86 CHAPTER TWOing” was often formulaic, copied from magical recipe books (though the Ara-
maic amulets themselves provide surprisingly little evidence of this).^94 If so,
the traditional formulations were at any rate shaped by the learned. An addi-
tional hint that the mythic cosmology constitutes a scribal reshaping of a pop-
ular cosmology that had, we may suppose, implications for religious praxis
is the prominence, especially in the ascent stories, of material derived from
Canaanite mythology—a mythology thus apparently still extant, perhaps
among the population of the Palestinian countryside.^95
In sum, in social terms, the covenant and the myth formed a single com-
plex. It was the mediators of the Torah and the Temple who gave the myth its
classic formulations, pressed it into service to fill the gaps in the covenant,
and worked out its relation to the Torah. The scribe and the holy man were
thus often combined in one person, and the two roles spilled over into each
other, the scribe searching his books for the mysteries he thought they con-
cealed, and the holy man deriving his ability to prophesy, his knowledge of
the divine and demonic worlds, in part from the scribe’s Torah. Priests played
a special role. Not only did the Torah itself give priests authority over its inter-
pretation, but some priests believed that the temple provided them with a
direct link to the divine world. If, as Josephus and Philo both said, the Temple
symbolized the cosmos, then access to it gave one symbolic access to the
upper world, and theconduct of the cult could maintaina semblance of order
in the universe (some sectarians—Christians and Qumranians—rejected the
legitimacy of the cult; they also believed the universe was in a state of com-
plete disorder). Priests were therefore prominent not only as legal experts,
teachers, and judges, but also as miracle workers and prophets (e.g., like John
the Baptist and Josephus).
Thus, the incorporation of the mythology into the main ideology of Juda-
ism—admittedly as a subsidiary element without a separate institutional
base—was an aspect of centralization, of the rise in post-Maccabean Palestine
of an integrated Judaism, controlled from Jerusalem by mediators of the Tem-
ple and Torah. It was an artifact of the transformation of the covenant from
the ideology of the quasi-sectarianbenei hagolah(“children of the exile”) of
the fifth centuryB.C.E. into that of Judaism as a whole. The expansion of the
(^94) On the social position of magicians in late imperial Egypt, which is comparable to what I
am suggesting for Palestine, see D. Frankfurter,Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resis-
tance(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 198–237. On recipe books, see J. Naveh,
“OnJewish BooksofMagic RecipesinAntiquity,” inI.Gafni, A.Oppenheimer,and D.Schwartz,
eds.,The Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman World: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern(Jerusalem:
Merkaz Shazar, 1996), pp. 453–65.
(^95) Himmelfarb,Ascent to Heaven, pp. 16–18. There are also some Canaanite hints in Watch-
ers: the sacred tree planted next to the heavenly temple, the theme of the battle between God
and Nature; note also Jerome’s comment that even in his time Jews were still observing the
ancient (Canaanite/Israelite) mourning customs of head shaving and flesh cutting, prohibited by
the Torah.