Institute for Travesty

The seven-day week, monotheism, and the humane treatment of servants are all principles rooted in the Pentateuch, dating more than a millennium before the Silent Years, to a time when Israel was a wandering tribe. Yet the influence of these Jewish ideas and values on neighboring cultures is felt in the classical period, by which time an estimated six to eight million Jews were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. with perhaps 25,000—some claiming as high as 80,000—of them residing in Jerusalem. (Christian Pure, https://christianpure.com/learn/jerusalem-in-jesus-time. Last accessed July 27, 2024.) Some have estimated the number of Jews in Palestine to 1,000,000. That would leave at least 5 million or more Diasporans in the rest of the Roman Empire.

Hebrew Scriptures show us history of Israel as a Jewish nation. But we will need to think beyond the Hebrew Scriptures to come to some understanding of Diasporan history.

Two Jewish histories

For the purposes of this study, there are two Jewish histories, not one. These two histories share the historical realities to be found in the Old Testament of the modern Bible. One is an Establishmentarian account, in ancient times centered in Israel itself. The second is a story of outcasts, people displaced from Israel, peopled dispersed from Israel, people easily dismissed as simply the Diaspora.

The Israeli Hebrew-Jewish story is founded in the Five Books of Moses, the Torah.

The story of those displaced from Israel was also heavily weighted to the Torah, but it was also deeply interested as well in the Prophetic books and, within that, deeply interested in a Messianic Tradition.

Synopsis of Israeli-based Hebrew-Jewish History before Christ

From the time of King David to the Silent Years, the history of Israel is dominated by two Temples. The first was proposed under King David and built by David’s son and successor King Solomon, the planning and construction centering on 1000 B.C. The second was commanded by Cyrus of Medea-Persia in 538 B.C., who, along with others prominent in his government, made significant financial contributions for the construction of the Temple and the performances of Temple sacrifices. Construction was begun around 536 B.C. but completed, only after a hiatus, in 515 B.C.

The Tragedy of Jacob, Divorce of the Northern Tribes from Judah

The First Temple was captured by the Egyptians in the 900’s B.C. but only after the ten Northern tribes, which had provided the bulk of the labor for the First Temple, had revolted from Solomon’s son and set up a new Northern Kingdom of Israel. They made themselves obnoxious to the Temple Establishment by molding for themselves at least two Golden Calves, thus violating the prohibition against making for oneself a graven image. They also built a competing temple on Mt. Gerazim.

With such an heretical start, the Northern Kingdom became fairly easy prey, at the governmental level, to multi-theism. However, monotheistic faith in the God of Israel was never wiped out and, in fact, is represented in the Jewish Scriptures by major prophetic figures, notably Elijah and Elisha.

The Northern Kingdom was led into Assyrian Captivity in 722 B.C. Today, the tribes of the northern confederacy are simply dismissed as the “Lost Tribes” who “disappeared . . . into the sands of northern Mesopotamia” (Richard Hooker, “Ancient Jewish History: The Assyrians,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-assyrians. Last accessed 7/30/24.)

The Fall of Judah and Babylonian Exile

Within the next century and a half, the Southern Kingdom of Judah was itself riddled with (semi-secret) idolatrous and polytheistic deviations. Read the Old Testament prophets as original autographs from the period asserted to be responsible for their creation, and one has to conclude that the Southern Kingdom and the Northern Kingdom were repeatedly warned by prophets to recant and turn back to the true faith. By 586 B.C., corrupted Judah had been overrun three times by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar, and the First Temple had been finally destroyed. What followed was the “70 Years of Exile” in Babylon.

Modern Jewish theology is wont to think that in this period, the fundamental religious documents of Judaism were recast to suit a new religious understanding fostered in Babylon. Thus, within the Establishment story, there is now an Establishment A and an Establishment B account. The Establishment A account can be thought of as a millennia-old attempt to understand sacred history in the terms of the canonical documents themselves. Establishment B can be thought of as a comparatively recent attempt to understand sacred history as crucially altered by emendation of texts during and perhaps after the Babylonian Exile.

Return of the Remnant

Eventually, under a new Medea-Persian King, the Babylonian Exiles were given the choice to return to Israel and to practice their community religion there. There are Post Exilic writings in the Old Testament, and three canonical Prophets, Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi, which taken together present a rather sorry picture of the Remnant reluctantly getting about God’s business-–which was originally ordered by Cyrus the Mede—to build a new, Second Temple. And after that, in approximately 400 B.C., the canon ends.

Some additional insights into Jewish realities after Alexander the Great are available in books of the Apocrypha, notably Maccabees. But, for Israel from David to the last Post-Exilic Prophets, the most authoritative sources are within the modern Bible itself and thus easily available to the general reading public. Contrastively, there are no sources, authoritative or contested, in the modern Bible for the years that we call Silent.

Israeli history, of course, continued in and through the Silent Years even if the biblical record had ended.

The Medes and Persians were in charge when the Second Temple was built and for almost two centuries after. Then Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, and Israel became a backwater of the Alexandrian Empire. When Alexander died, his empire was divided into four by his chief generals, and Palestine became contested ground between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria.

Eventually, the Romans encroached on the Greek nations to the east of Italy, and by the time of Pompey in mid-first century B.C., they took control of Palestine. By then the Silent Years were better than 300 years along. However, sacrificial worship at the Second Temple, which was enhanced by Herod the Great well into the Silent Years, continued until the Temple’s destruction in 70 A.D.

End of the Silent Years

Christianity, not Judaism, asserts an end to that period of Prophetic Silence. Depending on how we define the silence, the end of silence may come with the events surrounding the birth of John the Baptist, or with the beginning of John’s ministry calling for repentance, or with Jesus, or with the first book of the New Testament canon, probably the Book of James. Not to quarrel, Prophetic Silence, the Silent Years, ends sometime between 20 and 70 A.D.

A Second, Dispersed-Jewish History

The biblical accounts virtually all take a perspective appropriate in Israel itself. The large dispersed majority of Jews (the Diaspora) at the time of Jesus birth, however, lived outside Israel. The Books of Daniel and Esther are the only two books of the Old Testament that give reasonably sustained accounts of Diasporan conditions.

It is time recognize that there is a second, overlapping history of the Jews, a history of biologically Hebrew people repeatedly subjected to dispersion among goyim nations.

The current study is not an attempt to reconsider Hebrew-Jewish history in Palestine. Nor is this study directly concerned with articulating the second Jewish history, the history of Diasporan experience.

Instead, in this study, we are attempting to make the case that while for half a millennium after the last Post-Exilic Prophet Malachi, Classical civilization was laying the base for all later Western realities, we misunderstand everything in the Classical period if we do not recognize that there were three competitors, not two, for the future of the West.

It was a dubious battle always, a battle between a whale, an elephant, and, if you will a giant pterodactyl. It was not a two-way competition between Greek and Roman thoughts and ways. It was a three-way competition between Greek and Jewish thought interweaving with Roman military, governmental, and jurisdictional supremacy. In practical affairs like war and government, the Romans had all the advantage and have left a major heritage through all later ages. The Greeks had the international language, the international culture, and even a rudimentary higher educational monopoly. They also left enduring marks.

The Jews had seemingly no advantages. And yet, the Classical world was constantly forced to accept Jewish ideas, if only in disguised forms. And if that is what this study is arguing, it is imperative to remember that it was through the Diasporans, not through priestly leadership in Jerusalem, that Jewish ideas competed on a daily basis with the ideas of polytheism around the Mediterranean Basin.

Seeing History in Reverse

In differentiating Diasporan history from Judean Judaism, it probably wouldn’t be bad, though much too complicated for the present study, to distinguish Jerusalem-centered Judaism in the time of Christ from regional and rural Judaism in the rest of Palestine. There are so many common elements between these different histories that one is constantly tempted to simplify to the exclusion of any second, Diasporan alternative.

In order to combat this very strong psychological tendency, it is perhaps well to think of Judean Judaism as starting a very long time ago in a place very far away and moving toward a Temple in Jerusalem where the sacrificial system of the Law could find fulfillment. On the other hand, Diasporan history can be thought of as starting at the present, in Chicago, New York, Miami Beach, Tokyo, Bombay, London, and Paris or wherever, and working progressively backward. For the purposes of this study, we will begin our consideration of the Diasporans in the first century A.D., in the early years of the Roman Empire, and work backward from there.

Luke the historian and physician, the writer of the Gospel by his name and also of the Acts of the Apostles, says,

“Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the Jews; And Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them. . . .” (Acts 17:1-2a)

The passage is well-rehearsed. It is not from some deeply buried archive or from some undiscovered tomb. But do we get it?

Do we get that this was Paul’s standard custom? One hopes so.

But do we also then get that it was Paul’s custom precisely within the reality that there was always a synagogue in any city he happened to be in?

It seems too obvious to be mentioned.

Thessalonica was a major commercial center on the major road crossing the northern Mediterranean coast on the way to Asia Minor and the East. The Jews were a commercial people, and they had a commercial community at Thessalonica. We normally leave it at that, but we should notice that Paul next goes to Berea which doesn’t have nearly the commercial interest but does have a synagogue, then moves on to Athens and Corinth both of which are major commercial centers and have commercial Jewish communities.

That’s four communities in an air distance of 200 miles.

In the time of Christ and of Paul, if there was a place to do regional business in the Mediterranean, there was almost certain to be a synagogue as well.

This dispersion of the Jews into “all the world” is one of the primary facts not just of Judaism but of the Classical world after 500 B.C. Yet No one seems to care to look at the extent or consequences of that dispersion as the sequel to the Old Testament family history nor as the groundwork for the Christian world transformation that happened with amazing rapidity after the close of the Gospel accounts.

There are some basic questions that should be asked and, if possible, answered if we are to understand Judaism outside Israel at the end of the Silent Years: 1) how and when did the Jews become scattered or dispersed? 2) How many people were involved in the scattering, and how many had that population become at the time of Paul? And 3) what difference is it reasonable to assume the resultant dispersion made for the influence of Judaism as a third force within the world normally described as subject to Roman arms and Greek culture?

The “Narrow” Definition of Diaspora

Modern Jewish scholarship has tended to accept the traditional definition of “Diaspora” as beginning with the 70-year Babylonian Exile of Judah. That Exile began with three successive sieges by Babylonian forces in the last years of the 7^th century B.C. and the first 14 years of the 6^th century. Jewish history today tends to concentrate on the occupations of Jerusalem, but, of course, there were earlier stages of all three Babylonian invasions, and these earlier stages no doubt resulted in a certain number of captives carried off to Babylon, quite possibly as slaves. Yet the dispersion of Babylonian Exiles who did not return to Jerusalem can hardly account for the broad proliferation of Jews in the Greek and Roman Empires, much less northern Africa.

A Wider Definition of Diaspora

Many nationalities, not just the Jews, had experienced dispersion in the ancient world. The Trojans celebrated in the Iliad, for example, suffered a typical fate of citizens of a city which had not come to negotiated settlement before being overrun. Trojan men were typically slaughtered. Trojan women were typically handed over as prizes to become slaves and concubines. The Trojan Women by Euripides considers such dispersion in personal detail.

A few Trojan men evidently escaped. Roman history putatively begins with one of those fugitives, Aeneas, escaping Troy, finding sanctuary at Carthage, but ultimately choosing to remain a peregrinus, a wanderer or foreigner, traveling north to Italy as recounted by Virgil in the Aeneid.

Considering that broader perspective, the wider sense of Hebrew Dispersion, then, always begins in conquest, but not necessarily Babylonian conquest. Such conquest extends at least prior to the year 900 B.C. when Judah and Jerusalem were overrun by Egyptian forces. There were no doubt other raids, for example of the Northern Kingdom by Syrian forces around the time of Elijah and Elisha. Raids would be more likely to take captive tillers of the soil in rural districts. But the overthrow of Samaria in 722 B.C. would result in a much more systematic enslavement of a primarily urban population, typically composed of artisans, merchants, and a politically dominant aristocracy.

In this context, the Babylonian Exile was only one of the more recent of the series of dispersions and simultaneously the one most composed of Judean upper classes. And even in the case of the Babylonian Exile, we have very careful records of exiles taken from Jerusalem itself but, biblically, no particular attention to previously captured citizens of Lachish or other subordinate citadels.

Recognizing Diasporan Perspective

Thus we have some written evidence of conquests that would lead to dispersion. But we do not have specific evidence of the numbers of the dispersed or the travel routes. Yet travel they did. And so did Jewish ideas. Trying to get at Diasporan perspective should be central to a new understanding of Classical Civilization as a three-way competition for the heart and mind of the West. The books which detail those numbers and travel routes don’t exist now, and given history’s proclivity for reputable written and signed documentary evidence, there is a good chance that such books will never be undertaken. Yet Given Diasporan demographics moving northward of 10% of Roman Empire population in the time of Augustus (31 B.C. to 14 A.D.), failure to understand Diasporan perspective simply falsifies our understanding of what everyone in the Mediterranean was dealing with.

The present study cannot possibly start to fill this critical void. But It can suggest just how pervasive, complex, and relevant the study of Diasporan perspective can be.

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