normative alternatives to the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem Temple. Indeed, with
the destruction of the Temple, and with the realization that the opportunity to
re-establish that Temple was a remote eventuality (confirmed by the failure of the
Bar Kochba rebellion), these normative institutions of the Diaspora became the norm
for Palestinian Jews as well. In fact, ample evidence shows that these institutions –
synagogue, public reading of scriptures and scriptural lessons, and prayer – had taken
hold in the Land of Israel by the first century ce, before the Temple’s destruction
in 70. Moreover, as I have remarked earlier, the adoption of a cult without sacrifice,
but exclusivelyof words, not only distinguished Diaspora Jews from their brethren
in the Land of Israel (at least before 70); it also was an oddity in the urban settings
of the Roman Mediterranean as a whole, another factor perhaps in some Latin and
Greek authors’ assertions that (Diaspora) Jews were atheists, since these Jews
seemed not to practice a sacrificial cult of even their own national god, YHWH.
All this being said, the disjuncture between the socially constructed world
enjoined by the scriptures and the circumstances of Jews in the Roman Diaspora is
much more profound than the challenges presented by distance from Jerusalem and
scriptures’ interdiction of sacrifice to YHWH anywhere other than the Jerusalem
Temple. This challenge is simply symptomatic. Biblical literature’s most basic pat-
terning of things will have been experienced as fundamentally problematic for
Greco-Roman Diaspora Jews. Measured against the basic world view of the Torah
of Moses, Diaspora Jews lived outside theLand in the unclean lands of the nations,
far from the Temple, for which purity maintenance served to create guarded and
bounded concentric circles of holiness, and from which YHWH’s life-giving and order-
ing power flowed. The further from the source, as we have seen above, the more
diluted that power by forces of uncleanness. Yet it was in this more diluted, remote
territory that Roman Diaspora Jews lived. Moreover, apart from this fundamental
patterning and the sets of meanings and perceptions conveyed by them, to what end
was the observance of the Torah’s injunctions and prohibitions serving to maintain
the Jews as a “people apart,” observing cultic festivals and rites serving to keep YHWH’s
life-giving presence in his Temple? In other words, Diaspora Jews might appropri-
ate many of the particulars enjoined by Torah law and see their identity as reflected
in the Torah’s narrative, but the particulars no longer “fit” into the whole of which
they are constituent elements. This, not the inability to worship YHWH via sacrifice
as enjoined in scriptures, constituted the fundamental problem and challenge for
Greco-Roman Diaspora Jewry’s construction of a “self-evidently” appropriate and
“plausible” world understood (both by Diaspora Jews and by their Jewish brethren
in the homeland) to be legitimated by the authority of the Torah of Moses. What
Roman Diaspora Jews gleaned from the Bible and biblical Judaism, as well as
non-, post-, or para-biblical institutions, such as the synagogue, scriptural readings,
scriptural lessons, prayer, and others which we shall discuss later – all these had to
fit within some newor other“whole,” some novel, overarching perception of the
shape and nature of their “world.” After I have articulated briefly this new whole,
I shall discuss such institutions as the synagogue and prayer, and other phenomena
characteristic of Roman Diaspora Judaism, as elements of this typically Diaspora
“world.”
368 Jack N. Lightstone