98 CHAPTER TWOthe sectarians even as disagreement over details of interpretation divided
them; the weakness of central control over the religious life of the country—
at a time when the high priests were a loosely constituted group rather than
members of a single dynasty. They were relatively disempowered by the mild
interventionism that distinguished the Romans, even before they openly an-
nexed their eastern client kingdoms, from their Macedonian and Persian pre-
decessors, and furthermore they had to cope with a society larger and mas-
sively more complex than it had been before the reign of Herod. Finally,
the importance of sectarianism demonstrates the anomalous character of the
economy and society of first-century Judaea, which had produced an unusu-
ally large class of well-to-do, pious, educated, and idle young men.^130
But the sects had little discernible impact on Palestinian Jewish society as
a whole. To the extent that local scribes, judges, and teachers belonged to one
or another sect, they presumably tried to use their version of the laws of the
Torah in arbitration, contracts, and so on, and may thereby have contributed
to the local differences in practice discussed above. But there is no reason to
believe that the villagers who patronized and were patronized by such officials
were interested in their sectarian affiliations. Popular supporters of sectarian
groups played no known role in Palestinian Jewish history in the first century,
unless one joins Josephus in counting the “fourth philosophy” (probably
someho wconnected to thesicarii) as a sect.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have been arguing that, as a result of the enduring tendency
of the imperial rulers of the eastern Mediterranean to rule partly autonomous
regions through local agents, a Jewish society gradually coalesced in Palestine.
We may speak, for the later Second Temple period, of Judaism in the singular
as the integrating ideology of the society. Judaism was complex and rather
baggy,andthefactthatmostJewsprofessedadherencetoittellsussurprisingly
little about ho wthey actually conducted their lives. The symbolic and practi-
cal importance of the Torah and Temple informs us mainly that their human
representatives were engaged in constant acts of intermediation between the
norms of Judaism and the behavior of the Jews. Furthermore, the chronic
weakness of central control meant that the norms themselves were constantly
disputed by the scribal and priestly elites and subelites. This dispute blos-
somed into the sectarianism that was so important in Josephus’s narrative and
in real life far from marginal in Judaea, at least in the first century. Neverthe-
(^130) Which raises a question that will not detain us here: given that these same young men went
on to form the backbone of the Judaean revolutionary movements, we may wonder why piety in
the end failed to satisfy them.