RELIGIOUS PRACTICES
Judaism (Hebrew Yehudith) is what we call the religion of the Jews (Judaeans, Judahites). The Jews are the people who returned from Babylonian captivity to their ancestral home in Judaea, rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, and spread around the world. It continued the ancient Israelite religion but was not quite the same because of several historical changes.
Scholars usually label the Judaism of New Testament times as Second Temple Judaism because the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple of Solomon. After the return from Exile, Zerubbabel built a new one, later reconstructed on a grander scale by Herod the Great. Sometimes religious historians also call it Early Judaism because it was the precursor to Rabbinic Judaism that grew out of it. The Romans demolished the Second Temple in AD 70, but the New Testament was still in the process of being written and collected. So we can include the period from Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century BC to the Bar Kochba rebellion that ended in AD 135, or even later, as the period enclosing Early Judaism.
By the authority of the Persian king Cyrus, the Jews had received permission to return to the former territory of Judah in the sixth century BC, but the project had not gone well. About a century later, Nehemiah, the cupbearer of King Artaxerxes, got himself appointed the governor of the region now called Yehud, and he energetically put things into shape. The spiritual leader was Ezra, the scribe, who was also a priest. During the seventh month (Tishri), he conducted a public reading of the law of Moses and a covenant renewal ceremony (Neh. 8:1-9:38). It was like a new Sinai experience, with Ezra as a second Moses. If we wish to pinpoint a specific time when Judaism, as we know it today began, it would be that event.
The Jewish leaders realized that the Exile was a result of the nation’s disobedience to the law and the corrupting influence of paganism. Not wanting to repeat those mistakes, they felt that the solution was scrupulous attention to the law and separatism, that is, avoiding any kind of alliance with non-Jews.
But it did not always work out. During the next several centuries following the Persian period, the Jews had to respond to Greek and then Roman challenges. Under Maccabean leadership and the Hasmonean dynasty, they achieved national independence and then lost it again. Prophecy died out. As a result of various responses to all these events, Judaism developed several varieties or sects.
The most potent challenge was Hellenism, the attraction of Greek culture, the modernity of that time. Jews who lived abroad in the Diaspora could not escape it, but neither could they in the land of Israel. Greek language, dress, architecture, and culture were everywhere. One tangible indication of this is how many Jews had Greek names, such as Andrew and Philip. Bartimaeus was the son of someone with the Greek name Timaeus. The different sects represented various ways of dealing with all these influences.
While recognizing the different forms of Judaism, we should not overlook what they all had in common: they were all both Abrahamic and Mosaic. That is to say, they all regarded Abraham as their father, and they all accepted the five books of the Law of Moses as sacred Scripture, the pinnacle of divine revelation. Except for the Samaritans, they all prayed toward the temple in Jerusalem as the place where the Lord caused His Name to dwell. E. P. Sanders has labeled this core Judaism as “ covenantal nomism,” which means that God made a gracious covenant with Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3; 17:1-14), of which circumcision was the sign. Every Jew is an heir to that covenant relationship but must remain within it by keeping the Law.
The three Jewish sects of most interest to us during this period are the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees. In the New Testament, we mostly encounter the Pharisees. According to Josephus (Antiquities 17.42), they numbered about 6,000. Besides the five books of Moses, they accepted as scripture the Prophets and the Writings that constitute the contents of our Protestant Old Testament. But for them, the Torah (divine instruction) included not only written Scripture but everything that one could logically extrapolate from the Law. It included the tradition of the elders (Mark 7:3), which they claimed had been passed down orally from Moses (Mishnah Aboth 1:1). Eventually put into written form, these traditions of oral law comprise the book known as the Mishnah. Another distinctive feature of the Pharisees was that even if they were laity, they undertook to observe all the laws of purity that the Law prescribed for priests.
The New Testament does not explicitly mention the Essenes, although some scholars would include them among the scribes often mentioned alongside the Pharisees (Luke 15:2). Josephus, Philo, and Pliny describe the Essenes at some length. Scholars generally agree that the Essenes produced the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. Josephus said there were more than 4,000 of them (Antiquities 18,20). They accepted the same scriptures like the Pharisees, with perhaps three exceptions. No copy of the book of Esther was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instead, it appears that the book of Jubilees and the book known today as 1 Enoch were considered scripture by them. They rejected the oral law of the Pharisees. But they believed that their founder and leader, whom they called the Teacher of Righteousness, had given them inspired interpretations of the prophetic writings (called pesharim). Perhaps, He had other inspired writings as well.
Furthermore, they believed that they were the righteous remnant, the true Israel. They also believed that other Jews were apostate, including the priests of the Jerusalem Temple, for which reason they withdrew from worshiping there. Believing that they were living in the end-times, they regarded all the prophecies as applying to them and their period of history.
The New Testament mentions the Sadducees only a few times, and they were few in number (Josephus Antiquities 18.17). But they were important, comprising a powerful elite who controlled the temple and, in collaboration with the Romans, the nation. They left behind no existing writings, so what we know about them comes mostly from people who did not like them. Reportedly, they accepted as Scripture only the five books of Moses and rejected any idea of oral law or inspired interpretation. In respect to the law, they were “strict interpretationists” and did not consider themselves bound by anything literally not in the Pentateuch.
It is interesting to compare the various Jewish sects concerning doctrines besides their scriptural canons. While the Sadducees believed totally in free will, the Essenes accepted predestination. The Pharisees, however, believed both viewpoints. The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. They believe that if one lived a life obedient to the Torah, God would reward them with long life and health, both signs of God’s blessing. The Pharisees taught a resurrection of the body, often together within an immortal soul. The Essenes believed in an immortal soul. The Pharisees looked for the coming of a righteous king, the Son of David, who would lead them in triumph over the unrighteous. The Essenes expected two Messiahs, a royal one, and a priestly one, and they expected a final battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. The Sadducees, however, discouraged all such speculation. They governed the temple while the Pharisees were dominant in the synagogues, and the Essenes lived to themselves in isolated and tightly organized communities that held property in common.
One key difference between the Essenes and the other two sects was their calendar. The Pharisees and Sadducees used a lunisolar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months, as had the Babylonians. Since 12 lunar months make only 354 days, it was necessary to add a thirteenth month approximately every three years to synchronize with the seasons. But the Essenes, like the Egyptians, employed a solar calendar, except that it was modified to have only 364 days. That way, the new year always began on Wednesday, and all the annual festivals always fell on the same day of the week. The Essenes believed their calendar was the true one and that the other groups followed a false one.
New Testament Judaism had additional factions that were more political than religious. The Herodians supported the dynasty of Herod and tended to accept Greek customs. But they made common cause with the Pharisees, who were usually their natural enemies, to entrap Jesus (Mark 3:6). The Zealots (or Cananaeans) were a resistance movement opposed to the Romans and those who cooperated with their occupation. They could be violent terrorists. Interestingly, one of Jesus’s disciples was Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15; cf. Mark 3:18).
Judging from the figures reported by Josephus, all of the major Jewish sects combined numbered little more than 10,000. The vast majority of Jews were not affiliated with any such group. Just ordinary people, they went to the synagogue maybe once a week and had reverent feelings about the law and the temple, but were not especially scrupulous. The Pharisees and Jewish leaders regarded them with contempt, referring to them as “ this crowd that does not know the law” (John 7:49). Jesus described them as “ the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:6) and made them the special targets of His evangelistic outreach. The Pharisees referred to them as the ‘am ha-’areş, the “ people of the land,” a term found in Ezra 4:4 and Nehemiah 10:30-31, where it refers to a mixed-race of peasants left behind when the Babylonians took Jews into captivity. By the time of Jesus, it had become merely a derogatory term used for ordinary Jews.
After the destruction of the temple in AD 70, the Sadducees and the Essenes disappeared from the scene, and the only Jewish sects that remained were the Pharisees and the Christians. Pharisaic Judaism became the norm and developed into what we call Rabbinic Judaism, from which all modern forms of Judaism have descended. It rested on three pillars: the scriptural canon, the synagogue, and the rabbis. Their canon is the same as the Protestant Old Testament. Judaism survived the destruction of the temple because it still had synagogues. The Rabbis, succeeding the Scribes, expounded and applied the scriptures. They believed that prophecy had ceased: &ldquo ; When Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the last of the prophets died, the Holy Spirit disappeared from Israel” (Tosefta Sotah 13:2). In the absence of new revelation, Rabbinic Judaism focused on exegesis of old revelation, and the responsibility of interpreting old revelation was in the hands of the Rabbis.