Chapter 7
In This Chapter
● Looking at different rulers
● Practicing Jewish religion
● Meeting important sects
● Experiencing family life and social networks
One of the things we know about Jesus was that he was a Jew. But what did it mean to be a Jew in his time? Whatever you know about Jews today, you can’t assume that’s what they were like back in the day. Two thousand years have gone by, and groups change a lot over such a long period (not to mention that the early Jews were a pretty diverse lot to begin with!).
This chapter is a trip back in time. It gives you the chance to go to Judea between about 200 BCE and 30 CE and meet the people and see how they lived. You discover how they ran their government, you uncover their basic religious beliefs, you join their major religious groups, and you meet their families.
Hoping for Their Own Kind of King
Before Jesus was crucified with the charge “King of the Jews” over his head, several different kingdoms ruled the Jews of the Near East. The way they ruled shaped how the people thought about kings and kindled the Jewish hope that one day a king of their own, or some sort of heaven-sent person, would repel the foreign rulers and restore the Jewish nation, Temple, and society. This hope took many forms and shaped how the historical Jesus was viewed by some of his contemporaries. You can check out Chapter 6 for a quick introduction to the history of these empires and their conquests (including the Roman Empire). What I focus on here is the cultural impact they had on Jewish society.
Falling to foreign kings and cultures
The Jews hadn’t had their own native king since 587 BCE, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire blew through the Jewish kingdom of Judah (which later became Judea) and marched the monarch Zedekiah off into exile, executing his sons along the way (2 Kings 24:6-7; Jeremiah 52:9-11). The northern part of the country, Israel, lost its independence even earlier, when it was overrun by the Assyrian Empire in 721 BCE. Remnants of the Davidic dynasty (the family that had ruled the kingdom of Judah since about 1000 BCE) survived, but barely. When the Persians sent the Babylonians packing and allowed the Judeans to return to their province, they picked the old king’s grandson, Zerubbabel, as governor. But that’s all that Zerubbabel could be — governor. The Persians wouldn’t allow the “stump” of the Davidic line to sprout kings anymore. (This phrase, the “stump” or root of the Davidic line that starts from David’s father, Jesse, was an important text for later messianic thought; see Isaiah 11:1-10; Acts 13:22-23; Revelation 22:16).
In the 330s BCE, the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great, and when Alexander died in 323 BCE, his Hellenistic empire split into three parts; Judea was firmly in the Egyptian orbit, and a Syrian branch set up shop just to the north. The impact of the imperial shift from Persia to Greek Egypt was pretty negligible for the little province of Judea, at least as far as politics was concerned. The Greeks kept the Persian system largely intact. In fact, subject nations like Judea actually had some autonomy. Their priests ran the Jerusalem Temple and their wealthy families collected taxes (and kept hefty profits). But ultimately even the elites were under the thumb of Greek bureaucrats and had every incentive to mimic them (by learning Greek, studying Plato, and so on). Doing so allowed them to rise up the political ranks and be on the social cutting edge.
Switching to the Seleucids
The two Greek dynasties on either side of Judea, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, spent the third century BCE battling for control of the Palestinian coast. In 200 BCE, power officially shifted to the north when the Ptolemies of Egypt lost Judea to the Seleucids of Syria.
The Seleucids were a little more interested in cultural uniformity than their predecessors. So, of course, they didn’t want the Jews to keep observing their religious and cultural practices. Instead, the Seleucids wanted to replace those customs with Greek traditions, cultural institutions (like gymnasiums and theaters), and religious practices (like the worship of the Greek gods). The problem was that not all of their subjects in the provinces were sold on the idea.
The issue came to a head in 168 BCE. The Seleucid King Antiochus IV, a usurper to the throne who liked to call himself Epiphanes (“manifest” [as a God]), was humiliated by a Roman delegation in Egypt and forced to withdraw to Syria. He took his revenge by savagely reasserting control over his Jewish subjects on his way home. Antiochus plundered the Jerusalem Temple, brutalized the population, forbade religious traditions (such as Sabbaths and circumcision), and tried to compel sacrifice to the Greek gods. He even rededicated the Temple to Zeus Olympios-Ba’al Shamim (“Zeus of Olympus, Lord of the Heavens”). There’s a reason the Greek author Polybius called Antiochus Epimanes (“madman”).
Ruling with the Hasmoneans
Some of the Jews revolted against the Seleucids in 168 BCE.
It isn’t clear exactly who started the revolt, but one family — the Hasmoneans — soon came to dominate it. Mattathias the Hasmonean and his five sons, especially Judah Maccabee (“Judah the Hammer”), used guerrilla tactics and eventually retook Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple. This eight-day rededication later became the basis for the festival of Hanukkah (1 Maccabees 4:36-59; 2 Maccabees 1:18-2:23).
The irony with the Hasmoneans was that they were pretty Hellenized themselves, having been one of the prominent families in Judea under the Seleucids. They spoke Greek, knew how to handle themselves in imperial courts, and adopted a lot of Greek practices.
Judean independence wasn’t assured until about 141 BCE, when both the Seleucids and the Romans recognized Judea’s autonomy. But Judea’s independence remained on shaky ground later as well. After all, the only reason that the Seleucids recognized Judea’s autonomy is that they were consumed with a century-long fight in Antioch (the capital of the Greek empire in Syria) over the dynastic succession after the usurper Antiochus IV died in 164 BCE. The would-be rulers were too busy fighting among themselves to retake Judea. The Romans were just a century away from taking advantage of that weakness themselves; in 64 BCE, the Roman general Pompey seized Antioch and the Seleucid Empire for Rome (see Chapter 6).
The Hasmoneans enjoyed about a century of relative independence, even though their reign was controversial. They seized the high priesthood on the grounds that they were from the priestly tribe of Levi. This seizure caused a lot of concern among the Judean people because the Hasmoneans weren’t descended from the Zadokite line, the legitimate line for the high priests. The Hasmoneans also seized the Judean throne, even though they weren’t from the Davidic line.
In the following sections, I go over the main events of the rule of the Hasmoneans: the expansion of territory and a brutal civil war.
Expanding the kingdom
After gaining independence, the Hasmoneans weren’t content to control only tiny Judea. They began to expand their territory, taking advantage of Seleucid weakness. From 130-100 BCE, they conquered the following groups:
● The Idumeans south of Bethlehem
● The Greeks in cities along the coast and in the Decapolis (ten independent cities/colonies built by the Greeks on the east side of the Jordan River just north of Judea)
● The Samaritans to the immediate north
● The Greeks, Syrians, and Arab Itureans in the distant northern districts of the Galilee and the Golan Heights
The people in the annexed regions who weren’t already Jews were told to convert to Judaism — or else. All that conquest meant a lot of new tax money for the Jerusalem Temple, its priests, and Judea in general. That new tax money in turn attracted a wave of migration to the region from the conquered territories — and a lot of resentment from Jews and the new forced converts elsewhere.
Engaging in civil war
The newfound wealth of Judea made the throne that much more attractive. When the Hasmonean Queen Salome Alexandra died in 67 BCE, her two sons threw the country into civil war as they fought over the succession. Ironically, the Hasmonean dynasty would die in this dynastic succession, just as it had survived all those years because of Seleucid battles over the dynastic succession in Antioch. Who fought against whom in this civil war?
● On one side was King Hyrcanus II, with his allies the Idumaean Antipater and his son, Herod (known to posterity as “Herod the Great”; see the following section), as well as King Aretas, who ruled the Nabatean kingdom (an Arab kingdom that reached from southern Syria to eastern Egypt and northwest Arabia). By 64 BCE, fresh off his victories in Asia Minor and Syria, the Roman general Pompey joined Hyrcanus and his group (Chapter 6 covers Rome’s entry into the Palestinian picture).
● On the other side was King Aristobulus II, his son Antigonus, his friends in Lebanon (northwest of Judea), and some other assorted generals. In 49 BCE, he won over another important ally in Julius Caesar, when Caesar was trying to wrest power from Pompey (Chapter 6 explains the mess going on in Roman politics at this time).
As the Roman republic slipped into chaos, the Hasmonean civil war only got worse. As if that weren’t enough, the Parthian Empire of modern Iran and Iraq, which was worried about Rome’s approach, intervened in support of Aristobulus and banished Hyrcanus to Babylon. Hyrcanus’s ally, the young Idumean Herod, fled to Rome, where he was declared king by the Senate and was told to conquer the Hasmonean kingdom and destroy their alliance with the Parthians. He accomplished this task in 37 BCE.
Living in the time of Herod the Great
When he fled to Rome, Herod the Great played his cards correctly and at just the right the moment. At the time, Roman imperial power in the eastern Mediterranean was coming together. He had chosen the winning side. He was sent back to his home turf to battle the Parthians, where his combination of ruthless behavior and pragmatic, even imperial, vision allowed him to gain control of the former Hasmonean Empire. The region, which the Romans later referred to as Palestine (after its coastal inhabitants, the Philistines), began to enjoy a period of relative prosperity and growth. Herod’s 33-year reign was in many ways a welcome respite for the Jewish people from 30 years of civil war, though it too was marked by violence (including against his own family).
A bad guy to his family
To avenge Herod’s earlier exile by the ruling Hasmoneans and to destroy their alliance with the Parthian Empire as the Roman Senate had authorized him to do, Herod’s army besieged Jerusalem in 37 BCE and slaughtered many of its Jewish inhabitants. Herod intervened to stop his Idumean troops from more killing, but then he shipped the Parthians’ pick for Hasmonean king off to the Romans to be executed. The days of Parthian influence were over. Under Herod, the region was securely in Rome’s orbit.
Wanting to smooth things over with the Hasmoneans after effectively executing their king, Herod dumped his wife, Doris, and married a young Hasmonean princess named Mariamne. Because he couldn’t become high priest (he wasn’t from the right clan and his father was a convert), Herod took over the right to appoint the person who would become the high priest and picked Mariamne’s brother. But when some people sought to crown her brother king, he died in Herod’s palace in a not-so-mysterious drowning accident.
Herod proceeded to execute Mariamne her mother shortly thereafter. Then he killed another brother-in-law, two of his sons by Mariamne, and his son by Doris. Fortunately, he’d had enough marriages (ten in all) to produce a few other heirs who survived him (for a partial family tree, see Chapter 10). The executions reflected his insecurity about his position. A lot of Jews were upset that they were ruled by a second-generation convert, a man who had defeated the legitimate Hasmonean dynasty and allied himself with Roman power and Hellenistic practices. They looked for opportunities to undermine him, and with all those Herodian children as potential replacements, there was plenty of room for Herod to be paranoid.
Given all this bloodshed, Herod’s reputation was such that the gospel of Matthew would remember him as a murderer of children, as vicious as the hated Pharaoh of Egypt (Matthew 2; Exodus 1:1-2:11). There’s even a story that Emperor Augustus quipped,
“I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son” (in Greek, the words “pig” and “son” sound similar). Even though the Emperor probably never said this, it’s still funny: The pig was safer because Jews don’t eat pork!
A patron for the Jewish people
Herod was fortunately a lot nicer to the Jewish people than he was to his own family. It was no joke that he was remembered as Herod the Great. He took advantage of the expanded Hasmonean kingdom and his own successful alliance with the Roman Empire to build up the region and strengthen the position of Jews throughout the Diaspora or dispersion (the many places where Jews had relocated).
Herod built several fortresses and palaces for himself, but a lot of the investment was in roads and public buildings modeled on Greco-Roman architecture, such as stadiums and gymnasiums. Some other examples of Herod’s building work include the following:
● Keen to honor Emperor Augustus at every possible turn, he created a modern port city on the northern Samarian coast along the Mediterranean Sea and christened it “Caesarea Maritima” (or “city of Caesar by the sea”) in honor of the emperor, thus shifting trade from ports in Lebanon southward — and to a lesser degree from Alexandria northward. The city was so nice and had so many Roman-style institutions and buildings that later Roman governors made it their capital.
● He rebuilt the city of Samaria north of Judea and named it Sebaste in honor of the Emperor (Sebaste is Greek for Augustus, an honorific title that means “revered” or “honorable”).
● He enlarged the hill on which the Jerusalem Temple stood by building a massive retaining wall. This wall increased the size and capacity of the site so enormously that Jerusalem became a major tourist hub and pilgrimage center for Jews throughout the Mediterranean (see Figure 7-1). The western part of that wall — the so-called “Western Wall” or “Wailing Wall” — is still a pilgrimage destination for Jews (see Chapter 20).
Unearthing the tomb of Herod
In May 2007, Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer announced that he had discovered the tomb of King Herod the Great at Herodium, one of Herod's fortified palaces, just 8 miles south of Jerusalem. Netzer had been excavating the site for 35 years before he discovered a platform and remnants of a shattered and elaborately decorated sarcophagus along the monumental staircase up the slope. He didn't find an inscription mentioning Herod's name, but the site is widely considered to be the most likely place for Herod's tomb. After all, Herod named the place for himself, and the first-century Jewish historian Josephus reported that Herod's body was carried in an elaborate funeral procession from Jericho, where he died, to Herodium for burial (Jewish Antiquities 17.8.3). The hilltop fortress ceased to be used as a palace after Herod's death and was briefly occupied by the Jewish rebels during the First Revolt against Rome (66-74 CE). It was most likely these rebels who smashed up the tomb — so great was their hatred for the infamous client king of Rome.
Figure 7-1: Herod the Great’s renovations of the Jerusalem Temple, 30 CE.
While building up his kingdom, Herod also worked his Roman connections to protect Jews living in other parts of the Roman Empire. He made generous gifts to Greek and Roman cities for their own public buildings and games. By doing this, he bought good will for the Jews living in those areas. He even subsidized the Olympic Games in 12 BCE, which earned him acclaim throughout the empire.
Herod the Great died an agonizing death in 4 BCE. The Jewish historian Josephus, who apparently wasn’t Herod’s biggest fan, reveled in the gory details. He said that Herod suffered from ulcerated intestines, some sort of chronic urinary discharge, “putrefied genitals” that produced worms, and difficulty breathing (Jewish Antiquities 17.6.5). A nasty end for a nasty man, Josephus would say (see the nearby sidebar “Unearthing the tomb of Herod” for more about a recent archeological discovery).
It’s hard to be certain, but Jesus was likely born sometime before Herod the Great’s death. Both Matthew and Luke mention that this Herod was king when Jesus was born (Matthew 2; Luke 1:5; see Chapter 9 for some of the historical problems with these accounts).
Carving up the kingdom
After Herod’s death, his kingdom broke into three parts, with each part going to a different son. Here’s what the division looked like:
● Herod Antipas took the northwestern portion, which included the northern region of the Galilee, as well as Perea on the east bank of the Jordan River.
● Herod Archelaus took the all-important region of Judea, with its Temple-city of Jerusalem. He also took Samaria with its port at Caesarea Maritima and the family’s homeland, Idumea.
● Their half-brother Philip became tetrarch (ruler of four major regions) of the northeast (two of which were the Iturea and Trachonitis mentioned as his territories in Luke 3:1).
Herod Antipas and Philip reigned until well into the 30s CE. Herod Archelaus wasn’t so lucky — or so skillful. He immediately alienated the Judean Jews. As the story goes, the Jews were upset that Herod senior (Herod the Great) had put a golden Roman eagle on the Jewish Temple. They saw the eagle as a pagan symbol and as an insult to God. So, a few Jews defaced the eagle, and then Herod killed them. When Jewish partisans wanted to honor the memory of these martyrs, Archelaus murdered them. Nice way to start a reign! It turned out that Archelaus was more concerned about the potential insult to Rome than he was about the insult to his own people. The situation only went downhill from there, and within nine years, Rome had exiled Archelaus to Gaul and seized Judea and Samaria as a Roman province. This explains why the Romans were the ones in charge some 25 years later, when Jesus was killed in Jerusalem.
Believing in God, Temple, and Torah
Many first-century Jews shared certain general ideas, even if their specific beliefs about those ideas differed from group to group and place to place (I discuss different Jewish groups later in this chapter). The basic ideas that all these folks shared were
There’s only one God.
There’s only one Temple.
The Torah is the cornerstone of Jewish scripture and ethics.
The historical Jesus, who was a first-century Jew, shared these core convictions. He believed in only one God, he worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple, and the Torah framed his understanding of revelation, his ethical practice, and his teaching.
Holding fast to one God
The Jews’ belief in one God set them apart from most other groups of people at the time. Rather than multiple temples in each city dedicated to different gods, the Jews had only one major Temple in Jerusalem dedicated to their one God, Yahweh. Some of the Jewish groups thought that angels and demons were operating alongside God, but they didn’t believe that those other divine beings should be worshipped or that their power was the same as God’s.
The Romans occasionally got irritated that Jewish belief in one god prevented them from joining in Roman festivals and sacrifices. Plus, the Jews took every Saturday off as the Sabbath (the day of rest to honor God) while everyone else kept working. It really made it obvious that the Jews were present and on someone else’s clock (namely their God’s). But, for the most part, the Roman emperors of the early empire generally respected Jewish customs because they recognized Judaism as an old and venerable tradition.
Worshipping in the Temple
One commonality that the Jews shared with their Greek and Roman neighbors was the practice of praying and honoring God in a temple with prayers, offerings, sacrifices, and songs. In fact, Jews and Christians today still share some of these practices, including praying, making monetary offerings, pledging certain vows, and singing hymns when they gather to worship. What made the first-century Jewish practice different from today, however, was the practice of sacrifice. That practice happened in one place only: the Jerusalem Temple.
Some Jewish splinter groups set up alternative temples in other places, such as in Jordan, Leontopolis in Egypt, and Samaria (see the section, “The heretical Samaritans,” later in this chapter). One group was so disturbed by leadership and conduct of the sacrifices in Jerusalem that they set up an alternative community in the Dead Sea wilderness. They thought of their community as a kind of Temple (see the later section, “The strict, apocalyptic Essenes”). But by and large, when Jews referred to the Jewish Temple in the first century, everyone understood that they meant the one Temple in Jerusalem that was dedicated to the service of the one God.
Offering animals and grain to thank God for blessings
Much of the Jewish law found in the books of Exodus and Leviticus in the Old Testament lays out the rules for animal sacrifice in the Temple. Different animals were used for different purposes. The Jews, for example, may have offered an animal from their herd to atone for wrongdoing or to pray for well-being. The priests would slaughter the animal, splash its blood on the sides of the altar, and burn the body on the altar so that the fragrant smoke would ascend.
Another type of offering that Jews may have provided was grain or flour that was raw, baked, or fried and maybe mixed with oil and aromatic spices. The priests would toss a handful on the altar fire (which was always burning) and keep the rest as a payment in kind for their services.
The Jews had sin and guilt offerings and offerings to begin and end the day. They even had offerings to mark the important festivals of the year. Sometimes the animal or grain was fully burned, sometimes part was eaten by the priest, and sometimes the worshippers themselves got a portion. Between the incense and all the meat cooking, the place probably smelled great — maybe like a tailgate party before a football game!
The general purpose of the practice of sacrifice was to fulfill the command of God in the scriptures, to imitate God’s purity and power, and to attract God’s presence through sincere prayer and fragrant smoke (though the Jewish people didn’t actually think God could physically smell or drop in for a visit). They performed sacrifices as a return of the good things God had blessed them with, in the hope that God would continue to bless them. With their sacrifices, they also acknowledged their regret for sins against God’s law that jeopardized their relationships with God and others.
Centering on the sacred in the Jerusalem Temple
The fact that Jews had only one central shrine paralleled and reflected their belief that there was only one God. The centralization of worship in one place also emphasized the identity of the Jewish people as a single nation called into existence by this one God. The Temple was built to imitate the movement from the profane world of other nations and daily life into the sacred world of the chosen people and the single God.
The focus on the sacred in Judaism explains the reason for the layout of the Temple. The Temple was imagined as the navel of the universe, with its center being a kind of Paradise on earth. It was built in a series of concentric rings moving from the secular outside to the sacred interior. Each “ring” admitted people with increasing degrees of sanctity:
● Non-Jews could enter the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple, but that was as far as they could go.
● Jewish women could enter the Court of the Women, but they could go no farther.
● Jewish men could enter the next ring, the Court of the Israelites, but that was it.
● Priests (and only priests) could enter the Priests’ Court, where the altars were located.
● Only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies (and he could enter only once a year). The Holy of Holies is where God’s presence was thought to dwell in the midst of the people.
Those Jews who came to the Temple had to purify themselves in order to enter the Temple precincts. They could purify themselves in a number of ways: by washing in special baths, abstaining temporarily from sex, fasting, making special vows, or donating money to charity. People practiced these ethical commitments regularly in their day-to-day lives and certainly when they prepared themselves to visit the central sanctuary in Jerusalem.
The priests and the Levites (the priests’ assistants in the Temple) were set apart in purity from other people. Their separation was even considered biological. For example, to fill one of these positions, they had to come from a certain tribe; the high priests had to come from a certain clan within that tribe. They also had to observe stricter customs for keeping themselves pure throughout the year — especially for the two weeks a year when their “course” or group was on call for Temple duty (the priests lived throughout the land, with a majority of them living in Judea near the Temple).
Traveling to Jerusalem for festivals
Not all Jews in Judea, the Galilee, and the Diaspora could get to the Jerusalem Temple very often or very easily. It’s true that with Herod the Great’s road improvements (see the earlier section, “A patron for the Jewish people”), more people were able to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem for one or more of the three annual harvest festivals: Passover in the spring, Shavuot (or Pentecost) 40 days later, and Sukkot in the fall. And many people throughout the empire paid an annual tax for the Temple’s upkeep regardless of whether they could travel there themselves.
Reflecting Temple practices at home
As Jews traveled between Jerusalem and their homes, their local practices paralleled customs that were upheld in the Temple. For example:
● Just as the Torah was discussed and interpreted in Jerusalem at the Temple, so too was it interpreted in villages by local priests, laypeople, scholars, and students. They discussed the Torah both during Sabbath meetings in the synagogue and as questions arose (see Acts 15:21).
● Like Jews at the Temple, some local Jews purified themselves through ritual washings in Jewish villages. They used the ritual baths built for the purpose to cleanse the impurities of daily life.
Praying at home
Because the Temple was pretty far away from where most Jews lived, there were a lot of local religious customs that developed apart from it. Jewish law required the circumcision of boys and the keeping of kosher laws (such as the prohibition on eating pork). These practices were observed throughout Palestine and even in the Diaspora. Some local practitioners of healing and exorcism viewed themselves as acting in the name and power of God.
Prayer was also an important part of Jewish life. Some Jews said certain prayers daily, particularly the command to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and strength. They were to teach and remember this mitzvah (or command) by binding it on their foreheads and wrists while at prayer and by placing it in their doorposts (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). These practices continue today.
Observing the Torah
The Torah is composed of the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It tells the story of the Israelite people (the ancestors of the Jews of Jesus’s time), including the following bits that mix legend and history:
● Their creation and the stories of their ancestors
● Their Exodus or escape from Egypt
● The declaration of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai
● Their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness and their arrival on the edge of the Promised Land
Was there such a thing as a Jewish Bible?
Other books besides the five in the Torah were compiled in stages between perhaps 1000 and 100 BCE. These books included those written by the prophets who had lived at the time of the Jewish monarchy and whose books were sometimes supplemented later. Also included are "writings" such as proverbs, psalms, and other wisdom traditions. But not everybody agreed that these were as authoritative as the Torah. And even those groups that did view them as authoritative often included different ones.
In fact, there wasn't any such thing as a "Bible" among the Jews — if by Bible you mean a set of agreed-upon, authoritative, and normative books bound between two covers. Books bound between two covers didn't even become popular until the second or third century CE. More importantly, though, different groups had different collections of scrolls. It wasn't until the late first century CE that we have any evidence of Jewish lists of the approved books, and it's clear that some Jewish groups like the Essenes counted a good many more books as scripture. The Christians didn't compile their complete, official list until the mid-fourth century (see Chapter 5).
In Jesus’s time, all Jewish groups we know about saw the Torah (or “law”) as the cornerstone of their faith. The Torah grounded their relationship with God, provided their sense of who God was, and gave them a code of behavior that demanded a lot from them in response to God’s election and blessing of them. (For more information about the Torah, check out The Torah For Dummies by Arthur Kurzweil, published by Wiley.) In addition to the Torah, other religious books were collected and regarded highly (see the nearby sidebar “Was there such a thing as a Jewish Bible?”).
Meeting the Major Groups in Jewish Society
The gospels and some other first-century sources refer to several groups in first-century Jewish society: Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, and Samaritans. These groups were prominent, but not dominant. Together, they made up maybe 15-30 percent of the population in Judea, and they were probably even more lightly represented to the north, in Samaria and the Galilee (Josephus, Jewish War 2.8.2-14; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 13.5.9). As for the other 70-85 percent of the population, we simply don’t have much information about them. Ancient historians usually weren’t interested in the common folk unless they broke out in a rebellion of some kind, and archaeologists have only begun to focus on the living spaces and lifestyles of the common people rather than on their rulers.
The groups in the following sections all believed in God, Temple, and Torah, but each group differed in some important ways. While Jesus wasn’t a member of any of these groups, the gospels report that he did interact with some of them and that some of them were openly antagonistic toward him.
The conservative Sadducees
At the conservative end of the religious spectrum and the upper end of the social and religious ladder were the Sadducees. No one is sure how they got their name. It may have derived from tsaddiq (“righteous one”) or from the name Zadok, after the founder of the high priestly line in the time of King David.
The Sadducees are considered conservative because they thought that the Torah alone — as interpreted by them — should guide faith and practice. This sole reliance on the Torah ruled out the prophetic and wisdom books (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Psalms). These later books and traditions had led some Jews to believe in a final judgment and a resurrection of just people because they couldn’t stomach that the good suffered and the evil enjoyed the high life. The Sadducees rejected these notions, which meant that they didn’t believe in a resurrection of the dead (Matthew 22:23-33; Acts 23:6-10; Acts 13 takes a look at the gospel portrait of the Sadducees).
The liberal Pharisees
The Pharisees made their debut during the Hasmonean monarchy (which I discuss earlier in this chapter). The first Pharisees were pious Jews who were troubled by the Hellenizing reforms of the Seleucid King Antiochus IV and the behavior of the Hasmoneans and their Sadducean allies. The Pharisees often opposed both of these groups, and because of this opposition, one of the Hasmonean kings crucified thousands of Pharisees. Later, the Sadducees and Pharisees took opposite sides in the Hasmonean civil war.
The name “Pharisee” may come from the Hebrew word parush, meaning “detached” or “separated.” The Pharisees, who were both laypeople and priests, attempted to live by the purity regulations that priests observed (I discuss the special purity requirements of the priests earlier in this chapter). The gospels present these practices as a heavy burden that Pharisees were trying to impose on others, but the Pharisees understood it as a reform of the covenant (the relationship established in the Torah between God and the people expressed in Jewish ethical and worship practices).
For the Pharisees, the written Torah was central. But in order to invigorate written scripture and apply it in their day, they added to it the “traditions of the elders” (Jewish rabbis would later call this the “oral Torah”). They believed that these traditions included those stories and teachings that Moses received but hadn’t written down, along with interpretations of the law that had been transmitted by the sages through the ages. With greater freedom than the conservative Sadducees, the Pharisees thought that God hadn’t simply carved things on stone tablets hundreds of years before. Instead, they believed that God continued to reveal things. This openness to ongoing revelation made them more “liberal” in their stance toward scripture than the Sadducees. It’s no surprise, then, that they accepted prophetic books like Isaiah and Jeremiah and “the writings” (books like Psalms and Proverbs) and developed some of their characteristic beliefs — such as the importance of angels and spirits and the resurrection of the dead — from their interpretations of them (Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37; Daniel 12:1-4; Job 19:25-26).
The strict, apocalyptic Essenes
Another Jewish social group during Jesus’s time was the Essenes. The Jewish historian Josephus and a few other first-century writers mention them, but they’re nowhere to be found in the gospels. This may be because they lived out by the Dead Sea, which is far from Jesus’s Galilean roots.
Because ancient descriptions of the Essenes are strikingly similar to some of the teachings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, many people believe the Essenes are the collectors and authors of those scrolls (see Chapter 5). Most of the 800-plus manuscripts that form the bulk of the Dead Sea Scrolls have survived only in tiny pieces or worm-eaten fragments. But enough has survived to make clear that the compilers were heavily into religious literature. Many of those scroll manuscripts and fragments are books from the Torah, prophets, and writings (in fact, every biblical book currently in the Jewish Bible is represented except Esther and Nehemiah). There are also a lot of copies of apocalyptic works (books that convey special revelation in mysterious images and symbols of a pending end of time) and wisdom books (instructions on how to live and on divine wisdom) that apparently were authoritative for the Essenes but never made it into anyone else’s “Bible.” They also wrote some of their own works, which are a curious and interesting blend of apocalyptic expectation, legal norms, and wisdom speculation.
Like the Pharisees, the Essenes thought that the sacrificial system in the Temple had gone awry and that everyone in the community should adhere to a strict code of ethics. What was different, however, was that the Essenes were so upset with the Temple that they stopped going to it entirely. They even used a solar calendar to set time (rather than the lunar calendar that the Jerusalem Temple probably used). And their interpretations of the Torah were much stricter than those of any other Jewish group.
In fact, the Essenes considered their strict code of ethics their new mode of sacrifice, which showed how reluctant they were to ditch the sacrificial system entirely (I discuss sacrifices earlier in this chapter). Their love of the Temple and hope for its restoration by a priestly messiah suggests the group’s origins in priestly circles. (See the nearby sidebar “The messianic prophecies” for more about different groups’ thoughts on messiahs.)
In their messianic expectations, their apocalyptic hopes for a divine intervention, and their attempt to live a utopian, end-time lifestyle (sharing goods in common, praying regularly, and healing people), the Essenes actually share several features with John the Baptist and some of Jesus’s early followers, although in other ways they’re quite different (see Chapter 10 for details).
The rebellious Zealots
Josephus, who wrote after the first Jewish Revolt against Rome in 66-70 CE, was keen to explain the rise of another group in Jewish society: the Zealots. He said the group had its origins when Rome seized Judea and Samaria in 6 CE and when Judas the Galilean and Zadok the Pharisee led a rebellion against the Roman tax census (see Chapter 6 for more on this census; Acts 5:37 also mentions it). But there isn’t a lot of evidence of a group calling itself by that name until the First Jewish Revolt against Rome. One thing is clear: When they did arise, the Zealots opposed Roman rule and often engaged in guerrilla warfare to combat it.
Josephus reported that Zealot beliefs were similar to those of the Pharisees. What differentiated them was that they had an intense attachment to liberty and were willing to fight for the notion that their only ruler and lord was God himself, as the Torah required.
One of Jesus’s closest disciples is a man named Simon the “Cananean” (Mark 3:18; Matthew 10:4), which is the Aramaic word for “zealous” or “jealous” (thus Luke names him “Simon the zealot”; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13). (Flip to Chapters 2 and 10 for more on Simon.) But in the gospels, it probably functioned more as an adjective than as the name of a formal group he belonged to.
The heretical Samaritans
Some of the people who lived in Samaria, just north of Judea, thought of themselves as Jewish but were not viewed as such by their Judean neighbors. These folks, called Samaritans, had a copy of the Torah, but it looked a little different from everyone else’s. Like the Sadducees, they considered their Torah the only scriptures; they didn’t accept any other books. They also had their own temple and priesthood on Mount Gerizim — well, at least they did until the Hasmonean King John Hyrcanus destroyed it in 128 BCE. (The temple on Mount Gerizim is the temple that the Samaritan woman in John 4:20 refers to when she tells Jesus, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain.”) These differences of Torah text and Temple practice were aggravated by a couple of centuries of animosity between the Samaritans and their Judean neighbors after the Babylonian Exile. By Jesus’s time, any Jew who worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple would have considered the Samaritan religion aberrant, and vice versa.
The messianic prophecies
Messiahis Hebrew for "anointed one" (the Greek translation is "Christ"). Kings and priests, for example, were anointed for their jobs. The earliest reference to an "anointed one" in the Jewish scriptures is the promise that an heir to the great King David would always be sitting on the Jewish throne (2 Samuel 7:11-17).
When the immediate line of heirs was killed during the Babylonian Exile, the biblical promise was reinterpreted in the following ways:
● Some still expected a king from the line of David (Matthew 1).
● Others thought a foreign king would suffice (Isaiah 45:1 names the Persian King Cyrus a messiah).
● Others expected a prophet like Moses to restore the true practice of the law (Deuteronomy 18:15-20).
● Some expected a priestly messiah, especially after the Seleucids defiled the Temple and the Hasmoneans took over the high priesthood (even though they were from the wrong family).
● Some thought a heavenly messiah or Son of Man would come "on the clouds of heaven" and serve as judge and ruler of the cosmos (Daniel 7:13-14).
● Some groups, such as the Essenes, expected several of these types of messiahs, while others, such as the early Christians, imagined one figure who fused the different roles together.
No matter what kind of messiah these groups expected, each group agreed that the figure would usher in a new age on God's behalf, characterized by the destruction of evil, the triumph of good, the healing of illness, the elevation of the poor, the freeing of prisoners, and the restoration of the land.
The animosity between the Samaritans and Jews is what helped make the parable of the Good Samaritan so powerful in Luke’s gospel (Luke 10:25-37). After all, who in Jesus’s audience would ever have imagined that a Samaritan guy would help a mugged Jew as his fellow Jews passed right by?
Belonging to Social Networks
First-century Jews may not have had the Internet to help them network with other people, but they did have personal networks that were built around extended families and ethnic groups. People needed these extended networks to survive because they lived in a society where the majority of people were subsistence farmers. And unlike today, at that time, there was no welfare state to fall back on in retirement or during rough times. Jesus encouraged his followers to leave everything behind to follow him, which meant that they would have to leave their normal social networks and join his new one. The following sections give you the background you need to appreciate how difficult that would have been and how it may have shaped the early Jesus movement.
To understand the social networks, it helps to think of society in Palestine like a pyramid. There really isn’t a middle class in a society like this one (see Chapter 13 for more information):
● At the top is the very tiny group of true elites, who own most of the land and hobnob with the Herodians and the ruling Romans.
● Beneath the elites is a slightly larger group of folks that keeps things running for the elites. This group includes bureaucrats, scribes, lawyers, soldiers, tax collectors, and so on.
● Below the upper stratum is the lower layer, which includes the vast majority of working people. The people classified in this level are mostly farmers but also included are some merchants and tradespeople, such as metalworkers, tanners, and tent-makers. Some had enough resources to hire day workers, and some owned slaves. But most would have been fairly poor.
● Below the working poor are the truly destitute — those who have disabilities and can’t work. This group of people depends on the charity of others to survive.
Relying on the family
Most people in first-century Palestine were poor farmers. Some people owned small plots of land, but many just worked land for wealthier people. If they actually owned land to grow barley or dates, they were often just a couple of poor harvests away from destitution. Taxes had to be paid regardless of drought, locusts, or other natural disasters. So, people often had to borrow money to pay their taxes. A couple of years after accumulating that kind of debt, people found themselves selling their services or even their family members as slaves.
Given how vulnerable most people were economically, they really depended on their families for survival. So, families couldn’t afford to be small like the nuclear families of today. Instead, people needed to stay near their relatives so that, in a time of need, they could turn to someone. This commitment to family is embedded in the Ten Commandments, which specifically tells people to honor their fathers and mothers (Exodus 20:12). “Honor” here means respect, but it also refers to the obligation of people to take care of their fathers and mothers in their old age and to be a financial safety net so that their parents don’t fear destitution.
The extended families in Palestine centered on the husband’s family. When a girl married (usually within a few years of starting menstruation), she left her parents and moved in with her husband and his parents and kin. Father-centered families like this were called patriarchal families, and in these families the men ruled the roost. They also represented the family in the economic, political, and legal spheres outside the home. For example, a woman couldn’t represent herself in court. So a man (probably her husband) functioned as her legal guardian or representative, no matter how old she was. This strong reliance on her husband gives you an idea of how vulnerable a woman could become if she were widowed.
It was also important to men to protect their wives and daughters and to make certain that children were actually theirs. So even though women could and did go outside the home for various chores, social events, and religious festivals, social expectations required that they do so discreetly. Women were, in a sense, a kind of property of their husbands. Because of this view, adultery and even rape of a wife was defined as a violation of the husband’s rights. This wasn’t true just of Jewish society, but of ancient Mediterranean societies in general.
Slaves were considered to be part of the family network during this time. A lot of people, even poor people, owned slaves. In fact, slavery was a fairly accepted feature of ancient life. Parents could sell their children into slavery. And don’t forget that slavery meant that the slave had to serve the master through work, sex, bearing children, or whatever else he needed.
Depending on help from fellow Jews
First-century Jews depended on each other to get by. That didn’t mean that every Jew helped every other Jew, but, in general, they could depend on a kind of sympathy from each other because they belonged to the same ethnic group. They met regularly on the Sabbath, conducted business together, provided mutual aid in support of the sick, ill, and widowed, and often provided hospitality to each other. This sympathy particularly helped those Jews who were living farther from Judea in the Diaspora. Jews there were at most a minority community in larger Greco-Roman cities, and so found strength in numbers and in their shared traditions. They earned the respect of their Gentile (non-Jewish) neighbors for the venerability and ethical depth of their traditions.
The flip side of this sympathetic behavior was that, by and large, people didn’t treat other ethnic groups as well as they treated their “neighbors.” People gave what they got, and with so little to go around, respect and honor was reserved to those closest to them, those who did the most for them, or those who coerced it from them (such as rulers and toll collectors).
Protecting strangers and aliens
While resources were limited and the obligation to tend to one’s family and ethnic group took priority, Jewish law also mandated a minimal level of care for immigrants (called “aliens” or “strangers” in the Bible) living in Jewish lands. Sensitive to their own treatment at the hands of empires and foreigners, the Jews sought to treat strangers living in their own land better. Even though no one knows how this played out in practice, the Torah at least prescribed that aliens shouldn’t be oppressed (Exodus 22:20, 23:9; Leviticus 19:33-34; Deuteronomy 10:18-19; 24:17-18; Zechariah 7:10).