religion without a Temple and sacrifice in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruc-
tion. Rather Roman Diaspora Judaism developed in, and in response to, the social
and cultural context outside the Land of Israel, while late biblical Judaism still thrived
in the Land.Roman Diaspora Judaism, biblical literature, and late
biblical Judaism: continuities, dependence, and appropriation
I have proffered the view that an important element in any socially constructed world
experienced by its inhabitants as plausible and self-evidently appropriate is the shared
perception of continuity with an authoritative past. Without a doubt, biblical
literature and late biblical Judaism, in the main constructs of the Land of Israel,
provided the principal elements of that continuity for all Jews in the Roman era,
whether living in their “homeland” or in the Diaspora (see e.g. Sanders 1999).
We can be confident that Jews in the Greco-Roman Diaspora read, principally in
Greek translation, the biblical literature, which had been composed in Hebrew with
some few Aramaic texts, and promulgated and accepted as authoritative in the Land
of Israel during the second Temple Period (late sixth century bceto late first
century ce). Like the Jews of the Land, Greco-Roman Jews understood that this
biblical collection comprised three parts or classes of documents: the most holy was
“the Torah of Moses,” rendered in Greek as “the Law of Moses;” the second part
was the collected writings of the biblical “prophets” (which included the bulk of the
biblical narrative dealing with Joshua’s career through the destruction of Solomon’s
Temple and the demise of the monarchy in Judah); the third was a collection of
supplementary “sacred writings.” I will not here rehash debates about the process
of canonization of the biblical traditions or about probable regional differences as
to what was to be included in the second and third divisions of the tripartite col-
lection of the bible (see Lightstone 2002). Certainly a substantial body of supple-
mentary literature in Greek circulated with the biblical tradition (much of which
was later classified by the church as the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha to its Old
Testament). Whether or not in any one locale any of these supplementary documents
were considered part of the biblical collection of “sacred writings” does not matter
for our purposes.
Later we shall discuss the synagogue as a principal institution of the Greco-Roman
Jewish communities. Evidence for Hellenistic Egypt shows that synagogues are well
established there as early as the mid-third century bce(see Levine 2000; Rutgers
1998: 127–30), presumably as a place of assembly and prayer, as the designation
proseuchein use among Hellenistic Egyptian Jewry indicates. The literary evidence
for the first century ceindicates that synagogues are ubiquitous in the Greco-Roman
Diaspora Jewish communities. At this juncture, however, it is important to note that
Greco-Roman Diaspora communities kept sets of the sacred scrolls in the synagogue
for use during public readings of scripture, followed by a sermon-study session
elucidating their meaning, again a practice well attested in the literary evidence from
the first century (e.g. Book of Acts). This activity constituted a (or the) core element
of communal prayer services on Sabbaths and festivals (and, perhaps, twice addition-
ally during the week, as in the Land of Israel).
356 Jack N. Lightstone