According to the late biblical tradition of the Land of Israel, the maintenance of
these concentric circles of holiness required, as well, the organization of the People
of Israel in a hereditary caste system, again in concentric circles of holiness: at the
center the high priest, the chief officer of the Temple; the members of the priestly
families, who performed the rites of the Temple; supporting clans of the Levites,
a caste of Temple workers and officials; surrounded and supported by the caste of
Israelites, the remainder of the nation. Upon each caste were incumbent different
levels of purity maintenance, and since these castes were hereditary, endogamy and
rules about who might marry whom were of the utmost importance.
Beyond the Israelites were the other nations of the earth, who did not acknow-
ledge YHWH or practice his laws of purity, and therefore, unbeknown to them-
selves, endangered the very continued welfare of the world, because they let the
powers of uncleanness run rampant. In other words, if uncleanness was kept away
from the center, YHWH’s life-giving and world-maintaining power could flow out
of it to the world, albeit diluted and dispelled by uncleanness as it reached areas in
which the necessary purity rites were either unknown or not practiced. In this sense,
all of the people of Israel (in their Land) constituted “a kingdom of priests and a
holy nation” (Exodus 19. 6) for all nations.
It is clear that the biblical tradition, inherited and revered by the Diaspora
Greco-Roman Jewish communities, replicated in sphere after sphere the same basic
patterning – both in human life and activity, and in the perceived spatial ordering
of earthly territory. In all these spheres one encounters the model of concentric spheres
of increasing holiness – the whole intended to maintain at the center a kind of
“life-giving,” world-ordering “machine.”
It is also clear that Roman Diaspora Jews (1) understood their identity in terms
of the biblical tradition’s basic narrative, (2) inherited the late biblical tradition’s
monotheism, and depended upon biblical law for (3) family law, (4) life-cycle rites,
(5) dietary law, and (6) their calendar of weekly Sabbaths and festivals. The biblical
literature, and especially the Psalms, (7) provided the texts for prayer. And the bib-
lical tradition lay at the center of (8) Diaspora Jews’ continued relation with and
support for the institutions of the Land of Israel, especially the Jerusalem Temple
until its destruction inad 70, although, as we discuss at length below, Diaspora Jews
had especially to reconceptualize and recontextualize their “world’s” relationship to
the Jerusalem Temple, as defined in biblical Judaism.
Permit me to note those elements of biblical-inspired law, teaching, and tradition
adopted or adapted by Greco-Roman Diaspora Jews for which evidence is most
abundant and explicit (see Sanders 1999).
Diaspora identity and the biblical narrativeThere is ample evidence that Jews of the Greco-Roman Diaspora understood them-
selves to be that people with whom YHWH made a covenant via the agency of
Abraham, their common ancestor, and to whom YHWH revealed completely and
finally his law (Torah/nomos) via the agency of Moses. From the biblical narrative
they understood the Land of Israel to be their homeland. And the biblical accountRoman Diaspora Judaism 359