8. Preoccupations and Expectations
It will have become apparent in the course of the last two chapters that
even Jews who disagreed on fundamental matters during the late Second
Temple period shared a common concern for issues on which they
focused their enthusiasm. Jews of many different religious persuasions,
it seems, had views on purity and how to observe the Sabbath. There
was considerable discussion about the correct computation of the calen-
dar and the validity of oaths. There was much speculation about demons
and angels. There was wide concern for prophecy about the immediate
and eschatological future, and debate about the value of martyrdom
and expectation for life after death. None of these concerns was the sole
property of any one group or philosophy within Judaism in the first
century ce. On the contrary, these preoccupations were widely shared
and constituted the main topics for innovation and argument across the
whole spectrum of late Second Temple Judaism.
Purity, Sabbath and Calendar
The laws of purity were laid out in considerable detail in the Pentateuch,
as we have seen (Chapter 4), but in the late Second Temple period many
Jews discussed intensively both the relation of pollution to sin and the
mechanics of acquiring pollution and of cleansing. Biblical notions of
impurity applied both to ritual pollution which came from natural pro-
cesses such as death, sex and disease and were reckoned physically
contagious, causing impurity to a lesser degree, and to moral pollution.
Thus the language of ritual impurity applied metaphorically to sin, so
that the Psalmist pleaded ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean’
and Isaiah looked forward to the time when ‘the Lord has washed away
the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleaned the bloodstains of Jeru-
salem from its midst by a spirit of judgement and a spirit of burning’.