RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 83substanceofJewishscribalesotericism;Iwishonlytosuggestaninternalsocial
dynamic that might have made the influence productive.
The myth also had a function outside the scribal circles that formulated it.
It was a way of compensating for the deficiencies of the covenantal system.
Clearly, as a cosmology and an anthropology the covenant, for all its elegant
simplicity (or rather because of it) was problematic. Life does not work the
way the covenantal system says it should: God manifestly does not reward the
righteous and punish the wicked, and Israel’s observance of the covenant and
performance of the cult does not guarantee its well-being. This problem was
apparently recognized even by the classical formulators of the covenantal ide-
ology in the sixth centuryB.C.E. Their main work, the Deuteronomic history
(the name scholars give to Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) is after all a
sustained attempt toarguethat the history of Israel conformed with and so
confirmed the covenantal worldview; that God let Israel prosper when it ob-
served his commandments and punished it when it did not. To argue this
they had to explain away such inconvenient but generally known facts as the
prosperity of the “sinful” Northern Kingdom, the success of the wicked Judah-
ite king Manasseh, and (most troubling of all because most recent) the failure
of the pious Josiah and the destruction of his kingdom not long after the
imposition of religious reforms undertaken in the spirit of the Deuteronomists
themselves!
As we have already seen, Jewish writers of the third centuryB.C.E. were
peculiarly concerned with the failure of the covenantal system to explain evil.
To recapitulate, for Koheleth, as for many Greek thinkers (by whom he may
not have been directly influenced), the response was to combine philosophi-
cal nihilism (God is not in control; the laws of nature are unchanging but
blind; there is no point to anything, etc., etc.) with conformity with the re-
quirements of the La w(since there is no point in not observing it).^85 Ben Sira,
who wrote about 190B.C.E., simply denied that there was a problem and
stolidly affirmed the adequacy of Deuteronomic piety. And the author of the
Book of Watchers responded with mythopoiesis.
It is an obvious inference from the fact that the books long continued to be
copied and read that at various times various members of the Palestinian Jew-
ishelites andsubelitesfoundall theseresponsesattractive.^86 But themytholog-
Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins(Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University
Press, 1977), e.g., p. 71, referring to the “scribalization of prophecy.”
(^85) See Bickerman,Four Strange Books; see also N. Whybray, “The Social Worldof the Wisdom
Writers,” in R. E. Clements, ed.,The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological, and
Political Perspectives(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 242–44.
(^86) I am assuming that the very act of writing marked these authors as either elites (leading
priests or landowners) or subelites (relatively well-to-do/respectable priests/scribes), classes that
even when combined can scarcely have numbered more than a few hundred in Judaea around
200 B.C.E. Some have supposed that greater specificity is possible, especially in the case of Kohel-