CONCLUSION

T

HE MAIN ARGUMENT of this book has been that attempts to make
sense of the remains of ancient Judaism must consider the effects of
shifting types of imperial domination .The complex, loosely central-
ized but still basically unitary Jewish society that may be inferred from the
artifacts of the last two hundred years of the Second Temple period was in
part produced by a long history of imperial empowerment of Jewish leaders.
The fragmentation characteristic of the Jewish remains of the high imperial
period imply a profound but partial accommodation to direct Roman rule,
hastened by the disastrous failure of the revolts of 66 and 132 .The Jewish
cultural explosion of late antiquity, which can be read from a revival of literary
production and the emergence and diffusion of a distinctively Jewish art and
archaeology, is in complex ways a response to the gradual christianization of
the Roman Empire.
This explanatory scheme has several advantages .It helps integrate the Jews
into the history of the ancient eastern Mediterranean, allowing us to see how
they were simultaneously like and unlike all other subjects .The Jews may
thus be made to serve in some ways as exemplary—even in their difference—
filling in part of a larger picture of the effects of Roman domination, supple-
menting the very different kinds of information available from, for example,
Egypt.
In addition, treating the evidence whole and in the broadest possible con-
text partly solves (nothing can ever fully solve) the problem of infinite regres-
sion that I think inescapably affects the monographic approach to ancient
Judaism .That is, in order to begin interpreting some small body of material
(indeed, even to decide what constitutes an appropriate body of material to
study), we must make all sorts of quite specific assumptions about its historical
antecedents, context, and effects .For example, in an earlier book, I tried to
read the works of Josephus in light of the assumption that they testify to a post-
Destruction shift in Jewish politics from priestly to rabbinic or patriarchal
authority .But the conviction that such a shift occurred depended on a particu-
lar type of reading of Josephus and of the rabbinic corpus—readings that them-
selves depended on fairly specific hypotheses about the history of the Jews
both long before and long after the Destruction .Since this sort of regression
is, as I have just observed, infinite, expanding the scope of the investigation
cannot eliminate it .But it can at least make the ground a bit firmer, the
hypothetical structure a bit more solid.
Finally, the approach I have adopted here has the advantage of making
sense not only of the specific pieces of evidence but also of the contours of
the evidence as a whole .In other words, considering the wider political and