Youtube has started feeding me videos from the channel Kedem, and in particular several interviews with Yonatan Adler, author of _The Origins of Judaism_ and _Between Yahwism and Judaism_.
Adler’s overarching thesis is that Judaism–defined as following the Law–only appears on a wide scale in the archeological record in the Hasmonean period. He is considering things like when we find mikvot. Note that he is not dating the Torah as a literary work that late–he seems to think it was older but mainly read in limited circles of elites. It is an intriguing finding, but it raises questions for me.
First of all: Israel Finkelstein has found that early Jewish sites lack pig bones, unlike their neighbors. Adler addresses this at one point, saying that just because they were not eating pork doesn’t mean there was a taboo; consider that in modern Israel goat meat is pretty rare but that doesn’t mean there is a religious proscription on eating goat; presumably there are economic or ecological reasons modern Israelis (like modern Americans) don’t eat much goat.
I grant the methodological point, but if the lack of pig bones were driven by ecological or economic forces, we would expect those force to also be in play in the nearby communities as well, no? This makes me question how ready I am to accept his generalization that there is no evidence of widespread practice of the law until the Hasmonean period.
The case of the missing pig bones raises a second objection: It seems to me that a good portion of the Law is best understood as an etiological myth, explaining, justifying, defending practices that were already in place, rather than inventing them from whole cloth. Who just comes up with a story explaining the origin and necessity of circumcising if you aren’t already circumcising?
The situation becomes even stranger if we consider that he is not trying to redate the Torah as a literary work. It seems very odd to have a work like the Torah, not only get written, but then read and passed on for centuries (even in limited circles) if the practices it prescribes are not being followed. It might makes sense if we think there is a small, elite class or sect that is both keeping the Torah as a literary work, and keeping it as a living code.
My totally uninformed speculation is that his finding really speak to how diverse early Judaism was. There may have been practices (like circumcision–that leave no archeological record) or avoiding pork (which is in the archeological record though the explains it away) that were fairly widespread, but there may be many others that were practiced only in particular regions or by particular sub-sects on a relatively small scale, and there was a lot of vying for and exerting influence among these groups. In that case, it is not that Judaism emerges in the Hasmonean period, but that the specific form of Judaism we recognize gained hegemony over other forms in that period.
Now that I write it that way, I’m not sure how substantive my objections are, except perhaps in resisting calling the group that ends up dominating an “elite.”
Thoughts?
>>Your last point about about resisting calling the group that ends up dominating an “elite,” however, still eludes me somewhat. Can you elaborate on that, please?
Adler seems to have a two-tiered social system in mind. He seems to think that the Torah (and the actual mitzvot recorded in it) were practically unknown to the Jew in the street (until the 2nd century BC), but were the domain of a small circle of elites. While there certainly were elites who had better access to the literature, I’m wondering whether it isn’t more plausible to think of the lack of archeological evidence of widespread keeping of the law as indicating not so much an hierarchical stratification of the society, but a splintering of the society into different versions of Judaism possibility with slightly different versions of Scripture or (more plausibly) with different interpretations of it.
For example, one of the most obvious archeological data he points to is the lack of stepped pools. But you can have and keep the Torah without stepped pools. There are ways to wash without immersion, there are way to immerse that don’t require a specially constructed pool, and the most common need in later Judaism for a mikveh is after a woman’s menstruation before she can resume relations with her husband, but as far as I can tell that isn’t explicitly required in the Torah, it is a later interpretations of how to keep the law: what is explicit is that they can’t have relations during the seven days following the beginning of menstruation (or while it lasts, if it lasts longer); there is not a requirement that she immerse herself monthly if she wants to be able to sleep with her husband. In other words, you can have the Torah, know the Torah, be pretty serious about keeping the Torah, but still not need a dedicated immersion pool; and whether Jews were avoiding sex with their wives while they were bleeding–as actually required by the Torah–is not something we can observe in the archeological record.
In fact, just looking at that example, it seems the simplest explanation is that this is one more case of the lawyers building taller and taller fences around the Torah, just like “don’t a eat kid boiled in its mother’s milk” turns into, “don’t eat chicken at the same meal you have cheese.” In which case it tells us nothing about the Torah, only about prevailing interpretation of the Torah.
As I keep thinking about this, the less convinced I am by his data.
E.g., another example he gives is the lack of pictorial representations in the later period, though they are present in the earlier periods, which he links the the proscription of graven images.
But again, one could know the Torah and try to keep the Torah, but quite naturally interpret those several commands as prohibiting worship of images (just as quite a few Christians actually do).
You are correct that I would not disagree with those three points.
>1) Each sect or school of interpretation will nonetheless have its elites who define the terms of debate and seek to enforce their interpretations. Were there any truly egalitarian groups that could be identified?
Certainly. I question, though, whether those elites wouldn’t significantly influence the non-elites within their particular sect.
>2) Surely the Maccabees, the leaders of the Hasmonean dynasty represented a ruling elite, perhaps the most powerful of the various elites within each sect or school of interpretation.
Of course, but–precisely by ushering in the Hasmonean period–they are outside the periods in question. I think it is entirely plausiable that they brought a particular version of Judaism into dominance. What I question is whether we can say prior to them, there was no Judaism (defined as widespread knowledge of the Torah).
>3) Looking at surviving structures from thousands of years ago will inevitably skew toward giving evidence of a more elite subset of the population that has the wealth and sociological means to dictate what structures were constructed.
Yes, exactly. It makes sense we will start seeing mikvot (wither in wealthy houses or as public projects) once the elite adopt a version of Judaism that makes routine immersion necessary, just as we will see coins without pictorial representations on them once the ruling class adopts a version of Judaism that forbids graven images.
For this reason, these obvious archeological artifacts actually tell us *more* about the elite than they do about the Jew on the street.
I simply think it is problematic to say, “we see pictorial art in the Persian period (or, “we don’t see stepped immersion pools”), therefore most inhabitants of Judea didn’t know the Torah.”
Porphyry said
… My totally uninformed speculation is that his finding really speak to how diverse early Judaism was. There may have been practices (like circumcision–that leave no archeological record) or avoiding pork (which is in the archeological record though the explains it away) that were fairly widespread, but there may be many others that were practiced only in particular regions or by particular sub-sects on a relatively small scale, and there was a lot of vying for and exerting influence among these groups. In that case, it is not that Judaism emerges in the Hasmonean period, but that the specific form of Judaism we recognize gained hegemony over other forms in that period. …
Yes, that sounds like it’s worthy of exploration.
For one thing, there is the “two Torah’s” approach of Rabbinical Judaism, one the written Torah, the other the “oral Torah”, the oral tradition interpreting and in the views of some expanding on and adding to the written Torah. We know from anthropological study how oral traditions are steadily evolving and not “locked into place”, so it would be quite plausible that some oral traditions from the Hasmonean period had evolved dramatically since the period of the composition of the older parts of the written Torah.
Indeed, one can easily see a “countryside” observation of rules requiring immersion being no big deal, because they have developed in an area where you of course have rivers or streams that you take the flocks to, and they only require specially designed pools to be observed in the archeological record when there are urban residents who have taken up the “countryside” rules but are following them without the same ready access to naturally occurring pools.
Joel Baden has made some similar points. His view is that the Hasmonean period is where we first have evidence of widespread Torah observance, not its origin so much as the point where it had filtered down to effect the practice of regular folk. He points out that the Hasmoneans saw themselves as a “fundamentalist” force restoring Israel back to true, unsullied observance. This widespread Torah “observance” would likely have been compelled, top-down.
The foundation of any elite was literacy. What survives are the written records and so they automatically get primacy. Doubtless this gives us a distorted view. These cultures were overwhelmingly oral and who knows what vanished simply because it was never written down?
In my reading associated with the Book of Enoch I’ve discovered that there existed some anti-literary tendencies in Judaism. That writing was inherently inferior to oral communication. (And that teaching humans writing was one of the sins of the Watchers!) More than a little ironic that evidence of this viewpoint only survives within written records.
It’s also clear that Second Temple Judaism was a big ole mess. In fact it’s probably a mistake to even refer to it as Judaism since that implies at least some continuity of belief. More accurately it should be regarded as the “religion of the Jews”.
Bruce, you bring up a good point. For a long time all our views about the development of Judaism were filtered through the views of the Rabbinical movement, itself historically determined. This is why the discovery of Qumran was such a shock.
>> Joel Baden has made some similar points. His view is that the Hasmonean period is where we first have evidence of widespread Torah observance, not its origin so much as the point where it had filtered down to effect the practice of regular folk.
This is the idea I want to probe. Does the lack of evidence (of the specific sort they are looking for) really indicate that the law wasn’t being widely observed previously?
I gave a couple of examples of how the evidence that Adler was looking for as a sign of Torah observance may not be a reliable sign of whether people were observing Torah (but of whether they were observing it as it was observed in later, particularly rigorist fashion). More examples of the same sort can be produced: Adler cites the lack of tefillin and mezuzot as evidence that the Torah wasn’t being widely observed before the second century BC, but one can read
>>These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
and not think it requires you to tie boxes with verses in them to your head and hands. People could have known and habitually followed the law, just in a less legalistic way. This doesn’t even imply they were lax about it, just that they read these commands less literally, in a way that is entirely defensible as the natural interpretation.
I go back to my earlier point that the Torah seems to be (in many cases) explaining established practice. True, there may be cases where one sect is editing Scripture to justify their practices against the practices of rival groups (e.g., where may one offer sacrifices–Jerusalem? Mt. Gerizim? Bethel? Any random sanctuary? Or again, Is it okay to set up a matzevah?) But even in those cases, you presumably already have a group practicing what is described.
There could be specific cases where that didn’t obtain and someone did freely add commands to the scripture in order to produce an entirely novel practice (an obvious candidate would be the laws requiring sacrifices to be offered on various occasions–priests would have a vested interest in cranking up the number of sacrifices offered), but those seem like very specific classes and not generally applicable, especially to many of the laws that would most obviously mark day-to-day life.
In other words, it may be that what happened under the Hasmoneans was not that Torah observance became widespread, but that the interpretation of the Torah became hyper-literalistic and rigorous.
Porphyry said
Youtube has started feeding me videos from the channel Kedem, and in particular several interviews with Yonatan Adler, author of _The Origins of Judaism_ and _Between Yahwism and Judaism_.
Adler’s overarching thesis is that Judaism–defined as following the Law–only appears on a wide scale in the archeological record in the Hasmonean period. He is considering things like when we find mikvot. Note that he is not dating the Torah as a literary work that late–he seems to think it was older but mainly read in limited circles of elites. It is an intriguing finding, but it raises questions for me.
First of all: Israel Finkelstein has found that early Jewish sites lack pig bones, unlike their neighbors. Adler addresses this at one point, saying that just because they were not eating pork doesn’t mean there was a taboo; consider that in modern Israel goat meat is pretty rare but that doesn’t mean there is a religious proscription on eating goat; presumably there are economic or ecological reasons modern Israelis (like modern Americans) don’t eat much goat.
I grant the methodological point, but if the lack of pig bones were driven by ecological or economic forces, we would expect those force to also be in play in the nearby communities as well, no? This makes me question how ready I am to accept his generalization that there is no evidence of widespread practice of the law until the Hasmonean period.
The case of the missing pig bones raises a second objection: It seems to me that a good portion of the Law is best understood as an etiological myth, explaining, justifying, defending practices that were already in place, rather than inventing them from whole cloth. Who just comes up with a story explaining the origin and necessity of circumcising if you aren’t already circumcising?
The situation becomes even stranger if we consider that he is not trying to redate the Torah as a literary work. It seems very odd to have a work like the Torah, not only get written, but then read and passed on for centuries (even in limited circles) if the practices it prescribes are not being followed. It might makes sense if we think there is a small, elite class or sect that is both keeping the Torah as a literary work, and keeping it as a living code.
My totally uninformed speculation is that his finding really speak to how diverse early Judaism was. There may have been practices (like circumcision–that leave no archeological record) or avoiding pork (which is in the archeological record though the explains it away) that were fairly widespread, but there may be many others that were practiced only in particular regions or by particular sub-sects on a relatively small scale, and there was a lot of vying for and exerting influence among these groups. In that case, it is not that Judaism emerges in the Hasmonean period, but that the specific form of Judaism we recognize gained hegemony over other forms in that period.
Now that I write it that way, I’m not sure how substantive my objections are, except perhaps in resisting calling the group that ends up dominating an “elite.”
Thoughts?
It is essential to all inquiry that terms are defined and defined as specifically as possible. My “thought” is thus: it behooves you to define as specifically as possible what you mean by Judaism–by specifically, I mean give concrete instances, as concrete as possible; indeed, as tedious as you can. Does “Judaism” mean restrictions on how far a Jew can walk on “saturdays”? And in what region did whatever view obtain?
In other words Judaism was not a philosophy, and so generalizations will not cover it (as when historians talk of “platonism” involving general attitudes towards nature and thought). Judaism must be assessed through its various performances, and they are variegated.
To say that “Judaism began in t the Hasmonean period” assumes a religious pattern that cannot be found in the biblical canon. This assumption needs to be reassessed. Do we have no regulations in the Jewish canon that correspond to modern notions of “Judaism”? Of course not. “Judaism” is an extension of Torah. Jeremiah gave an interpretation of Sabbath law when he stated is opinion that traders should not bring merchandize through the walls of Jerusalem during the Sabbath.
>> It is essential to all inquiry that terms are defined and defined as specifically as possible. . . . it behooves you to define as specifically as possible what you mean by Judaism
I’m not sure why you think I needed this admonition. I accepted Adler’s working definition of “Judaism” as keeping the Torah. And I looked at the specific cases of mitzvot he argues were not being widely kept, and I considered the evidence he marshaled to show they were not being widely kept. I don’t think I was speaking in meaningless generalizations.
>> Judaism must be assessed through its various performances, and they are variegated.
I believe I made that point in my original post, the one you quoted:
“My totally uninformed speculation is that his finding really speak to how diverse early Judaism was. There may have been practices (like circumcision–that leave no archeological record) or avoiding pork (which is in the archeological record though the explains it away) that were fairly widespread, but there may be many others that were practiced only in particular regions or by particular sub-sects on a relatively small scale, and there was a lot of vying for and exerting influence among these groups. In that case, it is not that Judaism emerges in the Hasmonean period, but that the specific form of Judaism we recognize gained hegemony over other forms in that period.”
…there may be many others that were practiced only in particular regions or by particular sub-sects on a relatively small scale, and there was a lot of vying for and exerting influence among these groups. In that case, it is not that Judaism emerges in the Hasmonean period, but that the specific form of Judaism we recognize gained hegemony over other forms in that period.
Indeed. As late as the first century BCE there were Jews who did not privilege the revelation at Sinai, marginalizing both Moses and the Torah. This is at least partly why the Enochic material, for example, was eventually abandoned in Judaism. It went underground to some degree and was eventually absorbed into the Merkabah.
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