RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 63thought about them. In attempting to do this, we must first of all fall back on
the contents of the Torah itself and on what ancient Jews wrote about it and
the Temple. Of course, this will not answer the question, for the literature is
not simply evidence for what “the Jews” thought. In the first place, it is far
from clear how much access most Palestinian Jews had to knowledge of the
contents of the Torah. The synagogue, where Torah scrolls could probably be
found and were probably read on a weekly basis, was not yet widespread.
Nevertheless, there were some synagogues, and, if Josephus’s story mentioned
above may be believed, some villages possessed Torah scrolls, whether or not
they had synagogues. It is also likely that whatever liturgical activity went on
in the towns and villages of Jewish Palestine was informed by some knowledge
of the Torah, and certain that some parts of the public liturgy of the temple—
the firstfruits ceremony (Deuteronomy 26:1–11), the paschal sacrifice (Exo-
dus 12)—were.
However, weknowonly what we can read in books written in the later
Second Temple period, and the literate were ipso facto unrepresentative; fur-
thermore, they were often priests or experts in the Torah—that is, mediators
between the central institutions and the population at large, who shared, and
had a professionalinterest in promoting, theirinstitutions’ ideologies. Though
this fact is important in itself as a demonstration of the generative power of
these ideologies (see below), it also implies that the literature throws up a sort
of mirage. The coherent worldview that can be extracted from it cannot be
assumed to be characteristic of “the Jews,” for its coherence (which I am
intentionally overstating here) is the creation of the ideologues who wrote
the books. Nevertheless, a description of the components of this ideological
complex (which I would not hesitate to describe as normative, i.e., politically
authoritative) is necessary if we are to understand how it functioned in Pales-
tinianJewishsocietyandhowitinteractedwithideologicalsystemswithwhich
it coexisted.
God, Temple, and Torah constituted an ideological complex of remarkable
simplicity. If its neatness and coherence gave it a certain force, its clear inade-
quacy as an explanation of the operation of the human world was its potential
weakness. Everything in the system was unique: the one God chose the one
people of Israel as his own, and the one Temple as the only place where they
might worship him. He also gave them the one Torah, whose laws they are
obliged to study and observe. The Torah was of course not only a law book
(nomos), which was how its Greek translators represented it.^36 Nor was it only
(^36) For a survey of the endless theological debate about the propriety of the Greek translation,
a corollary of the central, even more theologically loaded debate about whether Judaism was
“legalistic”(towhichthecorrectansweris,Ofcourse,andwhatofit?),seeS.Westerholm,“Torah,
Nomos and Law,” in P. Richardson and S. Westerholm, eds.La win Religious Communities in the
Roman Period: The Debate over Torah and Nomos in Post-Biblical Judaism and Early Christianity
(Waterloo: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1991), pp. 45–56; cf. A. Segal,The
Other Judaisms of Late Antiquity(Atlanta: Scholars, 1987), pp. 131–46.