60 CHAPTER TWOthat 2 Maccabees, concerned as it is with the temple, warns against excessive
reverence for its structure (5:19–20).^29 This may indicate that its author was
anxious about attributing power to physical objects; but there is no way of
tellinghowwidespreadsuchanxietymayhavebeen.Atanyrate,1Maccabees,
a book that reads as if itoughtto be a straightforward presentation of the
Hasmonean party line, does not share this anxiety about sacred objects, for it
suggeststhat theTorahscrollitself somehowrepresentsJewishness. Itsdestruc-
tion is a synecdoche; it stands in for what Antiochus tried to do to the special
lifestyle prescribed by the Torah, namely, to Judaism. And its display by Judas
reminds “Israel” (that is, Judas’s supporters) what they are fighting for.
Similar concerns are manifest at the other end of the period under discus-
sion, in the works of Josephus. It is first of all interesting to find Josephus, in
the introduction toAntiquitiesand in the account inAntiquities12 of the
translation of the Torah into Greek, appropriating pseudo-Aristeas’s peculiar
reverence for the actual words of the Torah, and his attribution to them of
power best described as magical. Josephus hesitates about revealing the con-
tents of the Torah to outsiders and is aware that God sometimes punished
pagans like the historian Theopompus who looked into the Law; but he con-
cludes, following his Alexandrian source, that the contents of the Torah may
be revealed. Why? Perhaps he thought that God, in approving its publication
in Greek, had implicitly approved its revelation to gentiles, too; or perhaps,
as Josephus himself says, because it was customary among the Jews not to
conceal their “beautiful things” (if so, then why the anxiety?).^30
Such deliberations may admittedly tell us mainly about Josephus, though
there is little reason to think that his attitude to the Torah was drastically differ-
ent from that of other well-educated Jerusalem priests who survived the de-
struction of the temple—a class that may have been numerous and influential.
ButJosephusalsoreports storiesthattakefor grantedamore generalattribution
of symbolic forcetothe Torahscroll,though preciselyho wgeneralitisimpossi-
ble to tell. In the early 50s, a member of a unit of Roman troops searching
some north Judaean villages for brigands found in one of them a Torah scroll
(this may imply that not every Judaean village possessed one), which he cut
up and, in one version of the story, burned. According to Josephus, masses of
(^29) On the Temple in 2 Macc, see R. Doran,Temple Propaganda: The Purpose and Character
of 2 Maccabees(Washington: Catholic Biblical Association 1981).
(^30) SeeAnt12.110–3, with Aristeas 312ff. Both report that Ptolemy “prostrated himself” (pro-
skunein) to the book (pace Marcus’s apologetic comment ad loc., the antecedent of the pronoun
autois, the indirect object ofproskunein, is unambiguous). They also report God’s punishment
of Theopompus and the poet Theodectes, who had looked into the Law. Why then did God not
punishPtolemy II,whohadthe Lawtranslated?In AristeasandAnt12 theansweris clearenough:
God himself approved of the translation. InAnt1.9–11, though, Josephus implicitly rejects this
vie wand argues that the high priest Elazar’s decision to oversee the translation demonstrates that
the Torah is a public document.