This book is an introduction to Judaism of the Second Temple period. That is, it covers the time beginning in the Persian period and ending with the fall of the temple (539 BCE–70 CE), though I find it helpful to go as late as the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–35 CE). I have already given a detailed history of the Judaism of the period in Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian (1992) and the four-volume work, History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period (vol. 1 [2004], vol. 2 [2008], and vols 3–4 [in preparation]), so what I am doing in this much briefer study is to try to introduce the beginner – the student, the educated lay person, the non-specialist – to the subject. As the title of the present book indicates, I focus on the first century BCE and CE. (It is the convention now among scholars of early Judaism to use the abbreviations CE and BCE when giving dates. They stand for ‘Common Era’ [CE] and ‘Before the Common Era’ [BCE], being equivalent to AD and BC.) However, I do not limit myself to those two centuries since a complete understanding of them requires a general knowledge of the preceding several centuries.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of Jewish history for the Second Temple period (though some periods are treated more fully in later chapters) and then discusses the main sources. It is important that the reader takes note of where we get our knowledge of the Judaism of this time. There is no magical key to understanding Judaism during this era. We are all dependent on a handful of sources from which most of our knowledge comes. After the introductory chapter, the next four chapters look at various ‘currents’ or streams within Judaism. By treating them as moving streams we begin to see the dynamic aspect of Jewish history and realize that much of it is produced by the interaction of various movements. So I discuss textual Judaism (Chapter 2), revolutionary Judaism (Chapter 3), eschatological Judaism (Chapter 4), and the strange phenomenon known as Gnosticism which seems to have Jewish roots (Chapter 5). Together they encompass most facets of Judaism of the time.
What will soon become clear to the reader is that the idea of ‘orthodoxy’ or a ‘state church’ is not a good way of looking at Judaism before 70. British readers need to put the model of the Church of England out of mind. There was a centre to the religion: worship at the Jerusalem temple. Most Jews accepted the sacredness of the temple and the general teachings of the Torah. But there was no official orthodoxy (in the Christian sense), for it is clear that there were many interpretations of the Torah and many different views about how to apply the law outside the temple (within the temple, the priests were in control). Thus, each of the Chapters 2–5 tells us about one aspect of Judaism, but as will soon be apparent the various currents are not isolated entities. On the contrary, a single individual may have been a part of more than one current. A study of one particular current helps us to understand one aspect of Judaism, while the study of all four discussed here provides a quite comprehensive picture of Judaism – albeit, a complex picture, like a mosaic with many different parts.
I quote widely from the original sources at different points, both to illustrate my points and to help the reader to become more aware of the source of our knowledge. I usually use the New Jewish Publication Society translation for quotations from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Quotations from the New Testament and the Apocrypha are taken from the New Revised Standard Version. For Philo, Josephus, and the Greek and Roman writers I generally use the Loeb Classical Library. The Dead Sea Scrolls are usually quoted from the translation of Geza Vermes (see the end of Chapter 1). For the Pseudepigrapha, the translations in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the Apocryphal Old Testament are usually used (again, see the end of Chapter 1). The Nag Hammadi texts in Chapter 5 are quoted from The Nag Hammadi Library in English.
This book originated in the Frankland and West Weekend School Lectures given at Birkbeck College on 25–26 March 1995, and were originally published as An Introduction to First Century Judaism (1996). I thank Mr Michael Combermere and Dr Gwen Griffith Dickson for inviting and hosting me, and Professor Michael Knibb of King’s College, London, for suggesting my name and chairing the first two lectures. The present version has had a number of revisions, especially in Chapters 1 and 6, and all the bibliographies have been updated. Mrs Jerilyn Sculley has kindly read Chapter 1 from the point of view of the educated lay person. This book is very much the product of teaching early Judaism for many years, especially at the University of Hull but also in America and in various lectures in the UK. To those many students, who have been my willing (for the most part) guinea pigs, I dedicate this book.
L.L.G.
Kingston upon Hull
6 September 2009