‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 125
on whom the sun has set.” ’ Such doctrines might lead to disputes of
considerable significance for the validity of Temple worship carried out
by priests deemed incorrectly purified from pollution.^23
Underlying these specific areas of practical disagreement lay a fund-
amentally distinctive interpretation of the Torah. Sadducees, wrote
Josephus, ‘hold that only those regulations should be considered valid
which were written down, and that those which had been handed down
from the tradition of the fathers need not be observed’. Such biblical
fundamentalism was revolutionary, overturning the practices of gener-
ations, and it had consequences. It led, for instance, to a different
interpretation from other Jews of the biblical injunctions in relation to
the omer, the sheaf of barley offered in the Temple in Jerusalem just
after Pesach. It affected also the counting of seven weeks from then to
Shavuot, when two loaves of wheat were offered in the Temple to mark
the start of the wheat harvest. The biblical text requires this counting
(known as ‘counting the omer ’) to start on the day after the Sabbath
after Pesach, which most Jews took to refer to the second day of Pesach
(taking ‘Sabbath’ to mean the festival itself). But the Sadducees (in rab-
binic texts, ‘Boethusians’) took ‘the day after the Sabbath’ to refer to the
Sunday after Pesach (taking ‘Sabbath’ literally). The issue was probably
in part a desire to avoid violating the Sabbath by harvesting the omer
sheaf on a Saturday if the first day of Pesach fell on a Friday. But the
result was momentous: Sadducees will have found themselves celebrat-
ing Shavuot, the fiftieth day of the omer counting, on a day different
from other Jews.^24
It is very hard to know how reliance on the biblical text alone could
be possible. Like later fundamentalists, such as the Karaites (see Chapter
12), Sadducees must have developed their own systems of interpretation,
whatever they claimed about their attitude to tradition.^25 Of greatest dif-
ficulty for readers of the Bible might be thought the view of the role of
God in human affairs ascribed to the Sadducees by Josephus:
Sadducees ... do away with Fate altogether and place God beyond both
the committing and the contemplating of evil: they claim that both the
honourable and the despicable reside in the choice of human beings, and
that it is according to the judgement of each person to embrace either of
these. The survival of the soul, the punishments and rewards in Hades –
they do away with them. And whereas Pharisees are mutually affectionate
and cultivate concord in relation to the community, Sadducees have a
rather harsh disposition even towards one another.^26