RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS 109in the late first century, gives an idea of the gloom prevailing among some of
the literate elites and subelites of Jewish Palestine after 70. What point is there,
the author argues, in trying to observe an unobservable covenant when God
rewards our efforts by destroying us? His response, according to one of the less
implausible modern interpretations—a kind of submission to fate accompa-
nied by a defiant assertion of the covenant’s enduring validity—is likely to have
consoled some people, or the book would not have been read and copied;
and one can, wit ha little empat hetic imagination (an imperfect tool but not
therefore to be wholly neglected), grasp the appeal of surrender in the imme-
diate aftermat hof t he destruction.^13 But it cannot have satisfied everyone, and
those whom it failed to satisfy will have reacted with panic, despair, and finally
abandonment of Judaism.
Other Jews greeted the end of the rule of the Temple and Torah as their
emancipation and rushed openly into the waiting embrace of the paganism
of the Greco-Roman cities of Palestine and elsewhere: Josephus may allude
disapprovingly to such people, and they may be the real historical types behind
Martial’s stable of burlesque Jewis hand crypto-Jewis hactors, poets, and derac-
inated urban debauchees.^14 Furthermore, these may be among the people said
by Suetonius to have been especially affected by Domitian’s harsh exaction of
the Jewish tax. This notice in the work of the imperial biographer and the
coin of Nerva celebrating the easing of the collection procedure may indicate
that such Jews were numerous.^15 Similarly, an enigmatic rabbinic passage (T.
Shabbat 15[16]:9) says that many Jewish men who had submitted to epispasm,
shaped by the Destruction, a point emphasized by, for example, Bokser, inThe Origin of the
Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986).
(^13) See M. Stone, e.g., inJewish Writings of the Second Temple Period,CRINT2.2 (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1984), pp. 412–14; but one cannot help being impressed by the difficulty of adequately
explaining the jarring transition halfway through the book from profound pessimism to standard
piety. I adopt Stone’s interpretation wit hdiffidence. For a general discussion of t he post-Destruc-
tion apocalypses, see C. Rowland, “The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Chris-
tian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material,” in J. D. G. Dunn, ed.,Jews and Christians: Parting of
the Ways, AD 70 to 134,WUNT66 (Tu ̈bingen: Mohr, 1991), pp. 213–37, esp. 219–22. Rowland
is especially good on why 4 Ezra’s surrender (for he too adopts Stone’s interpretation) may have
been attractive after 70.
(^14) See S. Schwartz,Josephus, pp. 176–77 and, for Martial, the relevant passages inGLAJJI.
(For a different approach to Martial, see M. Williams, “Domitian, the Jews and the ‘Judaizers’—
A Simple Matter of Cupiditas and Maiestas?”Historia39 [1990]: 196–211.) Josephus,Ant4.145–
49 seems, for example, to reflect arguments against legal observance used by Jews in Josephus’s
time—arguments that, interestingly enough, depend for their appeal on a critique of submission
to authority and of the Law’s empowerment of its mediators, exemplified by Moses. The account
as a whole (126–155) is a warning to such scoffers. Cf. also Syriac Baruch 41.3, “those who
forsake the covenant.”
(^15) See M. Goodman,Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the
Roman Empire(Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 121–24.