding a religious rationale for infant exposure, the method of ridding oneself of the infant you can't care for because there isn't enough food to go around -- instead of just putting it on a hill and letting the elements kill it, you offer it to the gods as a sacrifice, hoping to end whatever it is that caused the situation preventing you from being able to care for it. (I'm making broad generalizations about a terrible topic here.)

Point being: the fact that there are specific Biblical denials that these sacrifices were made in Yahweh's name are a good indication that, in fact, they were part of early cultic practice for the Yahwists, though it's not clear when or to what extent. Stories like Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac (and the firstborn of Egypt being killed in one of the plagues) may of course be relevant here, though I don't need to point out that they would have a place in the culture even if it was only Israel's neighbors that were known to perform the sacrifices.

national child abuse prevention month

Look, the guy who raped me is probably an okay guy.

The babysitter who kissed me when I was five and she wasn't, the way babysitters aren't supposed to kiss you, the way their parents probably don't want them kissing anybody at all, turned out to have serious issues that came to light as an adult many years later and wound up in legal trouble of a kind that, when you hear about it, you wonder how she thought she could get away with it if she were in her right mind. And while the one kind of transgression doesn't seem to have anything to do with the other, the whole fractured picture makes you wonder, well, was she just some kind of ... all around fucked-up? To employ the technical term.

But this guy, is what I'm saying, is probably not a villain. There was actually more than one guy. Separate occasions (he said, as though to safeguard the image of his virtue). But this one guy had been through a lot. Worse than me at least up to that point, and odds are pretty good he was reenacting what had been done to him, and that it had been done to him more than once.

I've talked before about being a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and March was National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, so this is when I tend to talk about this. There were three molesters, rapists, assailants, whatever you want to call them, over the course of more than three occasions spread out over my childhood. None of them relatives -- I mention that because "survivors of incest" is a big subset, and not my tribe.

This guy was a minor still and had been through a lot, and he's gone and grown up and hopefully has worked through whatever happened to him, whatever many things happened to him, and hopefully it didn't take him as long as it did me, but if it did he's still had time to get around to it. And if so there's a good chance he's an okay guy. You get a pretty long timeline to figure shit out if you stay out of traffic.

So there's that.

Whatever happened to those individuals after they left those events they created, though, those events still had their effect on me. Those events resulted in my post-traumatic stress, contributing to claustrophobia, anxiety, exaggerated startle response, nightmares, hearing voices and seeing things, psychotic breaks, this whole thing where I imagined an older version of myself to give me advice to survive and then the older version of myself turned into a constant source of criticism instead of a wacky turn of events where he turns into a 5th-dimensional Mxyzpltk instead, panic and anxiety attacks, not letting anyone cut my hair for fucking years because how the fuck can I let a stranger stand that close to me by my fucking neck with fucking sharp objects, a nervous breakdown, problems with affect regulation and self-criticism, and the list goes on, a list thankfully growing ever shorter thanks to therapy -- but a list, nonetheless, oh what a list. Those effects are not mitigated by anything that happened to those people later in life or by my ability to understand that their actions came from somewhere -- that they were not random, that they became people able to act that way (or unable to act any other way) because of events in their own lives or chemicals in their own brains, forces burning and churning and acidulating as powerful an effect on them (if not moreso) as these events have on me.

The third one, the one I haven't actually mentioned, the one who did the most, I don't know anything mitigating about him. I don't have any context to excuse anything. All I know is what's human, which is that mostly life isn't a thriller novel and mostly nobody's just born rotten and stunkout, which is that mostly the bad that's done by us, it started somewhere. Some people do more bad than the bad that's been done to them, don't get me wrong, and I'm not talking about excuses or rationales or justifications, I'm talking about mechanisms, I'm talking about the drinky bird that pecks the mousetrap that snaps broke whatever last glass gasp inside you had to break before you could do what you done. All I know is that bad doesn't just rain down on you from nowhere and it doesn't just happen in a day.

So what I'm saying is I can know, without knowing what, without knowing why, I can know there was something, I can know there was a wrong somehow, there was a break somewhere, a crack somewhere, I can know that because people aren't supposed to do that and he did, that something happened to him, whether it was done to him from without or within, to make him do it.

I can understand this about all of them, and my understanding does not lift the yoke off my neck.

Can I separate the rape from the rapist?

Woody Allen's adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has for over 20 years claimed that he molested her when she was 7; police failed to pursue a case due to lack of physical evidence and a "rehearsed quality" to Dylan's statements. Comedians like Johnny Carson had been making jokes about Woody's interest in underage girls since at least Manhattan, and of course he married his stepdaughter.

Purple Rose of Cairo is one of my all-time favorite movies. Annie Hall, What's Up Tiger Lily, Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex, Midnight in Paris, and yes, Manhattan -- all genius movies.

Victor Salva was convicted of filming himself having sex with one of the 12 year old actors in his early feature Clownhouse before going on to make the Jeepers Creepers movies and the Disney magic albino movie Powder. It's worth pointing out -- in the context of all of this it has to be pointed out -- that Powder has a strong pedophile subtext that's lost on children and most parents but clear to people familiar with what to look for.

I loved Jeepers Creepers.

Bill Cosby ...

I don't even need to summarize that one, and of course grew up on Fat Albert and the Cosby Show.

Can you separate the art from the artist?

Is it morally better to not watch Woody Allen's new Amazon show when it comes out? I don't know. I do know that I have decided that I am not going to be comfortable watching it. I have not made this decision for you, which is to say, I have not decided that you are a lesser person if you watch it. I have decided what I am comfortable with.

Is it better to take the Cosby Show off the air? I Spy? Fat Albert? I don't know that either.

Is the Victor Salva part of the conversation affected by the fact that, unlike Cosby and Allen, he was arrested, convicted, and served his time?

Are we talking about crimes that simply say something about who you are on a deeper level than fraud or theft or drug use or drunk and disorderly? Not the "we" of a law-making society -- that is, it wouldn't be right to define laws in such a way -- but the "we" of a consumer society, the "we" of many me's and you's who can decide which vendors and entertainers deserve our dollars, and maybe the ones who might use those dollars to buy child porn or roofies are less deserving.

Is the first half of this entry related to the second?

I don't really know that either.

I know that the second conversation happens a lot. Cosby more often than Woody, though Woody should come up more often. Salva not as often -- he's obviously not a big name, though he pops up in the news every so often (he's in it at the moment).

Does it seem strange to want to find the good, the explicable, the human or humane or survivable about my own abusers -- to want to separate the rape from the rapist -- while resisting the temptation to separate the art from the artists when it comes to these other assaults that don't personally impact me? The thing is, those other assaults are not mine to contextualize or humanize. I am not the one bearing that weight.

Listen. I wrote this quickly, trying to articulate a stream of thought. I understand that this may not be as coherent an entry on this topic as I've had in the past. These topics feel connected to me -- public and private shaming and forgiveness, public and private personas.

The reason I talk about this every year is because the most important thing to me when it comes to sexual abuse is to fight the stigma. Abuse goes unreported because of the stigma that attaches to the victim -- child or otherwise. Victims of abuse feel ashamed, guilty, sure that they brought it on themselves, that something must be wrong with them for it to happen to them -- that somehow the bad that has been done to them is just the bad that was inside them all along, made manifest through the universe's sense of justice, the bad that they deserved -- there are many child sexual abuse analogues to the "she must have been asking for it" myth of adult rape. They feel guilty about the consequences they may be "responsible" for: the stress they cause their parents and the people they report it to, the fuss, the circus, the consequences to the abuser. They don't want to be a "tattletale," a "troublemaker." They don't want to draw attention to themselves -- especially now, after this, oh especially after this, believe me.

That's why I need to talk about it, why we need to talk about it. The stigma allows it to continue. Not talking about it punishes the victims and protects the abusers. It creates a culture in which abusers thrive. That culture needs to end.

The most important thing is to remain aware of child abuse, sexual and otherwise, and support important causes like:

The National Alliance on Mental Illness

and

RAINN

recent reading: from the maccabees to the mishnah

Okay, let's see. Well, I've actually read two books on ancient Judaism lately, and one of them is chronologically earlier than the other, but I read them in reverse chronological order. Not by design -- it was reading the chronologically later one that inspired me to go looking for the other one, which I'd read in college and didn't realize had since been released in a revised edition.

Let's start by writing about the chronologically later one and see how this goes.

As I have taken pains to explain but am going to keep pointing out when it's relevant, if you're a westerner and you didn't grow up in a religious but non-Christian household, your conception of religion is a Christian one. This is one of the fundamental problems with the New Atheism -- it grapples with religion in Christian definitions, and virtually denies the existence of religions that don't fit those definitions. Just the fact that modern Americans describe their approach to religion in terms of atheism, agnosticism, or theism is itself a Christian framework, since there are plenty of religions that welcome non-theists and doubters with open arms and even more that consider it strange to lead with this question -- it's Christianity that treats religion as defined by its beliefs, not Buddhism, not Hinduism, and emphatically not Judaism. Christianity is what's sometimes called a creedal religion -- the creed functions as a purity test, a sorting hat: if you believe this, this, and that, then you're one of us, otherwise you're out of the circle. Again: this is not the default model of religion. (It's worth pointing out that Islam is also a creedal religion; the reasons for that are an interesting thing I intend to explore in my reading and, consequently, my posts here.)

Judaism and its antecedents -- and the ancient polytheistic religions Christianity grew up around -- have always treated religion not as a set of beliefs but as a set of practices and observances. This was largely true of the first two centuries of Christianity as well -- the first five, six, maybe seven or eight centuries in some parts of the world -- where Christian communities defined themselves by whether or not they continued Jewish observances, by their baptism rituals, by their community meals, and so on. The beginnings of "Christianity defined by belief" are in the church councils and the search for universal orthodoxy, while growing out of the fact that the disputes between early Christian communities were both practice- and theology-based -- but that's a whole nother series of posts.

The point is that even if you're not a Christian, as long as you're not specifically anything else, learning about any non-Christian religion involves a lot of unlearning along the way. Otherwise a lot of stuff bounces off you like water off a duck, and you hear a lot of facts wrong. I've seen people in graduate programs who had fundamentally misunderstood a lot of what they had "learned," because it all got filtered through the way they insisted on understanding things, and deep down, a lot of people, Christians and unbelievers alike, really want to treat non-Christian religions as "somebody else's Christianity."

Like I said in my intellectual autobiography post, it was ancient history and the Ancient Near East that first got me into religious studies. So it was great picking up Shaye Cohen's From The Maccabees to the Mishnah, which covers Jewish history from the Maccabees' revolt against the Romans through the development of rabbinic Judaism, a period that includes the life of Jesus, the early development of Christianity, and the necessity of the Christians and Jews deciding what to make of one another. It's great because although this is my area, this is the first book I've read that has exactly this scope: I've read close to a dozen books on Second Temple Judaism, for instance, which is a much smaller slice of time than this; at least as many books on the life of Jesus; and 25-30 books that deal with some or all of the first three centuries of Christians. But this fits pieces and contexts together more easily, and even material that was review for me sometimes clicked in a different way as a result.

It's just straight-up a well-written book, too. Cohen is very good.

Histories and religions

People tend to think of a religion, any religion, as arriving in the world more or less fully formed. Sure, we know that there are many Protestant denominations now and that the Catholic and Orthodox churches experienced their split, but there's a tendency to assume that apart from those things, for instance, Christianity was cobbled together pretty quickly.

The next level of realization is that of the more gradual process of construction -- in Christianity's case, this means realizing that a process of enforcing orthodoxy took place over centuries, and that theological thought and Christian self-definition largely served that process.

When you start to really get into it, though, you realize that in many cases you can, and maybe need to, speak of a succession of religions. Jesus's religion was not Christianity. There is an extent to which even traditional conservative Christians acknowledge this, but saying "Jesus was a Jew" is not as enlightening an explanation as it could be. More to the point, some of the important aspects of what I mean by saying "Jesus's religion was not Christianity" are lost in saying "Jesus was a Jew": specifically that in Jesus's religion as he taught it, as it was practiced by his followers in his lifetime, there were no priests, no sacraments, no churches, and arguably no clear creed -- things that became central to Christian self-definition in the generations after his death. Further, saying he was a Jew tells most people very little -- certainly he was not raised in the Jewish religion as it exists today, and neither was his religion a mainstream Jewish sect of its time.

Most or all of the religious movements of Jesus's disciples were not the religion of Jesus; and the Catholic Church, in turn, was not the religion of the disciples. These things are incontrovertibly true, they just don't often come into focus -- again, in part because of declining religious literacy, and in part because of the Church's historical desire to downplay the variety of Christian faiths active in the early centuries. Histories of early Christianity are as often written as histories of the inevitability of Catholicism -- with the non Catholic mists leapt over quickly -- as histories of the European settlement of North America are written as histories of the inevitability of the United States.

Judaism is a little more honest or explicit about being, in essence, a series of religions (or about there being a series of Jewish religions, of which Judaism is the most recent) practiced by the Jewish people. To be fair, in Judaism's case you have two periods in which worship is officially centered around the Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in the year 70. It would be sort of difficult to pretend that everything that came after remained fundamentally the same religion.

But there is more to it than that. While the New Testament had to be assembled, and while there were Christian communities before and during the writing of the various books of the New Testament, you're still looking at no more than probably a hundred and fifty years between Jesus's death and the writing of the latest book in the New Testament. The construction of the Bible took much longer than that -- it was centuries before the final form was settled, in fact -- but the point is that, as much as I find that period of early Christianity historically interesting, compared to the overall history of Christianity it is a pretty small slice.

In the Jewish religion, on the other hand, the books of Jewish scripture were, first of all, written across a much longer period of time; second, they were in circulation (alongside other books, not all of which we still possess copies of) for a much longer period of time before any kind of process took place that "canonized" them as the official "Jewish scriptures"; third, the Jewish religion was already a mature and robust religion when the latest books of what became Jewish scripture (the Tanak, or the Old Testament) were written.

Even apart from that, you have some significant amount of Jewish history -- either the official Biblical account of Jewish history beginning with Abraham and the patriarchs, or some alternate construction -- in which a Jewish religion was practiced but no scripture had yet been written, and this too is explicitly acknowledged in Jewish scripture. In contrast, at least some Christian communities became scribal religions almost immediately after Jesus's death, in part because of the importance of scribes in Jewish culture at the time.

Cohen, a Jewish writer, refers to both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism as successors of the earlier Jewish religion, and this is probably the best way to understand it: as different as Christianity is from its Jewish origins, rabbinic Judaism is almost as radical at first glance.

Rabbinic Judaism, briefly, is the current dominant and mainstream form of Judaism, and has been since a few centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism, those are all branches of Rabbinic Judaism, the basic premise of which is that the Torah must be understood with reference to the "Oral Torah" -- collections of laws and commentaries compiled between the end of the Second Temple period and the beginnings of the rabbinic period. There is strong circumstantial evidence that rabbinic Judaism may descend from the Pharisees of Jesus's time.

So, Jewish history. Nevermind Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the Exodus, etc. for now. Skip ahead to the exile period in the 6th century BCE, one of the most formative events in early Jewish history, when Babylon conquered Judah, laying waste to Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon. Citizens of Judah, mainly Jerusalem and especially the royal court and wealthy families, were deported to Babylon in waves. When Persia conquered Babylon about fifty years later and took control of Judah, Jews were permitted to return home, and waves of repatriation began, and construction of the Second Temple began.

That fifty years and the Persian period that followed (until Alexander the Great conquered Persia a couple hundred years later) was a huge disruption and a hugely productive time in Jewish thought. The prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, Haggai, and Zechariah all date from the exile period. Ezra and Nehemiah come from the Persian period -- religious reformers whose efforts to essentially remove foreign influences from their peoples' culture after generations spent in Babylon were critical in defining what exactly Jewish religion and culture were. Ezra was critical in establishing the importance of the Torah, for instance, which we take for granted as synonymous with Jewishness now, but calling Jews a "people of the Book" during the first Temple period would have confused anyone overhearing you.

The exile raised a lot of questions that had to be addressed in Jewish religious culture and identity: if the Jews were God's chosen people and Jerusalem their promised land, how had it come to pass that Jerusalem had been laid to waste, the Temple built by Solomon destroyed, and many of the Jews themselves forced to live in a foreign land under foreign rule? One of the common solutions -- that the people of Judah had strayed from the path and had to be punished -- seems obvious in retrospect only because of the sheer weight of Biblical text and Judeo-Christian culture

Alexander's 4th century BCE conquest of Persia and its territories began the Hellenistic period, which in cultural terms persisted for centuries -- more than a millennium, really, until the area came until Muslim Arab control in the 7th century CE. Politically, though, the Hellenistic period of Judea -- the region formerly known as the Kingdom of Judah -- ends with the Maccabean revolt, where Cohen's book picks up:

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 [who controlled Judea after Alexander's death], 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.

... 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 [Old Testament] book in the Bible, Daniel, was written at the very end of the Hellenistic period, during the dark days of the Antiochian persecution.

Is it any wonder I'm fascinated by this period of history? So much happens! This is kind of a trend for my historic interests, actually. In American history I've tended to be most interested in what Robert Wiebe's organizational hypothesis, the idea that the Progressive period -- from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I or the Great Depression (depending on where you want to draw the line) -- is an intense period of organization, redefinition, and soul-searching in American culture: that's when the American frontier closes, that's when nation-wide professional organizations become commonplace, that's when national media chains become the norm, that's when people by default begin to identify as Americans first and New Yorkers or Virginians second, rather than the other way around. It's not a coincidence that Christian fundamentalism dates from that period, that we've had the same two political parties since that period, and so on, but that's a whole nother set of posts. My point is just that I tend to be drawn to these periods of history marked by intense cultural activity or prevailing anomie.

The Maccabean period lasted a century, from the victory of 164 BCE to the entrance of the Romans into Jerusalem in 63 BCE ... [the many Jews who opposed Maccabean rule] were not "hellenizers" and "lawless" Jews who supported Antiochus's attempt to destroy Judaism, but loyal Jews who had had enough of the Maccabeans' autocratic ways. 

... At first, while the Seleucid Empire was still strong, the Romans accepted a treaty of alliance with the Maccabees ... as Seleucid power waned and Maccabean power increased, it was no longer to their advantage to support the Judean state since the Maccabees had become as much a threat to Roman interests 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 mperial 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).

Hey, we've all heard of him!

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.

Later Cohen backs up and provides some background on earlier Jewish religion:

How does Israelite religion differ from Judaism? In many respects, of course, it doesn't. The two are linked by a common belief in the one supreme God, who created the world, chose the Israelites/Jews to be his people, and entered into a covenantal relationship with them; by a shared attachment to the Holy Land of Israel, the holy city of Jerusalem, and the holy temple; and by the same sacred calendar and many of the same religious observances. Even more important than these commonalities is the fact that the Jews of all times have always seen themselves not merely as the successors to, but also as the continuators of, the legacy of preexilic Israel. Christianity claimed (and to some extent, still claims) to be the true Israel, but this claim was accompanied by an assertion of newness. Premodern Judaism never developed this sense of newness, and it is this sense of continuity that more than anything else connects Second Temple Judaism to preexilic Israel, in spite of numerous changes and enormous upheavals.

Preexilic Israel was a tribal society living on its ancestral land. Membership in a tribe, and consequently the rights of citizenship, depended exclusively on birth. There was no established process by which a foreigner could be absorbed into the Israelite polity. Second Temple Judaism, in contrast, was not a tribal society. When the Jews returned from Babylonia, they returned not as tribes but as clans. The entire tribal structure had been destroyed. Many Jews did not return to the land of Israel but remained in Babylonia; later, many Jews left the land of Israel to live throughout the Mediterranean basin. As a result of these changes, Judaism gradually defined itself more as a religion than as a nationality. It created the institution of conversion, which allowed foreigners to be admitted into "citizenship." As a religion, Judaism prohibited all marriages between Jews and non-Jews, a prohibition unknown to preexilic Israel.

Preexilic Israel worshiped in the temple through the slaughter and roasting of animals. A good part of the actual service was performed not by lay Israelites but by the priests, since only priests were permitted entrance into the inner precincts of the temple. Prayer was not a standard part of worship.

Second Temple Judaism also developed a regimen of private worship unknown to preexilic Israel. The word of God was to be the object of constant study and meditation, not only because this activity would teach the conduct that God expected, but also because the very act of study was deemed an act of worship. In addition to study, daily prayer became part of the piety practiced by the religious elite.

The piety of preexilic Israel centered on the group (the people of Israel or the family), while the piety of Second Temple Israel centered on both the group and the individual.

Preexilic Israel and Second Temple Judaism also differed in their understanding of theodicy, God's administration of justice ... Preexilic Israel believed that God administered justice in this world. The righteous and the wicked were not always the direct recipients of God's attentions, because God could reward or punish their offspring in their stead (emphasis on the collective). Second Temple Judaism insisted that God punishes or rewards only those who deserve it and that the conduct of one's ancestors is irrelevant (emphasis on the individual). Since God does not always seem to set matters right in this world, he must do so in the next. Second Temple Judaism therefore elaborated complex schemes of reward and punishment after death or at the end of time. Some of these schemes included the resurrection of the dead.

Prophets no longer enjoyed the prestige and authority that had been theirs in preexilic times. In Second Temple Judaism, prophets became apocalyptic seers, mystics, healers, and holy men. A new type of authority figure emerged to replace the classical prophet: the scribe, whose authority derived not from his pedigree and institutional setting (like the priest), not from his charismatic personality and direct contact with God (like the prophet), but from his erudition in the sacred Scriptures and traditions. Various sects as well claimed authority on the basis of their superior erudition.

Now some remarks on hellenization -- that is to say, the influence of Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) culture on the Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. Some of this ties in to my opening remarks about practice vs. theology, as well as with the preceding paragraphs about the differences between preexilic and Second Temple Judaism.

All the Jews of antiquity were hellenized to some degree... but usually the term "hellenization" involves more than just pots, pans, and language. It also involves a way of thought and a way of life. ... Some Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora sought to obliterate all distinctions between themselves and the gentiles. These Jews are usually called "apostates" (rebels). Their reasons were diverse. Some, hoping to make a career in the civil service, felt that their Judaism was an obstacle in their path ... Some apostates were motivated by the desire to partake fully of the delights of Hellenistic civilization... they wanted to "belong." Others were "uprooted intellectuals" who could accept the truths of Greek philosophy but had difficulty accepting the truths of Judaism. In a polytheistic world they could not believe in monotheism, in a society that revered philosophy they could not accept revelation, and in a universal culture they could not accept distinctiveness. 

A group of Jews known to modern scholarship as "the extreme hellenizers" tried to remove the distinctive characteristics of Judaism in order to make it indistinguishable from other forms of Semitic-Hellenistic polytheism... whether they were motivated primarily by social, economic, political, or religious desires is difficult to determine. The supporters of the Maccabees had no doubt, however, that these Jews were sinners and rebels. 

Universalistic trends had always existed in Judaism, even in preexilic times, especially in intellectual circles. The Wisdom literature of the Bible (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes) completely ignores the distinctive elements of Israelite cult, history, and theology; freely draws on the wisdom literature of the ancient East, especially Egypt; and emphasizes the common morality and ethics applicable to all peoples. ... But the universalism of these apostates was different ... because these apostates ... surrendered their Jewish identity. For the vast majority of Jews, this was not an acceptable response to the challenges of the Hellenistic world.

Many scholars have noted that the religions and philosophies of the Hellenistic period share a concern for the individual, whereas the religions and philosophies of [the earlier period of] classical Greece centered more on the polis, the collective. The same development can be seen in the Judaism of the Hellenistic period.

Another innovation of the Hellenistic period was the phenomenon of non-Jews converting to Judaism or adopting Jewish practices without conversion -- not because they had married a Jew or joined a Jewish community, but simply because they coexisted in the larger world with the Jews, a world in which practices tended to pass back and forth like this. Traditions for conversion had to be developed, which were later recorded in documents of rabbinic law -- though those date from a later period than what we're talking about, and might not be wholly accurate.

According to rabbinic law, a convert must also be immersed in water (in Christian terminology, be baptized) and must offer a sacrifice at the temple. Yet the same rabbinic authorities insist that the convert's inability to bring a sacrifice after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE does not impair the acquired Jewishness. The convert merely incurs an obligation that will need to be satisfied in the messianic future. According to rabbinic law, then, in the Second Temple period the ritual requirements for conversion were three: circumcision [for men], immersion, and sacrifice.

The major problem raised by this rabbinic tradition is that no text from the Second Temple period knows of immersion and sacrifice as rituals of conversion. The baptism that figures so prominently in certain portions of the New Testament obviously bears some relationship to the immersion for converts, but the precise nature of that relationship has been endlessly debated by scholars. The fact that gentile converts to Christianity were baptized is the strongest argument for the view that converts to Judaism must have been baptized already in the first century.

Even more numerous than converts were those gentiles who accepted certain aspects of Judaism but did not convert to it. In polytheistic fashion, they added the God of Israel to their pantheon and did not deny the pagan gods. Throughout the Roman Empire, various practices of Judaism found favor with large segments of the populace. In the city of Rome, many gentiles observed the Sabbath, the fasts, and the food laws; in Asia Minor, many gentiles attended synagogue on the Sabbath. ... they did not see themselves as Jews and were not seen by others as Jews.

Later, when the gentiles adopting Jewish practices were Christians -- especially in the second to fifth centuries -- scholars refer to them as "Judaizers."

Let's revisit what I was saying at the start about many religions being defined as much or more by practice and observance than by belief. "Apostates" like the "extreme hellenizers" aren't those who have "abandoned the Jewish faith," to use a Christian construction -- Josephus, for instance, condemns them not for rejecting Jewish beliefs but for abandoning ancient customs like circumcision. Judaizers, similarly, don't necessarily understand Christian theology differently than other Christians do as a result of their embrace of Jewish practice -- it is the practice itself that sets them apart.

I have to wonder if Catholics have an easier time understanding this, given that Catholicism is far more practice-and-observance-oriented than Protestantism -- that said, I studied in both heavily Catholic New Orleans and the very Protestant Midwest and didn't notice a particular difference among my classmates.

Through Christianity, they [the Judaizers] learned the Hebrew Scriptures and became familiar with Jewish observances. Many Christian groups, for example, insisted that Easter must coincide with the Jewish Passover and that it be celebrated with rites similar to those of the Jewish Passover. In Antioch in the late fourth century, John Chrystostom was shocked that many Christians were doing what pagan God-fearers had been doing in other parts of the empire three centuries previously: they were attending synagogues and observing the Jewish festivals.

The pervasive influence of Christianity on our thinking makes us equate "religion" with theology or faith. This ... is false not only for ancient polytheism but also for the Judaism of antiquity. Both Jews and gentiles recognized that the Jews denied the gods of the nations and claimed that their God alone was the true God, the Lord of the universe. Yet for both Jews and gentiles, the boundary line between Judaism and polytheism was determined more by Jewish observances than by Jewish theology. 

Practices, not theology, also determined the boundaries within the Jewish community. The debates between sectarians and nascent Christian "orthodoxy" of antiquity centered on theological matters ... but for the most part the debates among Jewish sects centered on matters of law. The Jews of Qumran criticized not the theology of their coreligionists but their way of life, especially their calendar, their purity rules, and their administration of the temple. The library of books assembled by the Jews of Qumran contains a bewildering variety of theological ideas and eschatological scenarios. Sometimes a single text juxtaposes several different eschatological or messianic theories. Not a single tractate of either the Mishnah or the Talmud is devoted to a "theological" topic. 

Okay, I'm going to digress on gnosticism after all, something I try to put off.

I get that gnosticism is one of the things people find interesting and appealing about ancient religion, but it is, in essence, a myth. Not a myth exactly, but a modern construct used as an umbrella term for ancient beliefs, practices, and groups that might well be surprised to find themselves grouped together. The "ism" of it all is misleading. To wit:

1: No group or individual identified themselves as gnostic.

2: The term comes from the early Church Fathers who used it as an accusation. There are many problems with drawing conclusions about the groups they accused of being gnostics, much less deriving from their descriptions a "gnosticism." Consider the diverse groups and politicians that American conservatives call "socialists," many of whom -- like the Clintons -- hold positions that are clearly conservative, and who in any case have little to nothing to do with the political ideology of socialism.

This is not an accidental comparison I'm making. When you adopt one extreme position, accusing your opponents of occupying the other extreme is common practice. While we can easily untangle what it says about someone when they call a centrist a "socialist," this is because we understand the spectrum, the issues, and the language. We don't have that knowledge when it comes to the religious scene of developing Christianity, because:

2a) Most of the texts didn't survive,

2b) Most of the texts that did survive represent the Church Fathers' positions, because they're the ones who preserved the texts,

2c) Even though the Nag Hammadi documents -- which include many early non-orthodox Christian writings as well as various Jewish writings -- were recovered in the 20th century, we know very little about the demographics of the groups who produced them,

2d) We're still debating serious issues about the Gospel of Mark, a much better understood document with much more supporting material -- in comparison, it's been much harder to even start the conversation about the Nag Hammadi finds,

2e) Moderns tend to lose sight of the fact that although text finds like this are very valuable, with religious communities of this era, written texts are the smallest part of the puzzle. It is very likely that there were at least as many Christian communities that produced zero written texts as those that produced some; further, those that produced some used them in addition to their oral "texts," not as the sole source of their traditions, practices, faith, what have you. The texts will never tell the whole of the story.

3) As Qumran and other communities attest, possession of a text does not necessarily indicate subscription to that text's creed. In Qumran's case, a strong theory is that the Qumran community used as its main texts both a text written by its founder and at least one text written by an earlier group -- and in the latter case, very likely interpreted that text differently than the source had done, just as Christians interpret the Jewish scriptures differently than Jews do. Without possession of commentaries, we have no idea what to say about the possession of a text that a group didn't create.

Now, point #3 is one of the things that gets lost when we talk about which groups "were gnostic" and what gnosticism means. There is a good book called Rethinking "Gnosticism" that addresses some of the problems most scholarship on gnosticism, as typically exemplified by Elaine Pagels, the best known scholar on gnostics, both in the academic community and, especially, with the general public. One of the key problems is the way so much work on gnosticism relies on association:

Group 1 is gnostic for reason such-and-such.

Group 1 produced or possessed Text A: Text A is therefore gnostic.

Group 2 possessed Text A: Group 2 is gnostic.

Group 2 produced Text B: Text B is gnostic.

Group 3 possessed Text B: Group 3 is gnostic.

Worst yet: Text B contains Idea I: Idea I is gnostic. Text C contains Idea I: Text X is gnostic.

Eventually there is very little that you can't write a book about the gnosticism thereof, but what have you accomplished?

Meanwhile, while we know that the Church Fathers found value in accusing groups of being gnostic in the same way that American politicians find value in accusing opponents of socialism, the more groups we want to include in the umbrella, the more broadly we have to define "gnostic" for it to fit the few things that we know for sure. Otherwise we wind up ascribing beliefs and practices to groups simply because of their imagined associations with other groups and texts on the basis of this awful math.

I should add that although I am regularly critical of Pagels, it isn't that her work is entirely wrong. She has made a lot of good points about early Christianity and brought a lot of important elements to light. Popularity is a tricky thing in scholarship -- Publish or Perish is one thing, but once you find a popular audience, there's a pressure to continue publishing more books along similar lines, regardless of whether you have the material or conclusions to justify doing so. The biggest problems with Pagels are the shadow she casts and the "everything is gnostic if you squint enough" effect that her popularity has caused, by turning "gnostic" into a marketable brand name for the layman.

Moving on. One of the things Christians are often unaware of is the way that Jewish religion underwent significant change every few centuries, and specifically the fact that in the time of Jesus, the Jewish religion was very much in flux. In the generations immediately prior to Jesus's birth, many of the elements Christians take for granted as part of the "Judeo" half of their Judeo-Christian heritage were only just falling into place, brand new and shiny.

In the early third and second centuries BCE, the Jewish conception of God became more majestic, and the angels who served him became more delineated. Greek-speaking Jews developed the idea of the Logos -- translated in the Christian world as the "Word" of God, but according to Cohen better understood as "speech" or "reason," the angel who interacts with the material world on God's behalf.

In the early Second Temple period, the term "the accuser" (ha satan) began to refer to a member of the heavenly court who, while still subservient to God, was able to exercise some initiative on his own (Job 1-2, Zech. 3:1-2). "Satan" was not yet a proper name. The third and second centuries BCE, however, witnessed the emergence of Satan as a clearly defined being. Sometimes called Mastema or Belial or other names, he was the supernatural leader of the forces of evil. He was an enemy both of God and of the righteous and was blamed for most of the maladies that befall humanity. 

The existence of Satan actually underscored God's majesty, because his existence was used to solve the free will issue: according to the view that was prevalent in late Second Temple Judaism, God has foreseen everything (and certain sects, such as the Essences, consider themselves the divinely predetermined elect who will be resurrected at the end of time as discussed below) but humans have free will. This doesn't make God responsible for human sinfulness, but neither does it mean that sinful actions represent the ability to thwart the will of God; rather, Satan is the source of evil and of sin, and Satan is a creation of God. Christianity developed the shit out of this idea too, sometimes to such a degree that it actually trips over itself and conflicts with other doctrines of sin.

It's really not until Maimonides in the Middle Ages that we have a Jewish source espousing pure, unadulerated monotheism -- Maimonides argued that angels and other apparent divine beings were just attributes of God, sort of ways for people to understand God, but had no existence independent from Him. This is emphatically not the way Jews understood monotheism in the premodern world, and a religion that originated in polytheism constantly struggled with deciding exactly what it meant by what we now call monotheism -- or at least, so it appears in retrospect from a modern viewpoint. The truth is that so long as people weren't worshipping foreign gods, there doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of tension or "struggle" here, just a lot of expression of belief that we now have trouble feeling comfortable categorizing as "monotheistic."

But that became Christianity's problem. It's Christianity that's the creedal religion, not Judaism. Judaism doesn't tear itself into pieces over theological quandaries, it's more legalistic in scope. Christianity inherited a worldview that included a supposedly strict monotheism but also innumerable divine beings who existed independently of God, including the angels, Satan, demons who were responsible for causing illness, and eventually, Jesus. No wonder it took them most of a thousand years to sort out what exactly they believed in, when those were the parameters.

Another recent introduction:

For the first time, in the third and second centuries BCE we also hear of immortality and resurrection as the rewards that await the righteous and of eternal punishments that await the wicked. In the preexilic portions of the Bible, Sheol is the ultimate destination for the disembodied soils of everyone, righteous and wicked alike ... there is no judgment and no reward. 

Since neither the righteous nor the wicked receives their due in either life or death, what is the incentive to be righteous? Where is God's justice? These are the taunts that the righteous hear in the book of Enoch, in Wisdom of Solomon, and in many other works, including rabbinic literature. Since the present is inexplicable, the answer must be the future. Death does not mark the end; the righteous -- and perhaps the wicked too -- must receive their due in the hereafter. 

... A clearer account is provided by Daniel 12:2-3, a description of the events of the end time:

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky; and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever."

Keep in mind a few key differences here between the Jewish Daniel conception of the afterlife and the modern Christian view of the afterlife: first, that it seems to involve a specifically bodily resurrection rather than the departure of the soul from the body; second, that not everyone is so resurrected; and third, that it doesn't even occur until the end of time, and does so collectively, rather than everyone entering the afterlife at the moment of their individual death. Forget about any ideas about your dead grandparents watching you from Heaven, much less the intercession of saints.

Those differences are important, but equally important to the initial development of Christianity -- or perhaps more to the point, to the development of Jesus's thought and teachings -- is the fact that these notions of resurrection and supernatural reward were major themes in Jewish religious thought in his era. This is also something to keep in mind when evaluating the various theories that Jesus's ideas were partially or largely influenced by Eastern schools of philosophy, Buddhism specifically, etc. -- theories I have never seen any meaningful support for, and which are nearly always advocated by people with little familiarity with Jewish antiquity.

Cohen on the shift in the seat of political and religious power in this era:

By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (mid-fifth century BCE), the royal family had disappeared, and the high priest was emerging as the leading political figure ... by the fourth century BCE at the latest, the high priest was the uncontested head of the Jews, not merely the head of the temple. In Hellenistic times, the office was filled by an appointee of the king. "Civil" and "religious" power were combined in one person. The wars of the Maccabees in large measure revolved around this office.

As the focal point of the religion, the temple was the central communal institution not just for the Jews of the land of Israel but also for those of the Diaspora. The annual half-shekel contribution and the festival pilgrimages bound together the entire Jewish community. The ideology of the temple also served as a binding force: it represented oneness and exclusivity ... during the Second Temple period, at least three other temples were erected, but none of them competed effectively with the temple of Jerusalem.

The Sanhedrin were a supreme court chaired by the high priest and composed of members drawn from various groups (Sadducees, Pharisees, priests). It had authority to try cases that involved serious violations of religious law.

Beyond that, things get unsure -- Josephus refers to the Sanhedrin as a temporary court assembled by the high priest on an as-needed basis, but rabbinical tradition says otherwise and further attributes legislative power as well as judicial to the Sanhedrin. Complicating things, we know both Josephus and rabbinical tradition to be in error about other matters, so it's a whole big conversation when it comes to which source to weigh more heavily. What is clear, though, is that Rome allowed the Jewish community considerable autonomy when it came to ruling on internal matters.

It seems likely that, if nothing else, the Sanhedrin was present frequently, so if it was ad-hoc, then it was assembled an awful lot. The development of the rabbinical tradition seems to have occurred in no small part because after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the loss of the supporting infrastructure left the Jewish community with specific needs unfilled, and the early rabbis -- very likely the sect referred to in both the New Testament and early rabbinical texts as the Pharisees -- assumed a judicial-like leadership role.

Cohen on the development of the institution of the synagogue:

The synagogue is a tripartite institution: A place of prayer, a place of study, and a place of meeting. In all likelihood, each of these parts was once a separate institution, each with its own history, and only after a long and complicated process were the three combined. ... The synagogue is an amalgamation of a prayerhouse, which apparently originated in the Diaspora in early Hellenistic times; a study house or school, which apparently originated in Israel also in early Hellenistic times; and a meetinghouse, which served the different needs of the Jewries of the Diaspora and the land of Israel. By the first century CE, these diverse elements had not yet united to form a single type. In fact ... our sources from the third to the seventh centuries CE present radically different portraits of the synagogue.

When we say rabbinical Judaism and Christianity developed alongside each other, we really mean it: they both took seven or eight centuries to really come into focus.

On sectarianism in Jewish antiquity:

A sect separates itself from society ... the members of the sect might flee to the desert or some other isolated place. Or they might live among, but not with, their nonsectarian coreligionists [by creating] taboos that inhibit normal social intercourse between the members of the group (the "pure," "righteous," "elect") and nonmembers (the "impure," "wicked," "damned"). No matter what form the separation takes, it is generally caused by a sense of alienation from the rest of society, especially from society's central institutions. 

A sect asserts that it alone embodies the ideals of the larger group. In Jewish terms, this means that a sect sees itself as the true Israel. At best, all other Jews are sinners; at worst, they hardly deserve the name "Israel" at all.

The cutting edge of ancient Jewish sectarianism was not theology but law. Of course, sects often advocated peculiar doctrinal views, but these did not play the formative role that the legal positions did. Abundant evidence makes this point clear: the protosectarianism of the Persian period; the critique of Jewish society contained in [the documents of the Qumran community; [etc.] All this material emphasizes the legal character of the debates among the sects and ignores or slights philosophical and theological matters.

In Second Temple times, the biblical canon was very fluid. All Jews regarded the Torah as authoritative, and all Jews except the Samaritans regarded the prophetic books as authoritative. But the nature and degree of the authority that was ascribed to these books, and the identity of the other books that also were to be regarded as authoritative, varied greatly from community to community. The Essenes of Qumran criticized the religious behavior of their fellow Jews, but failure to respect the Essene writings is not among their complaints. No ancient source implies that the constitution of the canon was a focal point of sectarian dispute. There is no evidence that any central body (e.g. the temple priesthood) tried to impose on the population a unified canon.

Early Christianity ceased to be a Jewish sect when it ceased to observe Jewish practices. It abolished circumcision and became a religious movement overwhelmingly gentile in composition and character. This process was accompanied by the elevation of Jesus far higher and more significant than that occupied by any intermediary figure in Judaism; even those Jews who, like Philo, used their belief in God's Logos to explain how a transcendent and unknowable God could create the world and interact with it did not worship the Logos or pray to it. For Christians, Christ the Logos was the primary focus of worship. With its practices no longer those of the Jews, its theology no longer that of the Jews, its membership no longer Jewish, and its political institutions no longer those of the Jews -- the Christianity of the early second century CE was no longer a Jewish phenomenon but a separate religion. Small groups of Jewish Christians (more accurately, Christian Jews) persisted through the first five or six centuries CE, but they were regarded as sects by both the Jews and the Christians.

On Samaritans specifically:

The name "Samaritan" has two distinct meanings: an inhabitant of the district of Samaria or a member of a religious community centered at Shechem and Mount Gerizim. The people who concern us here are not [the former] but the community that dwelt (and still dwells) in Shechem and venerated (and still venerates) Mount Gerizim. ... archaeological evidence suggests that the former inhabitants of Samaria fled to Shechem [in the fourth century BCE]. In all likelihood, the temple on Mount Gerizim was now built to serve the new temple ... not [to] signal a break with the Jews of Judea. The alphabet used by the Samaritans and the text form of their Torah were widespread in Judea in the second century BCE. The decrees of Epiphanes applied to the Samaritans as well as to the Judeans, a fact confirming that both groups were Jews in the eyes of the state. Unlike the Jews of Judea, however, the Samaritans accepted the king's program and dedicated their temple to Zeus. Perhaps in revenge for this act, John Hyrcanus destroyed the Gerizim temple in 129 BCE and the city of Shechem in 109 BCE. This caused undying tension between the communities.

The Samaritans created their own biblical canon (including only the Torah), developed rituals and practices that in many areas agreed, and in many areas disagreed, with those of their fellow Jews, and elaborated their own eschatology (including the restoration of their temple on Mount Gerizim). 

Were the Samaritans a sect? On the one hand, they have many sectarian features. As long as their temple stood on Mount Gerizim, they seem to have regarded themselves as part of the larger community ... but after their temple was destroyed, they argued that the Jerusalem temple was completely unacceptable to God ... [and] looked upon themselves as the true Israel. On the other hand, the Samaritans have many features that are decidedly nonsectarian: their mixed origins, their ethnic ties to Shechem and Mount Gerizim, and their widespread Diaspora, which has been estimated by some scholars to rival that of the Jews.

On the status of Jewish scriptural genres:

Prophecy of the biblical sort ceased; seers continued to see visions and hearers continued to hear voices, but their methods, messages, and settings were different from those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Instead of consulting prophets, people eager to hear the word of the Lord would study the collected words of those who had once spoken with God.

The status of the Torah as the sole literary expression of the revelation of God was still subject to challenge as late as the second century BCE. Some Jews believed that they still had the option of reformulating the narratives and laws attributed to Moses. These Jews wrote the Temple Scroll and the book of Jubilees. The former, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, is either a very early work of the Qumran Jews, perhaps of their founder, or is a work inherited by them from some earlier group or school (perhaps third century BCE). The Temple Scroll rewrites the laws of the Torah, rearranges them, reformulates them, expands on them, and even adds new laws not found in the original. But the Temple Scroll is no mere paraphrase of the Torah. It presents itself as THE Torah. In the Torah now in our Bibles, some anonymous narrator tells us that God spoke to Moses, but in the Temple Scroll God speaks to Moses directly. Laws that refer to God in the third person in the Torah are cast as referring to God in the first person in the Temple Scroll.

The book of Jubilees, written in the 160s BCE, rewrites the narrative portion of the Torah from Genesis through Exodus 12 (precisely the point at which the Temple Scroll began). The work greatly expands on the Torah and tries to prove the authenticity of the solar calendar and the pre-Sinatic origin of the commandments. The alleged author of the work is an angel who reveals to Moses the content of various heavenly tablets.

Their goal is not to supplement Scripture but to supplant it.

For some Jews, especially in the land of Israel, the second part of the Bible was now closed. It consisted of the historical books Joshua through Kings, which were a preface to the prophetic books (or an epilogue to the Torah), and the prophetic books themselves. Additions to the canon were incorporated in a third section that ultimately became known simply as "the Writings." When the book of Daniel, written in the 160s BCE [the same time as the book of Jubilees], came to be canonized, it was included not in the Prophets, a section already complete, but in the Writings. 

Many textbooks still claim that the rabbinic "synod" at Yavneh finalized the canonization of the Hebrew Bible around 100 CE. The rabbis were motivated, we are told, by a desire to exclude Christianity from the fol, and to exclude Christian and apocalyptic books from the canon. These views have lost favor in recent years, primarily for lack of evidence. [This is putting it lightly.] The rabbis in the third and fourth centuries CE were still debating the sanctity of various books. Esther in particular had to fight for its place in the canon. The Jews of Qumran did not read Esther; it is missing from the earliest extant Christian list of biblical books, from the second half of the second century CE; and the rabbis still were not sure about the book a century or two later.

The Writings are a motley assortment of books ... books of wisdom ... hymns, histories, and novellas ... the Song of Songs, a collection of secular love songs.

Thus the tripartite canon was born: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. This canon was accepted by many Jews in both the land of Israel and the Diaspora. Some ... preferred not to define a canon at all; some, like the author of 4 Ezra, had a canon of 24 books, yet an additional collection of apocalyptic works besides; others ... looked on the Torah as a work in a category of its own and otherwise were content to preserve [separately] a collection of literature that did not distinguish between Prophets and Writings, between the divinely inspired and the uninspired, between the eternally valid and the transient.

The Tanak [Jewish Scriptures, or "the Old Testament"] itself refers to several works that are now lost. These include, for example, the Book of Yashar, the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. Why did no one care to preserve them? Why weren't these books canonized? Centuries later, why weren't Tobit, Ben Sira, and Judith canonized? We do not know.

The canonization of the Tanak was accompanied by the growth of the ideal of scriptural study and the emergence of people who claimed political and religious authority on the basis of their scriptural expertise. The study of Scripture led to the creation of three new literary genres: scriptural translation, paraphrase, and commentary... However, even as the Jews declared their loyalty to Scripture, they liberated themselves from it. Many of the scriptural translations, paraphrases, and commentaries, from both Second Temple and rabbinic times, are remarkably fanciful and capricious, and even those that claim to be accurate interpretations of the original often do not live up to their claims. The emergence of canonized texts allowed the Jews great freedom in interpreting their sacred traditions, a freedom denied them when the traditions circulated in fluid form. When the original itself was still susceptible to change, the distinction between text and interpretation was not clear, and the custodians of the originals would be wary of capricious modifications.

[That said, it is clear that the originals were modified numerous times, but that is a separate conversation.]

By the second century BCE, classical prophecy had ceased; seers who saw visions and hearers who heard voices instead wrote apocalypses ... a literary work that has an angel or some inspired worthy revealing a secret or unraveling a mystery. ... Apocalyptic literature never lost its interest in cosmology, but in response to the profanation of the temple and the persecution of Judaism, it shifted its attention to the secrets of history and eschatology. This type of apocalypse, whose best-known representative is the book of Daniel, marks the final evolution of classical prophecy. ... Christians were very interested in apocalypses; they preserved many Jewish apocalypses and wrote new apocalypses themselves.

Midrash and exegesis:

The Hebrew word "midrash" literally means "research" or "investigation," but through rabbinic usage the term has come to mean "the investigation of Scripture." A commentary on Scripture, a piece of scriptural exegesis, a veiled allusion to a scriptural passage, a retelling of scriptural material -- all these are called midrash. 

The essence of exegesis is the notion "X = Y." When Scripture says X, it really means Y. In some instances, the formula can be represented as "X + Y," where the exegesis adds Y to the X of scripture. ... Demetrius asks how the Israelites, who fled Egypt unarmed, managed to obtain weapons for their various battles. His answer (they obtained arms by stripping them from the Egyptian corpses at the Red Sea) is a good illustration of the X + Y method, in which the exegete adds important information omitted by Scripture.

... The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution but of course routinely interprets it in a manner that would have amazed the Founding Fathers. No matter. Historians must try to find out what the Constitution meant in its eighteenth-century context, but the Supreme Court must determine what it means for contemporary society. 

Linked by their common education, vocabulary, values, and culture, the rabbis clearly constitute a unified group ... but these facts do not mean that rabbinic literature really is seamless or that all rabbis of antiquity thought and behaved in identical fashion. 

The Mishnah ("repetition" or "teaching") is the first rabbinic book, written in Hebrew and edited around 200 CE. ... it contains primarily material of a legal character: anonymous rulings, rulings ascribed to names sages, and debates between sages. The Mishnah also contains anecdotes, maxims, exhortations, scriptural exegesis, and descriptions of the rituals of the Jerusalem temple. ... it is full of legal material but is not a law code, rather, it is a digest or anthology.

The rabbis of the second century debated among themselves the number and identity of [the Noahide laws ... laws revealed to Noah and his descendants, which were to be observed by all mankind, i.e. the laws which Jews should find it reasonable to expect non-Jews to obey, and which later influenced the ideas of international law and natural law in the West]. The usual number was seven. ... The very idea of Noahide laws shows a remarkable tendency toward recognizing the validity of cultures other than one's own and of affirming the common bond of all civilized peoples.

Okay! Not a lot of comment from me on the last few chapters there, but I think the excerpts also speak for themselves. And this is a long entry. The other book related to this is on the development of monotheism, which gets into extremely interesting material. I am off to Boston for Easter.