embracing most aspects of Hellenistic culture other than idolatry. (On the
degrees of assimilation and acculturation, see Barclay 1996.)Conclusion
The story of modern scholarship on early Judaism is largely a story of re-
trieval. None of the literature of this period was preserved by the rabbis. The
Greek literature of the Diaspora may not have been available to them. Much
of the apocalyptic literature and of the material in the Dead Sea Scrolls was
rejected for ideological reasons. The recovery of this literature in modern
times presents us with a very different view of early Judaism than was cur-
rent in the nineteenth century, and even than more recent accounts that im-
pose a rabbinic paradigm on the period in the interests of normativity.
No doubt, our current picture of early Judaism is also incomplete. De-
spite the important documentary papyri from the Judean Desert dating to
the Bar Kokhba period (Cotton in Oppenheimer, ed. 1999: 221-36), de-
scriptions of therealiaof Jewish life still rely heavily on rabbinic sources
that are possibly anachronistic. The overdue study of women in this period
is a case in point (Ilan 1995). One of the salutary lessons of the Dead Sea
Scrolls is that they revealed aspects of Judaism that no one would have pre-
dicted before the discovery. And yet this was only the corpus of writings
collected by one sect. To do justice to early Judaism we would need similar
finds of Pharisaic, Sadducean, and other groups, and further documentary
finds similar to those that have shed at least limited light on Egyptian Ju-
daism and on Judah in the Bar Kokhba period.bibliography
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Baumgarten, Albert I. 1997.The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era:
An Interpretation.Leiden: Brill.
Beall, Todd S. 1988.Josephus’ Description of the Essenes Illustrated by the Dead Sea
Scrolls.Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Berthelot, Katell. 2003.Philanthropia Judaica: Le débat autour de la ‘misanthropie’
des lois juives dans l’antiquité.Leiden: Brill.
¾¾¾, and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra. 2010.Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the
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2 July 2008.Leiden: Brill.24john j. collinsEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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