Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

52 CHAPTER TWO

their subversive character and become a naturalized part of the local version
of Judaism—a body of practice roughly comparable to what in the Middle
Ages would have been calledminhag.^9 The situation in the other districts may
have been similar: I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that in the first cen-
tury the temple exerted a far weaker economic influence in Galilee than in
Judaea.^10 This implies that Galileans were less willing than Judaeans to hand
over their surplus production to the temple and its staff, which suggests that
devotion to the temple was less widespread and deep there. But not nonexis-
tent: Josephus reports that Jerusalem priests could apparently expect a priestly
gift-gathering expedition to Galilee to yield a profit. And when the Roman
legions invaded Palestine in 67C.E., several thousand Galileans and Idu-
maeans marched on Jerusalem and endeavored to seize control of the temple.
Therefore, though we can be fairly certain that by the first centuryC.E.
most inhabitants of the non-Judaean districts of the Palestinian hinterland
had by and large internalized some version of the ideology that was centrally
constitutive of Judaism, we must not assume that their Judaism was indistin-
guishable from that of the Judaeans.

Temple and Torah in Jewish Society

In arguing for the symbolic centrality of Temple and Torah, I begin with an
account of their actual role in Judaean and, later, Palestinian Jewish society.
Almost every imperial and native ruler of Palestine from Darius I in 515B.C.E.
(or, at any rate, from sometime in the Achaemenid period, if one is reluctant
tobelieveEzra-Nehemiah)to Nero,attheoutbreakof theJewish revoltagainst
Rome in the summer of 66C.E., supported the Temple of Jerusalem—and its
priestly staff—to the exclusion of all other Yahwist (and a fortiori non-Yahwist)
shrines in Judaea and later in the Palestinian hinterland (leaving aside as al-
ways the case of Samaria).^11 The character of imperial support for the temple

(^9) Too little is known to provide many details. However, one case may be suggested: burial in
kokhimis attested at Khirbet Za’aquqa in Idumaea as early as c.300B.C.E. and was the standard
mode of burial in third- and second-century Marisa. The practice not only persisted locally after
the judaization but even spread to Judaea, where it predominated by the first centuryC.E., and
then to the rest of Jewish Palestine. For Khirbet Za’aquqa, see A. Kloner, D. Regev, and U.
Rappaport, “A Burial Cave from the Hellenistic Period,”Atiqot21 (1992): 27–50 (in Hebrew);
for Marisa, Oren, and Rappaport, “Necropolis of Marisa.” For some additional reflections on
conversionist religious and cultural systems, see S. Schwartz, “Hellenization of Jerusalem.”
(^10) See S. Schwartz, “Josephus in Galilee: Rural Patronage and Social Breakdown,” in eds., F.
parente and J. Sievers,Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of
Morton Smith(Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 290–306. L. Schiffman’s discussion, “Was There a Gali-
lean Halakhah?” in L. Levine, ed.,The Galilee in Late Antiquity(Ne wYork: Je wish Theological
Seminary, 1992), pp. 143–56, is problematic.
(^11) The chief exception to this rule, the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV, is well-known. There
are also a number of questionable cases. Alexander the Great may have recognized the Temple
and the priesthood, and the right of the Judaeans to use their own laws—as Judaean propaganda