o The covenant was expressed by observance of the
commandments, which established Jews in righteousness with
God and their neighbors. Obligatory were not only the Ten
Commandments but also the social legislation of the Law.o Equally important were ritual commands concerning the
observance of the Sabbath, circumcision, endogamy (marriage
within a specific group), and dietary and purity regulations.• Despite these unifying elements, several factors contributed to the
differentiation and even division of Jews in the 1st century.
o The first of these factors was geography. Although many Jews
lived in Palestine, at least twice as many had lived for as long
as 600 years in the Diaspora (“the scattering”), in countries
from Babylon to Rome.
o Jews were further set apart by their language. Most Jews in
Palestine spoke Aramaic (a dialect of Hebrew)—although
some spoke Greek—and read their Bible in Hebrew. In the
Diaspora, Greek was spoken and read exclusively—the Bible
had been translated into Greek already by 250 B.C.E.o Further, the dominant cultural forms in Palestine were those
shaped by Torah; in the Diaspora, Jews lived within the
dominant Greco-Roman culture. In addition to reading Torah
in the synagogue, they could go to the gymnasium and read
Homer in Greek.o A final factor was ideology. Especially in Palestine, Jews
sharply disagreed on how to engage the “foreign” incursions of
Greek culture and Roman rule. For Jews in the Diaspora, life
within a pluralistic culture had tensions but was, overall, more
positive than not, because religious symbols were not tied to
social forms.