RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 67portant qualification (because it applies to all Jews, not only sectarians) is that
thecomplexGod-Temple-Torah—althoughitwaspoliticallyandsymbolically
potent—does not imply that all Jews actually lived their lives according to the
rules prescribed by the system; that is, it implies disappointingly little about
the texture of daily, private life.^43
One reason for this is thatnoset of prescriptions can be assumed to control
completely the lives of those to whom they are addressed; even laws whose
desirability has been to some extent internalized and theoretically are backed
by the full force of a totalitarian, militarist government will necessarily be
violated and evaded; standards of behavior and patterns of social relations in
place when the prescriptive system is introduced cannot be totally eradicated
(no government has ever been able to maintain complete control) and are
likely to end by reshaping the very prescriptive system introduced to supplant
them. There is absolutely no reason to think ancient Jewish society differed
in this respect from any other. Indeed, this consideration, though it certainly
applies to Judaea proper, is even more critical for the way we should think
about the other districts of Jewish Palestine, where for many people the gulf
between (recognizably Jewish) public and (still conspicuously Idumaean,
Galilean, etc.) private life must, even in the first century, have been deep.
A complicating factor—one that is presumably characteristic, mutatis mu-
tandis, of all written law codes—is the well-known opacity of Pentateuchal
prescription. That it was often difficult, even for those intent on precise obser-
vance of the Law, to determine what the Law requires, created the need for a
class of expert interpreters, and it had the effect of rendering the system fluid
and, inprinciple, reconcilablewith allsorts oflocal varietiesof practice.Thus,
for example, the Pentateuch instructs the man who comes to hate his wife to
give her asefer keritut(“bill of divorcement”: Deuteronomy 24:1ff.) but no-
where says what this document should contain. In practice, the contents of
the document, as well as the actual terms of the divorce, must have been
determined by the scribe who wrote it, in accordance with local custom,
which may have varied widely from place to place.^44 We should furthermore
not exclude the possibility that men sometimes dismissed their wives without
a written document or that wives divorced their husbands, as is attested in the
Herodian family (Ant15.259–60), perhaps in accordance with Idumaean law,
and perhaps also in a recently published Judaean document. Additionally, it
(^43) Here I disagree with Sanders, who has produced a detailed description of Palestinian Jewish
life in the first century largely on the basis of biblical prescription inJudaism, Practice, and Belief:
63 BCE–66 CE(Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).
(^44) In fact local variations are impossible to detect, since there is only one extant divorce docu-
ment from pre-70 Jewish Palestine; see P. Benoit, J. T. Milik, and R. de Vaux,Les grottes de
Murabba’at, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961). = P.Murab. 19,
drawn up at Masada, perhaps in 111C.E.