That not only was the content of the scrolls deemed holy, but also the scrolls
themselves were perceived as holy objects, is indicated by architectural elements in
excavated synagogues of the Roman period. Increasingly through the late Roman
period, an elaborate niche in which the scrolls were kept (or placed during com-
munal prayer) becomes the architectural feature around which and toward which the
synagogue assembly hall was oriented (see Levine 2000). And such Torah niches
seem often to be framed by representations of Temple cult symbols, such as the
Jerusalem Temple seven-branched candelabra. It is as if communal prayer were directed
throughthe niche in which the scrolls are placed, a conduit to heaven, as it were,
likened to the Jerusalem Temple.
In the Land of Israel, the tripartite biblical tradition was probably perceived as three
concentric circles of holiness: the Torah of Moses, at the center, was the most holy,
ringed about, in turn, by the “prophets” and the other “sacred writings,” as if the
outer domains protected the inner. In fact, this shared perception of “the way things
are ordered” – concentric circles with the most sacred, holy, and authoritative at the
center, protected by successive encompassing domains – is replicated time and time
again in sphere after sphere in the Torah of Moses’ prescriptions for the religious cult
and social organization of Judaic life in the Land of Israel. This model of the “world”
is at the heart of the Torah’s own perception of the world as communicated in its
narrative and especially its legal content. And we must understand this model in order
to appreciate Greco-Roman Diaspora Judaism as an ethno-religious minority phenom-
enon in Rome’s empire in the Mediterranean lands outside the Land of Israel.
The Torah established YHWH, the creator, as the unique and only deity of Israel,
with whose ancestor Abraham, YHWH, according to this Torah, made a covenant
to follow God’s law (later revealed to Moses) so that through Abraham’s descen-
dents “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12. 3). Biblical
Judaism, grounded in theTorah, believed wholly to have been revealed to Moses,
ordained a Judaic world, at the center of which was the Holy of Holies, surrounded
by the Sanctuary and Outer Courts of YHWH’s unique and onlyHoly Temple, in
YHWH’s only chosen Holy City, Jerusalem, bounded by the holy Land of Israel,
beyond which lay the “lands of the nations.” In the biblical articulation of matters,
YHWH’s “name” “dwelled” in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. Elaborate purity
laws and rites ensured that “uncleanness” made no ingress into that dwelling place,
lest YHWH’s “name” or “presence,” allergic, as it were, to uncleanness, depart.
(Uncleanness was produced and released by many things, chiefly corpses, running
or bleeding sores, venereal diseases, and menstrual blood.) In this view, such a depar-
ture by YHWH’s presence from his only “dwelling place” in this world meant the
dissolution of divine order on earth, characterized as war, pestilence, famine – in the
biblical text’s language, “and they will not die in their uncleanness, having rendered
unclean My sanctuary which is in their midst” (Leviticus 15. 31).
Biblical purity law and rites of purification were intended to produce the requisite
degree of purity in the Land of Israel, so as to maintain a higher degree of purity
in Jerusalem, allowing the maintenance of a more elevated degree of purity in the
Temple, permitting the utmost degree of purity to be guaranteed in the Holy of
Holies. The classical rabbinic rendition of this essentially biblical view of matters is
stunningly articulated in Mishnah Tractate Kelim 1: 6 –9.
Roman Diaspora Judaism 357