RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 59The Symbolic Significance of Torah and TempleBy the first centuryC.E., the Temple and Torah had been transformed into
central symbols of Palestinian Judaism. This transformation greatly enhanced
their actual political importance and ultimately loosened their dependence
on the brute realities of power and enabled them, or the memory of them, to
survive political displacement (in the case of the Torah) and destruction.
I will not try to explain this internalization of the value of the Temple and
Torah, beyond repeating that their political importance over half a millen-
nium or so necessarily had some influence on the collective mentality of the
Jews. But the effects of internalizationcanbe isolated and described. The
most striking and accessible examples concern, as I hinted above, the actual
physical objects as displayed, in the case of the Torah, or represented, either
pictoriallyorrhetorically.Afullcataloguewouldbeinstructivebutisunneces-
sary for my purposes. Rather, I will mention a few characteristic cases.
Given the importance of the Torah and Temple in Hasmonean ideology,
it may not be accidental that it is 1 Maccabees, a strongly pro-Hasmonean
book, that contains perhaps the earliest indications of the symbolic potency
of the Torah scroll.^27 At the time of the Antiochan persecution, in 167B.C.E.,
agents of the king are said not simply to have confiscated but to have ripped
up and burned Torah scrolls; possession of a scroll was a capital crime (1:56–
57). These claims may not be true. The parallel description of the persecution
in 2 Maccabees 6:4–7 is interestingly different; for one thing, it fails to men-
tion Torah scrolls. Which (if either) is a more accurate account of the events
of 167 cannot be determined in this case. It seems preferable to treat both
accounts as evidence for the ideological positions of their authors—a prefer-
ence confirmed by another story in 1 Maccabees in which display of a Torah
scroll is important (3:46–60, the assembly at Massepha) and again unparal-
leled in 2 Maccabees.^28 What we can learn from these passages about the
ideological position of 2 Maccabees is not my concern here. The La wis un-
questionably important in 2 Maccabees; why the physical object does not
figure in the account is a complex issue. It is perhaps worth remembering
the Herodians, for example, makes clear. See S. Schwartz,Josephus and Judaean Politics(Leiden:
Brill, 1990), pp. 110–69.
(^27) The Letter of Aristeas has traces of the same theme; its date is uncertain, but if Bickerman
was right to think that it was written around 130B.C.E. (“Zur Datierung des Pseudo-Aristeas,”
Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 1: 123–36), then it is approximately contemporary with
1 Macc. This indicates that the fetishization of the Torah scroll occurred also outside the context
of Hasmonean ideology; for some discussion see M. Goodman, “Texts, Scribes, and Power.”
(^28) Its parallel ought to be 2 Macc 8:12–20 where, instead of conducting an assembly dedicated
to the reading and observance of the Torah, Judas gives the sort of prebattle pep talk standard in
Greek historiography, in which the “ancestral constitution” (v. 17) is indeed invoked but is nei-
ther displayed nor consulted. The common temptation to find the 1 Macc account more credible
should be resisted.