A book I am reading now makes the claim that the Sadducees (they only existed near the time of Jesus, 140BCE to 70 CE) thought YHWH was a national God.
The quote
“Moreover, whereas in the eyes of the Sadducees God was essentially a national God, to the Pharisees He was essentially a universal God.”
Taken from “Jewish Life and Thought” by Louis H. Feldman and Meyer Reinhold 1996 p.241
I cannot verify this point of view, though. The bibliography for the paragraph containing this line is 40 books long, and I can wring nothing off of the net.
If true though…
We see the line of thought of the Sadducees, the high ranking priesthood that dominated the role of high priest after the Maccabees ended the official Zadokite priesthood. I think its more indication of the terms of relationship between the god YHWH and the Judeans (inheritors of the promises to the Israelites).
FocusMyView said
A book I am reading now makes the claim that the Sadducees …thought YHWH was a national God.
The quote
“Moreover, whereas in the eyes of the Sadducees God was essentially a national God, to the Pharisees He was essentially a universal God.”
Taken from “Jewish Life and Thought” by Louis H. Feldman and Meyer Reinhold 1996 p.241
If I could throw my 2 cents in, from the perspective of a practicing Jew. Usually when we hear about the Sadducees, we are told the major distinctions are: 1) They rejected the authority of the Oral Torah, and 2) that they felt G-d was the G-d of the Jews, and for the Jews (exclusivity of the religion).
That could be in part, the basis for the quote. It was the Pharisees who more readily accepted converts and saw G-d as not only the G-d of the Jews, but the only G-d.
They may have believed God cared more about the Jews, but He was still God of All, and the only God that existed.
Whatever God exists, pretty sure He/She/It has more to worry about than obscure internecine religious disputes.
“What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitest him?”
That would seem to refer to all humans. (Well, all the ones with penises, at least.) And the son of man reference is intriguing, but this is not the thread for that. 😉
Hence my question, do you know where this idea comes from exactly?
Short answer, no, not exactly. I will do some digging and post anything interesting that I may find.
Longer answer, the old adage applies, “history is written by the winners.” I have little doubt that the rabbis of the middle ages (and a little later) laid certain ideas they wished to distance themselves from at the feet of the Sadducees since they were not around to defend themselves.
I have have heard that the idea that the modern rabbis came from the Pharisees dates to the middle ages. I have even heard that the son of Gamaliel (of the book of Acts) was a founder of rabbinic Judaism (Pirkei Avot 1:16-18). But, I have never seen anything in the Mishnah to indicate that Rabbinic Judaism comes directly from the Pharisaic tradition.
Robert said
Thank you. I appreciate whatever you can find.
Here is what I found regarding evidence that Orthodox Judaism is a descendant (in some form) of Pharisaical Judaism. The argument being made comes from Orthodoxy. The evidence is not found in the in the Mishnah or Talmud, but rather is itself, the Mishnah and Talmud.
Here’s the Reader Digest version of the argument I was given. According to Josephus the Pharisees rejected the Oral Torah. Rabbi Judah ha-Nassi (Judah the Prince) was instrumental in guiding the creation of the Mishnah. The purpose of the Mishnah was to serve as a tool for the preservation of the Oral Torah. Rather than wright down the Oral Torah (which was strictly forbidden) the Mishnah records decisions based on the specific points of the Oral Torah.
Anyone of the Pharisaic mindset would have had no more inclination to preserve the Oral Torah than an Evangelical Christian would want to preserve the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. (No offense is intended by that analogy.)
Because Orthodox Judaism has taken great pains to preserve and live by the Oral Torah, it considers itself the offspring of the Pharisees.
Thanks for the replies.
To be fair, I have had just as much entertainment reading the book I got the quote from as I have reading the comments above. In one passage they give position x to the Sadducees and position y to the Pharisees, then they seem to reverse it.
So I would not be surprised to find one (original) source tell me the Sadducees believed in a nationalistic God, and another (original) source contradict it. But I find 0.
You know, it’s quite likely that both groups were less than uniform in their beliefs. Some Pharisees may have had zealot leanings, based on scholarship I’ve read.
It seems a fairly subjective thing to figure out, even if we could go back and ask them. And they could believe Yahweh was everyone’s God, but theirs first.
Hell, that’s what a lot of devout people think now–and I don’t just mean Jews. They shouldn’t, but they do anyway, because that’s part of what creates cohesion within a group–feeling set apart from the rest.
On the question of ethnocentrism, the Judeans seem to be a little unique here. Their all time hero, Moses, has an Egyptian name and was blessed by the Midianite priest Jethro. The covenant with all mankind and God is made on Ararat, not Zion. The peoples spread out from Babel, not Jerusalem. The founder is from Ur, instead of Israel spawning founders.
Honestly, it looks like some of these stories might have been made about them rather than by them. If you look at the earliest nonbiblical mentions of Moses you get a different perspective. Judeans may have cleaned up what others were saying about them, in Babylon and in Egypt, and made these stories their own.
I am sure some were specifically local in origin. It seems though that a lot of ANE mythology was pan-Aramaic. IT did not belong to any particular people, Canaanites, Assyrians, or Babylonians. The Judeans were unique in that they also had a very real Egyptian heritage as well.
What agitates me is even the idea that they “borrowed” these mythologies. It seems these mythologies were as much a part of their heritage as anyone else’s heritage.
It’s an old rip–“You stole that!” Everybody borrows; every culture that ever existed, except maybe the very first ones, and who remembers them? All long gone, left no writings behind. For all we know, even the Lascaux cave paintings are derivative of earlier cultures whose art we don’t have. It’s a way of diminishing the vital importance of the Jewish contribution to world religion, world culture–of saying they have nothing original to contribute. It is, in effect, anti-semitic.
The Greeks have been accused of stealing everything from Egypt. There have been many books asserting this factoid, and of course the Greeks learned from Egyptian writers, and the Egyptians learned from other cultures. But when somebody feels this or that group is getting too much credit, they pull this rusty old hacksaw out, and honestly, they’d find parallels even if they weren’t there. Lots of ideas have appeared independently of each other, in parts of the globe that had no contact with each other until long afterwards. Maybe there was some original culture all humans belonged to, before we disseminated around the world, but if that’s the case, we all have equal rights to make use of whatever it created.
It’s not real history. It’s agit-prop. Not to be taken seriously, except to the extent that it (sometimes) has a racist bent to it. “These are the creative people, and everybody else stole from them.” That is a statement that is literally never true, no matter which groups are being looked at.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)