TWO

RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E.

I

BEGIN MY ACCOUNT of Palestinian Jewish society and the impact
of foreign rule on its integration by observing ho wthe three pillars of
ancient Judaism—the one God, the one Torah, and the one Temple—
cohere in a single neat, ideological system. I will then disturb this coherence,
first, by observing the messiness, diversity, and unpredictability of theeffects
of this system in Jewish Palestinian society in the first century and, second,
by noting the existence of a subsidiary ideological system—basically, a mildly
dualistic mythological narrative—that implicitly contradicted the main one.
I will then try to determine what its social effects might have been. Finally, I
will briefly discuss one of the outstanding characteristics of first-century Juda-
ism, sectarianism, and argue that the main sects were in fact an integral part
of the Torah-centered Judaean mainstream elite. Here I am taking issue with
the common characterization of ancient Judaism as radically diverse, a char-
acterization for which the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes are the main
evidence.^1 Though we know of more radical Jewish organizations in the first
century—the Christians are the best-known example—the three main sects
are evidence not simply of Judaism’s diversity but also of the power of its
ideological mainstream. For their part, the Christians illustrate the proposi-
tion that there were limits to acceptablediversity in ancient Judaism, for those
who remained Jewish did so by affirming their adherence to the Torah and
at least the idea of a temple, while the rest in short order ceased to regard
themselves as Jews.

God, Temple, and Torah in First-Century Palestine

The ideological complex I mentioned above, God-Temple-Torah, was sym-
bolically central in the Palestinian Judaism of the first century.^2 If many or
most Palestinian Jews had been asked what it was that made them what they
were (and it is worth remembering that few of them were ever asked such a

(^1) For an account that makes some points similar to mine, see J. D. G. Dunn, “Judaism in the
Land of Israel in the First Century,” in J. Neusner, ed.,Judaism in Late Antiquity, Part 2: Histori-
cal Syntheses(Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 229–61.
(^2) On ideology and symbol, see C. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” and “Ideology as
a Cultural System,”The Interpretation of Cultures(Ne wYork: Basic, 1973), pp. 87–125, 193–
233.