THE MAIN ARGUMENT of this book has been that attempts to make sense of the remains of ancient Judaism must consider the effects of shifting types of imperial domination. The complex, loosely centralized but still basically unitary Jewish society that may be inferred from the artifacts of the last two hundred years of the Second Temple period was in part produced by a long history of imperial empowerment of Jewish leaders. The fragmentation characteristic of the Jewish remains of the high imperial period imply a profound but partial accommodation to direct Roman rule, hastened by the disastrous failure of the revolts of 66 and 132. The Jewish cultural explosion of late antiquity, which can be read from a revival of literary production and the emergence and diffusion of a distinctively Jewish art and archaeology, is in complex ways a response to the gradual christianization of the Roman Empire.
This explanatory scheme has several advantages. It helps integrate the Jews into the history of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, allowing us to see how they were simultaneously like and unlike all other subjects. The Jews may thus be made to serve in some ways as exemplary—even in their difference—filling in part of a larger picture of the effects of Roman domination, supplementing the very different kinds of information available from, for example, Egypt.
In addition, treating the evidence whole and in the broadest possible context partly solves (nothing can ever fully solve) the problem of infinite regression that I think inescapably affects the monographic approach to ancient Judaism. That is, in order to begin interpreting some small body of material (indeed, even to decide what constitutes an appropriate body of material to study), we must make all sorts of quite specific assumptions about its historical antecedents, context, and effects. For example, in an earlier book, I tried to read the works of Josephus in light of the assumption that they testify to a post-Destruction shift in Jewish politics from priestly to rabbinic or patriarchal authority. But the conviction that such a shift occurred depended on a particular type of reading of Josephus and of the rabbinic corpus—readings that themselves depended on fairly specific hypotheses about the history of the Jews both long before and long after the Destruction. Since this sort of regression is, as I have just observed, infinite, expanding the scope of the investigation cannot eliminate it. But it can at least make the ground a bit firmer, the hypothetical structure a bit more solid.
Finally, the approach I have adopted here has the advantage of making sense not only of the specific pieces of evidence but also of the contours of the evidence as a whole. In other words, considering the wider political and social worlds in which the ancient Jews lived can help explain why the evidence is the way it is, why covenant and myth are so inextricably combined in the literature of the Second Temple period, why the archaeology of Jewish Palestine in the second and third centuries seems so similar to that of the eastern Roman Empire in general, while its exiguous literary remains are so different from the products of the “second sophistic,” and why, finally, the synagogue and the religious ideology that justified its construction reached their greatest diffusion only under Christian rule.