ONE

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

I

N THIS CHAPTER I provide some of the political and social back-
ground for the discussion in chapter 2 of the functioning of a loosely
integrated Palestinian Jewish society in the later first millenniumB.C.E.I
focus here on some of the crucial episodes in the prehistory of Jews’ political
and social integration: the activities of Ezra and Nehemiah (about which little
can really be known), the Maccabean revolt, the fundamentally important
but little studied or understood Hasmonean expansion, and, perhaps rather
surprisingly, the activities of Herod. I also offer an account of “hellenization,”
a process—or rather a complex of processes—that might have been expected
to hinder the Jews’ internal integration by introducing or sharpening social
divisions between Jews and by allowing some or many among the elites to
cease regarding themselves as Jewish at all. But hellenization is a rather mis-
leading concept that requires critical attention.

Persian Sponsorship of the Jerusalem Temple

and the Torah of Moses^1

I assume that the Israelite religion, as practiced before the destruction of the
kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 586B.C.E., was distinct from the
religion practiced by the Israelites’ putative descendants, the Jews, in the Sec-
ond Temple period.^2 The Israelites, to be sure, worshiped Yahweh, whose cult
was then, as later, centered in Jerusalem, and they seem to have shared many

(^1) A bibliographical note: this chapter covers well-trodden ground; it would be counterproduc-
tive even to aspire to provide comprehensive annotation for relatively uncontentious points (there
are no absolutely uncontentious points). It will suffice here to refer to the standard handbooks,
especially E. Schu ̈rer,A History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D.
135), ed. and rev. by G. Vermes, F. Millar et al., 4 vols. (Edinburgh:T&TClark, 1973–1987);
L. Grabbe,Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), containing much
recent bibliography. P. Scha ̈fer,The History of the Jews in Antiquity(Luxembourg: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1995), provides an especially accessible and reliable account of political
history.
(^2) I am following a tendency in scholarship that starts with Wellhausen and was much later
taken up by Morton Smith,Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament(New
York: Columbia University Press, 1971), and has now gained widespread acceptance, especially
in circles not influenced by Yehezkel Kaufmann; see, for example, N. P. Lemche,Ancient Israel:
A New History of Israelite Society(Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press, 1988).