64 CHAPTER TWOa constitution (politeia), as Jewish apologists and Greek diplomats said, al-
though it certainly functioned as one. Nor indeed was it merely the national
epic of a recalcitrant people, as it seems if one reads only the narrative and
skips the laws. It was primarily the record of an agreement—a contract be-
tween God and his people—obligating Israel to observe the laws specified in
the contract, and God in return to protect Israel. There is nothing uniquely
Jewish about the idea that thepax Dei(ordeorum) is secured by following a
set of (usually cultic) rules; and anyone familiar with the history of the rise of
the Greekpoliswill recognize the conception of the fundamentally egalitar-
ian national community underlying the contemporaneous biblical notion of
“Israel.” But the explicit framing of a national la wcode/constitution/epic as a
written contract between a people and its patron deity has no precise parallel
in antiquity, to the best of my knowledge.^37
Inany case,the ideologicalsystem embodiedinthe Torahimplies aspecific
worldview (whose classic postbiblical formulations are in theWisdom of Jesus
b. Sira, also calledEcclesiasticus, and in theJewish AntiquitiesandAgainst
Apionof Josephus): its vision of society is characterized by a mild tension
between hierarchical and egalitarian principles, of the human condition opti-
mistic, and of the cosmos irenic and nonmythological.^38 That is, “Israelite
society,” in its ideal form, is egalitarian in that all adult males share the obliga-
tion to kno wand observe God’s la ws but hierarchical in that a hereditary
priesthood is assigned a special role in maintaining God’s favor toward Israel
throughproperconduct ofthecultandinterpretationof thelaws.Manyschol-
ars have supposed that this tension between egalitarianism and hierarchy was
a formative one in ancient Judaism, that, for example, it helps account for the
rise of sectarianism and the beginnings of Christianity. It is indeed perfectly
plausible to suppose that different groups emphasized different things—Phari-
sees, perhaps, the egalitarian aspect, priests and Sadducees, the hierarchical.
Nevertheless, there is remarkably little evidence, between 200B.C.E. and 70
C.E., that this ideological faultline produced clear-cut social rifts: Pharisees,
some of whom were themselves priests, could not ignore the special authority
the Torah gives to priests and the cult (at any rate, their rabbinic descendants
certainly acknowledged their importance), and priests could not ignore the
obligations that the Torah imposes on all Israel equally.^39 It is perhaps more
(^37) Compare Millar, “Background to the Maccabean Revolution,” 6–12.
(^38) This is close to the characterization of ancient Judaism as a whole in the works of G. F.
Moore and E. P. Sanders, both of whom drastically underestimated the importance of the irratio-
nal.
(^39) There may be a growing tendency in scholarship to minimize the effects of this tension and
its close relative, the supposed priest-scribe antinomy: see Himmelfarb, “Kingdom,” and S.
Fraade’s forthcoming work on scribes mentioned by M. Himmelfarb,Ascent to Heaven in Jewish
and Christian Apocalypses(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 24 n. 86, in which he
argues that most scribes were in fact priests. See also Schwartz,Josephus,p.69.