Institute for Travesty

Often the strongest culture-to-culture influences are in the confluence of peoples themselves. We have to think that the Silent Years provided many opportunities for the non-Jews of the Greco-Roman world to observe the lifestyles, practices, and concerns of everyday followers of Judaism. And what the Gentiles could observe would depend on whether they were looking at Israel itself or at the widely dispersed but hardly lost or silent Diasporans throughout the Mediterranean.

We acknowledge that we have little hard evidence of the everyday life and interaction of Jews with Gentiles over the period in consideration. But we do have very impressive evidence by the end of the “Silent Years.” We will be working backward in time, often having to give ball-park estimates of earlier states of Jewish affairs, but relying on the strong base of Jewish religious documents, most strongly on the Old Testament itself but also the New Testament.

Beneath the Radar

The story of interaction between Judaism and the Gentile nations in the Silent Years is, not surprisingly, mainly a “beneath the radar” story. It is the story of one new idea after another working its way from the Jewish heartland into the Diaspora, and from thence, in one personal contact or another, often seemingly random, creating an “Aha Moment” in which a Gentile is prodded to think outside the previous Gentile mainstream. That thinking is generally free from governmental or Jewish interference and can veer in unexpected new directions. And in all probability, the early stages of that new thinking were never recorded.

And if they had been recorded, the overwhelming probability is that such record disappeared permanently and a long time ago. One has only to consider recent archeological research and discovery to realize how very little written evidence has survived from the centuries before the Christian era. We are happy when we know the dates of important battles, have an approximate idea of where the battlefield was and the names of the contesting nations and generals. With such skeletal background, archeology is normally thrilled if it can find a mural at Pompeii or a parchment in some buried amphora, or even some shards of pottery with words scratched on their surface.

The Crown Jewels

Therefore, when we do have surviving full literary documents, whether a speech, an anecdote, a dramatic script, a sacred hymn, a governmental constitution, anything coherent at all—when we have such a literary document, we likely need to milk it for everything we can, for these are the crown jewels of what we know of the ancient world.

These general principles are certainly applicable to our understanding of day-to-day political realities in any of the ancient civilizations, and notably of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Our understanding often comes from vast interpolation from fragments found accidentally here or there.

And as we interpolate, we must distinguish between Israel itself and the Jews in Diaspora. Israel itself represented the remnant of the Jewish state, no longer sovereign, but to some extent self-governing, especially religiously, notably by various factions. The factionalizing of the Jewish establishment would have been very apparent to both Jews and Gentiles.

Furthermore, in contrast to the sparsity of documentation concerning ancient cultures, we have a great deal of light thrown by four inter-related coherent major literary accounts, all of which provide us with evidence. These are also some of the most available documents even in the modern world, namely the four Gospels of the New Testament. True, all four come technically after the end of the Silent Years—they are, in fact, what mainly breaks the silence. By putting the Gospels together with archeological evidence from the same period, we can have a far better idea of Jewish factions than is provided by almost any other literary corpus.

Ironically for this study, however, what we know from the Gospels and other New Testament sources is rich but easily leads us astray from the central thesis of this work, the influence of Jewish thought on a Gentile Roman Mediterranean world. We can overconcentrate on the rich diversity of Israeli politics as incidentally indicated in the Gospel accounts and think that our knowledge about Jewish homeland politics is what was important to the Gentile world. Generally speaking, these political stances in Israel had some of the least effects on Gentiles outside Israel. Jewish political institutions in Israel were quite inwardly-focused and worked to isolate Judaism, not to influence the world.

Jewish influence on the world can be assumed to happen mainly through a) other institutions, b) through Diasporans living in contact with Gentile cultures, and c) through the written central Scriptures of Judaism, typically translated into Coiné Greek as the Septuagint.

The following discussion, then, reviews the well-known politics of Israel mainly to compare that Jerusalem-focused politics with the very contrastive, not typically political stances of Diasporan Judaism.

The “Logos” of Five Political-Religious Parties in Israel

By the end of the Silent Years, five major factions of political-religious Israel can be sketched. The structure or “logos” of this division of thought can then be superimposed on previous times as a good first guess of what must have been inherent in the factions of those times. The order in which these five factions should be taken is fairly arbitrary. The best order should be the one that makes the whole most comprehensible. For present purposes, the Sadducees are a convenient starting point.

Sadducees

The Sadducees were not at all the largest faction in Israel, at least by modern democratic criteria. But the Sadducees considered themselves quite possibly the greatest in influence.

We can trace the development of the Sadducee party over centuries. If we confine ourselves to the period begun with the Alexandrian conquests, the Sadducees at the coming of Alexander were power people, navigating not only for themselves but for the Judean Remnant that returned to Israel and built the Second Temple. In other words, the Sadducees were an upper-class group centering on the people centrally concerned with the Temple, its sacrifices and rituals.

In the Greek Period, such people were very concerned to protect the Temple and its worship patterns without interference from the new Greek political overlords. At the same time, they were “progressive” people, trying to accommodate on what was not centrally important. And as they accommodated, they found more and more to like in Greek culture, antithetic as such things were to the dictates of historical scriptural Judaism.

By the time of Jesus of Nazareth, the Sadducees had developed typical religious positions that no doubt represented a general consensus from which individuals might privately vary. But in general, Sadducees were formalists, insisting on every detail being just so as long as it dealt with the Temple, its sacrifices, and its rituals. Their strength was in governance, and they made their weight felt through the Sanhedrin.

But beyond the details of Temple worship, the Sadducees adopted a basic stance of relative indifference to other issues of the faith, standing for the Torah as the definition of Jewish faith without need of interpretation. If forced, they were at least skeptical and probably in denial of the idea of an afterlife. They were quite comfortable and tolerant about social issues like divorce. And they probably were careful not to press religious discussions even among themselves.

It is often assumed that as power-seekers, Sadducees were at heart Hellenizers. Probably most of them felt that some accommodations with Greek culture might even be beneficial to Jews, but their emphasis on the Torah as definitive without need for interpretation made them the archetypical advocates for the Written Law.

It looks probable that the ultimate value for the Sadducees was the independence of Temple worship from all secular, Gentile authority. They recognized themselves as the trustees of the Temple, and they equated that idea with being trustees of Jewish autonomy. As a result, their concerns were intensely political, not intensely religious.

If all this sounds a little vague, we must recognize that even in the Gospels, while the Sadducees come in repeatedly, they are essentially outside the central narrative of Jesus. What is here said about the Sadducees is vague enough to allow for personal idiosyncrasies and for variations in light of changing circumstances over centuries.

The Sadducees were an upper-class, typically land-owning, establishmentarian party with an uninterpreted-Torah religious orthodoxy. They had practical power at their disposal. And they were divorced from the common people by their aristocratic traditions centering in the priesthood, by their affluence and land-holding, and by their austere religious convictions in favor of the most conservative, ritually-centered emphasis on the Torah alone. Their greatest opponents for control of Jewish destiny were the Pharisees.

Pharisees

The common people looked for other leadership and found it in the scribal class, a highly literate, practically-oriented, and legalistically-minded cadre. In the longer-run of history, they had been directly involved in copying the Torah for an increasingly literate middle and even lower class and involved in legal work, like divorce, directly dependent on religious law.

During the return from Exile, Ezra had united the profession of scribe (an important Persian institution) with a priestly genealogy. Almost immediately after Ezra, however, the priestly class began to hold itself aloof from general religious teaching in favor of their sacerdotal duties, and people increasingly looked to the scribes for instruction in the faith and practical decisions to implement the Torah throughout life.

The Scribes thus became the interpreters of the Law or proponents of the Unwritten Law, not that they never wrote anything down, but that their decisions were necessarily extensions of the Torah and not the Written Law, the Torah itself.

By the early Roman Empire, the Scribes, leading the popular religious party in Israel, had become Hasidim, the “purified ones.” The extensions of the Written Law more and more stringently encompassed Jewish life, and the Pharisees, as the main line descending from the Hasidim had become extremely scrupulous at practical living details derived from the Torah.

Thus, Sadducees and Pharisees were in essential agreement on the absolute centrality of the Torah and on living within the Torah as the essential requirement of Judaism. At the same time that they were in essential agreement, they had chosen opposite stances, the Sadducees insisting on the Written Law and the Pharisees insisting on Tradition, the Tradition of Unwritten Law extensions based in the Torah.

As leaders of the popular religious faction, the Pharisees were not thought of as accommodating to Greek culture, and their emphasis on Tradition made it very difficult for them to be accommodative.

But both Sadducees and Pharisees could be respected simultaneously by the people. The Sadducees could be given the respect normally given to wealth and station and also to those with special responsibility for the maintenance of rightful religious ceremony and practice. Their efforts to keep religious official practice unpolluted by Greek irreligion could even be admired, especially because there had been notable failings in that line from the beginning of the Hellenistic Period (approx. 323 B.C.) The Pharisees could be admired as exemplifying popular religious ideals: a literate, Torah-centered, entirely religiously- defined lifestyle, equally insistent on the Torah and intimately concerned with implementation of the Torah within the common life of Jews

Zealots

In addition to these two major factions, we clearly must recognize the existence of a radicalism that could not bear without revolt the submergence of Israeli political independence. In Israel, these people were known as the Zealots, normally considered something of a left wing or fringe of the Pharisaic party. Technically, the Zealots were extreme Traditionists, at least as staunchly advocates for the Torah as the Sadducees and other Pharisees. What made them distinct was their hatred for any higher secular authority like Rome. The masses didn’t like Roman taxes; the Zealots were willing to make taxes the pretext for revolution.

Pharisees tended to go light on the Zealots as part of their own corps. And Sadducees, feeling a responsibility to keep Rome out of the religious affairs of Israel, tended strongly to feel that the Zealots were an existential threat to the faith.

In a not-very-long run, the Sadducees turned out to be right, and Rome, despite repeated attempts to find some compromised middle ground, finally ended up destroying both Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 A.D., in the process creating perhaps a million Jewish casualties and carrying off an unprecedented number of Palestinian Jews into slavery.

Essenes

We know nothing of the Essenes from the Gospels and not that much more from archeology. But we do know that the Essenes had decided to withdraw from normal society altogether and to live rather monastically out in the wilderness. As the withdrawn, they presumably had little effect on Judaism generally and were little noticed or regarded by Gentile authority in Israel. They are at best a minor party within Israel.

Herodians (Accommodationists)

The fifth political group among the Jews by the time of Jesus of Nazareth were the Herodians, those who supported the puppet kingdom of Herod the Great and the Rome-dictated political variations of his successors. Two hundred years previously, there had been a party that supported the interests of the Seleucid Empire. And for centuries before that, there were power people choosing sides between major powers that always seemed focused on Israel as the strategic center of the Fertile Crescent.

From the masses’ perspective, such people were fast-track, turn-coat, religionists-in-name-only. Presumably Pharisees and Sadussees felt pretty much the same. At least some Herodians may have felt that they were a sincere, progressive leadership trying to help Israel catch up to the modern world and the realities of power.

If they were to be of use to foreign powers, Accomodationists had to have their hands on the levers of political power in Israel, so one can easily imagine that the Herodians worked hard to be on good terms with all the people who looked down on them. In the time of Jesus of Nazareth, one sub-class of Herodians, the tax collectors, stood out. From the tax collectors’ own perspective, the work no doubt had to be done and would have been much more poorly done by foreigners.

A tax collector could always neglect trying to ingratiate himself with the people, could choose to be arrogant, backed by the full power of Roman legionnaires. A tax collector could also find himself dead in some back alley.

An Additional Dimension

That leaves what might be considered a sixth group, or perhaps rather a tendency—primarily religious, not political—that might exist within any of the political factions of Judaism. After the return from Exile, Jews under Ezra and Nehemiah quite understandably endeavored to learn the lesson of God’s rejection, to return to His ways and to lead godly lives lest a greater curse fall upon them. Obedience to the letter of the Law, embodied in the Torah, thus became close to the totality of religious focus. And since the Law was in the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, the practical bias of Jewish religion came to focus totally on the Torah.

But even in the same years of Ezra-Nehemiah leadership, the ruling council, the Great Synagogue meeting in Jerusalem, canonized a number of new books into the corpus of Jewish Scripture, essentially making that corpus the equivalent of what is today the Old Testament. There are 39 books in the current Old Testament. Five are books of the Law. But that leaves 34 others that are part of the authoritative Word of God.

Probably in each of the political factions of Judaism, there was a range of attempts to bring these other books into the practice of Judaism.

Psalms, Proverbs, History, Poetry, and Prophets

For example, there was the song book of Israel, the Psalms, beginning with many written by David, but also many others written even hundreds of years later and attributed in the text itself to other writers. If these were the songs Israel sang, shouldn’t they affect how Jews thought, felt, and acted as religious beings?

There were also the Proverbs, the vast majority written by King Solomon. Weren’t they to be respected, understood, and observed in the practice of Jewish life?

There were many books of history, a more perfect historical record through more centuries than belonged to any other nation. If “those who ignore history are bound to repeat its errors,” weren’t the historical books keys to understanding Israel in any age and how God could be expected to act with respect to Hebrew conduct?

And there were books of prophecy. The Great Synagogue had introduced into the canon twelve new “minor prophets” as well as Ezekiel and Daniel as major prophets. Among many other subjects, the prophets proclaimed a coming Messiah, whom Moses himself had already prophesied. Weren’t the Prophets God’s updated instructions for Jewish life?

Depending on one’s own answers to any of these questions, living up to the Torah and the Law might need some addition or modification. But in any case, Jews in the Diaspora had the larger corpus available to them, and through that larger corpus, the Mediterranean world could get glimpses of something more than the Law as the “oracles of God” entrusted to the Jews.

Thus, there is a fundamental choice between considering a sixth faction within Judaism which insisted on “the Law and the Prophets,” or instead an additional dimension that cut across all political factions, holding that the Torah was certainly the Word of God, but so were the books of Isaiah, the Psalms, Solomon’s Proverb’s, the books of Ruth and Esther, and all the other canonical books of History, Poetry, Wisdom, and Prophesy with them. If they were the Word of God, if God had bothered to send their messages, trying to live as one of the Chosen People would need to give the full canon weight in deciding on all the questions life might present to the individual believer.

Variation within an Understandable “Logos” or Structure

As indicated above, with all terms considered as vague generalizations, in Israel, it is reasonable to consider the factions of the entire post-exilic period as variants on the five basic religio-political attitudes outlined above and recognizing the admixture of a stance either for or against careful consideration of the remaining canonical books outside the Torah.

Impressions on the Gentile World

Recognizing that throughout the Silent Years Israel was inhabited largely by Jews, there were also in Israel agents of whatever empire was currently in power, growing in number no doubt, through the years. These sometimes-resident Gentiles as well as near neighbors would certainly have some impression of the factions of Israel and of the beliefs and thought processes of Judaism therein represented. From an outsiders’ perspective of these various factions, observing from across the room, so to speak,what would the Gentiles conclude?

First, they would probably sense that all Jews regardless of faction were similarly different from the Greco-Roman culture around them. Superficial signs were easily recognizable, such as avoidance of swine and other prohibited foods. They would notice that many Jews if not all objected to participating in athletic competitions in the nude. But moreover, they would sense that beneath the surface, there were deep religious divides between the Jews and the polytheistic cultures around them.

Second, they would have to notice that virtually all the factions were people of the Book, particularly of the Torah and also to a greater or lesser extent the Prophets and Books of Wisdom. Jewish Scriptures were not simply nice stories to be shared, modified, or confuted but rather the Word of the One true God. This focus on the Scriptures was in stark contrast to the plethora of stories about a plethora of gods floating around goyim culture.

Third, Gentiles would know that all Jews worshipped the One God and not many gods, again a stark contrast to the polytheism of the surrounding cultures.

Fourth, they would know that virtually all the factions were in one way or another dedicated to Temple worship and sacrifices. They were dedicated to The Temple of The One God, eschewing all other temples of all other gods and jealously guarding the function of the Temple to appropriate Jews, particularly Jews of the tribe of Levi. When Antiochus Epiphanes by force took over the priestly oversight and desecrated the Temple, everyone would expect from all factions of Israel outrage, revulsion, and deep grief.

Fifth, they were not at all interested in sharing, trading, or mix-and-matching gods and temples.

Sixth, they would know that the Jews, devoted as they were to their one God, refused to create a carved representation or symbol of that God.

Seventh, they knew that Jews did not agree on everything and they might want to carefully consider which faction they were dealing with in sensitive political or even commercial situations.

And eighth, they knew that at least the Zealots were ready to revolt when the time was right.

That’s a lot to know from across the room.

Beyond Israel

But what about Jews not living in Israel but rather living as Jews in Diaspora? Much has been written about factions in Israel; very little has been written about Jewish realities in Diaspora, and for a great many scholars, the question is meaningless because they have accepted the “Lost Tribes” sobriquet, leaving everything outside Israel in silence.

For the present study, this assumption is very unfortunate because, if the Mediterranean world in these “Silent Years” was, in fact, being significantly impacted and influenced by Judaism, that impact in all likelihood was almost entirely through Diasporan Jews, not through Jews resident in Israel. There is, separately, influence neither from Israel nor from the Diaspora, but rather, influence directly from religious texts of far older provenance, especially such texts available in the Greek Septuagint.

But returning to the pressing fact of a large Diasporan Jewish population which shouldn’t be ignored or cast aside, the answers here are likely to be speculative and subjective, based on a very wide range of archeological, Talmudic, and historical bits and pieces. The following understanding should be considered tentative in that light.

Basic Survival-in-Diaspora Politics

Diasporan Jews, if they were anything like humanity generally, had to consider all things in light of their own present circumstances. The circumstances of Diasporan living, surrounded by Gentile communities, was very different from Israel under Pharisee and Sadducee leadership. These differences probably made Diasporan Jews more like each other than they were like Jews in Palestine.

First, Diasporan Jews saw themselves as strangers in a foreign land.

Second, increasingly in the Hellenistic period, they saw themselves as potential subjects of persecution.

Third, they had a bias against real assimilation into the foreign land that they had come to call “home.”

Fourth, allied against assimilation were physical relationship within the nation Israel—a biological matter—and relationship to God’s Word, which set them apart as the Chosen People and the People of Promise—a matter centered in Scripture. Within these general principles, it is almost inevitable that to remain unassimilated, the Diasporans would have to emphasize faithful adherence to God’s commands—faithfulness in everyday life and minimally in ritual associated with Jewish observances in Jerusalem.

Ball-Park Diasporan Stances:

Pilgrimage to the Second Temple

It is generally thought that in Diaspora, Jews overwhelmingly chose a Hasidic approach, something quite akin to Pharisaism in Israel. It is also generally assumed and attested by many bits and pieces of both archeology and history that not only were Jews of the Diaspora Hasidic in their personal lives but also they had their spiritual eyes set on the Second Temple in Jerusalem virtually as soon as it was constructed. When Herod the Great undertook to reconstruct the Second Temple, he evidently planned to accommodate a million pilgrims at each of the three annual prescribed religious festivals in Jerusalem. The phenomenal centrality of Jerusalem at the high feasts is attested in detail in the Acts of the Apostles in recounting the events of Pentecost. Diasporans had come from many countries to the feast, and according to Acts, they all heard the Apostles in their own languages:

“and how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians . . .” (2:8-11a).

Pilgrimages have been part of religious practice for thousands of years. Medieval Christianity had its pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain, Rome in Italy, Mt. St. Michel in France, to Canterbury in England and other more local centers. In practical terms, these were often considered central to defining faith in the Middle Ages (someone of the upper classes in England who had gone so far away as Compostela, Spain, was likely to memorialize the pilgrimage by having a scallop shell on his coat of arms). It is very likely that something very similar psychologically was true of the pilgrims to the Second Temple.

Arduous Living

For Jews, whether in Israel or in dispersion, attempting a Hasidic lifestyle was arduous even in imagination. In practice, Hasidism had to be done in community and was easiest to do in the large community of Israel. In dispersion, being Hasidic meant finding a small, air-tight community, and even then, the Hasidic obligations would be much harder to accomplish outside Israel. And in all those difficulties, there would be temptations for accommodation with the surrounding culture and many tough questions about some modifications of practice that were acceptable and other modifications that were a sell-out to the world. We can assume that these were central daily realities for Jews in dispersion.

Most Diasporan Jews living the Hasidic life would also have accepted that God had spoken beyond the Torah. Many of the additional Scriptures were about a life in the spirit and in personal relationship to God, the Psalms and the Proverbs being notable examples. Additionally, Messianic, prophesies would require at a minimum waiting and watching for God’s salvation in an Anointed One. There were additional ideas from the Psalms about living in relation to God, and there were Proverbs in the hundreds or thousands that should be respected in applying it all.

We can give these additional scriptural principles individual names as if they were distinct believer groups. But in practice, the vast majority of Jews, even in Israel, would have been somewhat aware and receptive to some aspects of all these.

Just as documented examples, when Jesus of Nazareth, who ministered in Israel, asked whether John the Baptist was a prophet, Jesus could confidently expect that the people of Israel generally had agreed that John was. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was given the scroll of Isaiah to read publicly at the local synagogue. Prophesy and its possible return in a major figure like Elijah or perhaps more like Isaiah or another of the written prophets, in other words, was a routine mental construct in Israel. To that extent, the common people were not Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots, or Essenes. They were simply people who respected a far larger canon than the Torah and tried at least somewhat to live within the fuller canon as well as within the Law.

Presumably, Jews in dispersion were similarly disposed.

Strain between “Law and the Prophets” and Strict, Concentrated Observance of the Law

The socio-political benefit of a Hasidic lifestyle would have included holding people together discouraging assimilation with surrounding ideas and practices. This benefit would most likely to be achieved if the Hasidism we are talking about was predominantly lock-step and identical within all members of the Hasidic group.

But what if there were in one’s own Hasidic group people who were focused virtually exclusively on the Torah, and there were others focused with almost equal exclusion on the Messianic Hope of Israel? We don’t at all have to take sides to recognize that this diversity would have been a threat to a Diasporan community resisting assimilation. It seems inevitable that Diasporan Judaism had strains that were much more demanding of attention than similarly-derived strains in Israel itself.

Strains Versus Names

By and large, it doesn’t seem that history has provided names for various Diasporan factions or strains, in large part because Diasporans were not political in the sense that they did not control any state to be political in. Lack of names, however, doesn’t mean that the strains weren’t there or that they weren’t real. Just the reverse. For Diasporan living, the five political factions of Israeli Judaism were probably much less real than the practical challenges of living out the faith, however the individual might choose to define that faith.

This is a tentative overview. And there can be substantial disagreement about these realities in the process of trying to get in touch with the lives of millions of Jews living in dispersion. But for the present study, what is probably of most importance is that the outreach of Jewish ideas into all the world almost by definition had to be an outreach through Jews of the Diaspora rather than through Jews in Israel.

With all the strains of resisting accommodation and remaining faithful, Diasporans were nevertheless the people rubbing shoulders with Gentiles, engaged, purposefully or not, in culture-to-culture contact. As we try to wrap our minds around the concept that Jewish ideas were making huge inroads on the non-Jewish world during the supposed Silent Years, we need to keep focused on the Jews in dispersion, on their stances and attitudes, not stances within Israel. We need to focus on their (Diasporans’) attempts to work with an eternal religion within an increasingly accelerating secular world.

With all this, we have to imagine their likely mundane effects on their goyim, next-door neighbors.

Previous Chapter: Two Histories of Judaism

Next Chapter: Diasporan Character

ITCHS Home