RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 65reasonable to suppose that the ideological disharmony was itself the product
of a compromise between previously (viz., in the early Second Temple period
or the late Monarchy) opposed groups. Alternatively, it may be that such ten-
sionsareinfactcharacteristicofallbuttheverysimplestsocietiesandgenerate
rifts only rarely.
Contracts require volition. The Torah itself claims that Israel entered into
its agreement with God of its own free will—that the Israelites placed their
trust in God (he’eminu) and in his servant Moses when the latter saved them
from the Egyptians at the Red Sea. The Exodus was in fact consistently seen
in Israelite and Jewish literature as the legal foundation of the relationship of
mutualobligationbetweenthetwoparties,andthePentateuchalnarrativeand
subsequenthistories,fromJoshuathrough2Kings,areamongotherthingsthe
record of Israel’s bad faith and God’s patronal forbearance: Israel repeatedly
violates the contract, and God, instead of declaring the contract (and Israel)
void, repeatedly gives them another chance. This narrative presupposes that
the terms of the agreement may be difficult but are certainly observable (as is
stated explicitly in Deuteronomy 30:11–14), that Israel was able to keep to
the agreement but often failed to do so. Some first-century Jews disputed this:
the apostle Paul and the author of 4 Ezra at the end of the century both
claimed that the Law was impossible to observe. For Paul the Law’s unobserv-
ability abrogated the contract (though he was not consistent about this); for 4
Ezra it did not, but it meant that except for a fe wespecially righteous men
Israel is doomed. But these were necessarily exceptional positions among
those who remained Jewish,^40 Paul’s vie whaving been generated by his Chris-
tian zeal and 4 Ezra’s by his post-Destruction gloom. Anyone who accepted
the Covenant ipso facto affirmed the ideal observability of its terms.^41
Such a person also affirmed God’s absolute dependability to reward and
punish as appropriate, and so, by implication, that relations between God and
(^40) And we should not exclude the likelihood of widespread attrition after the destruction of
the temple in 70C.E. (see next chapter).
(^41) I follo wSanders in assuming the importance of the covenant as the foundation of Je wish
observance. Neusner, by contrast, argues from the rarity of the mention of the covenant in the
Mishnah for its unimportance in the Mishnaic system (and a fortiori in other “Judaisms”); see
Neusner, “Comparing Judaisms,”History of Religions18 (1978): 177–91, and note the absence
of the term, as far as I can make out, in the synthetic first chapters ofJudaism: The Evidence of the
Mishnah(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). This strikes me as empiricism reduced to
the absurd, for in fact the Mishnahneverexplains why one should observe the Law; it prescribes,
that is, neither covenantalism nor any alternative to it. This is because the Mishnah is a detailed
and systematicexpositionof the covenant’s terms, not a book of legal theory. Thus, it takes either
thecovenantor someotherlegaltheoryforgranted; sinceweknowofnofully articulatedtheoreti-
cal basis of halakhic observance in antiquity apart from the covenant, and since the covenant is
important in texts produced by groups closely connected to or descended from the framers of the
Mishnah, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Mishnah’s presumed basis for observance of the
la wis the covenant. For discussion, see Segal,Other Judaisms, pp. 147–65.