66 CHAPTER TWOhumanity are not subject to interference by other powers. The cosmos is thus
a simple, well-ordered place—a cosmos in the literal sense. This does not
exclude the possibility that God shares heaven with other divine beings (the
Pentateuch itself mentions angels), but does require that these beings be non-
volitional, mere executors of God’s will, or hypostases of his attributes, in
any case, absolutely his subordinates (the apparent exception is the highly
enigmatic story of the descent of the sons of [the] god[s] in Genesis 6:1–4; see
below). In this view,then, the cosmic world is not rivenby conflict and shaken
by instability; it is thus devoid of drama and cannot be described by means of
mythological narrative. The Hebrew Bible, as is well known, is nearly devoid
of cosmic mythology, though traces are detectable. In the main, its mytholo-
gizing is historical and concerns the vicissitudes of the behavior and fortunes
of Israel and its neighbors, not those of the divine world.
Deviance?What does this ideological system teach us about the beliefs and behavior of
the Jews of first-century Palestine? Can we treat it as if it were simply an
articulate, concentrated, and coherent expression of what for most Jews was
embedded and diffuse? Can we follow Sanders in supposing that most Jews
more or less believed in something like the “covenantal nomism” that I have
just described? Can we, in sum, predict the behavior of the Jews from the
prescriptions of the Torah, if we know they considered them a central compo-
nent of their symbolic world?
The conventional answers to all these questions, at least among scholars
not totally silenced by skepticism, is yes. Indeed, the “covenantal nomism”
extractable from the Pentateuch and later texts presumably has some rough
correspondence to what many Jews occasionally believed, though “belief” is
such a mercurial category of experience that any statement about what a large
number of people believe necessarily flirts with meaninglessness.^42 It is prefer-
able to examine action, which at least sometimes leaves traces: when we do
so, we find, as I observed above, that the texture of public life in the Jewish
parts of Palestine—characterized as it was by the absence of pagan shrines,
and so on—was indeed broadly influenced by the prescriptions of the Torah.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to be cautious. In the first place, I ob-
served above that the very symbolic power of the central institutions could
generate sectarian disregard for or opposition to them. A much more im-
(^42) This much at least may be extracted from Paul Veyne,Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?
An Essay in the Constitutive Imagination(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For a
more positive account, emphasizing the difficulty and unprofitability, but not the impossibility
and uselessness, of utilizing belief as a sociological category, see A. Eisen,Rethinking Modern
Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp.
8–19. Eisen, too, advocates attending primarily to behavior in the sociology of religion.