Prevailing Judaism versus “Sectarian Judaism”
From the findings at Qumran (and other Historical sources) we are aware that the late 2nd Temple period was characterized by very accentuate religious division it is important to find a kind of Judaism shared by the writers of all the texts, whatever their differences. It has been argued at length by a number of writers that such a mainstream Judaism existed in the centuries on either side of the Common Era, although Jacob
Neusner has disputed this point and has preferred to speak of a greater or lesser number of “Judaisms” instead. We may take James Dunn ’s “four pillars of second temple Judaism” as representative of the case in favor of mainstream (common) Judaism. Dunn’s pillars are:
- Monotheism — there is only one God, who rules the world, and the many gods of the more tolerant polytheists of the ancient world are idols who may not be worshiped and who are unworthy of worship, either because they do not exist at all or they are angels subordinate to God or they are really aspects of God’s character.
- Election — God has chosen the people of Israel alone as his own covenant people to whom he has given the Promised Land.
- Covenant and Torah (Sanders’s “covenantal nomism”) — The covenant between God and Israel is centrally focused in the Torah, the revelation and instruction of God to Israel. By the period that concerns us, Torah was embodied in the written Pentateuch of Moses, on whose text extensive oral and written commentary was already being composed. The Torah gave Israel distinctiveness, a sense of privilege, and focused laws and rituals that marked them off from others (chiefly circumcision, observation of the Sabbath, and food laws). I would add the laws of ritual purity to this list
- Land focused in Temple — The Temple in Jerusalem stood at the center of the national worship of God. It had political, economic, and religious functions, especially notably the priestly and sacrificial system which, I would add, made it the focal point for the concept of ritual purity.
Most of the texts do consistently share precisely the concerns laid out by Dunn as “prevailing” (common) Judaism, but one corpus in particular does not – The Enochian Corpus. The question is how important is this corpus.
The work of Gabriele Boccaccini (see chapter 6, pg.105) [1], reflect exactly this literary corpus. In his book Beyond the Essene Hypothesis Boccaccini has attempted to demonstrate that the Judaism of the second temple period included two major trends or streams, which he calls “Zadokite” and “Enochic” Judaism.
According to Zadokite Judaism the world is a good place (as per Genesis 1) and evil arose from the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (as per Genesis 2-3). The hero of Zadokite Judaism is Moses, and the Mosaic Torah or divine instruction in the Pentateuch is centrally important. The Jerusalem temple is a microcosm of the universe, and its ritual cult and the Zadokite priesthood that maintains it are also centrally important. Enochian Judaism presents evil as arising when fallen angels corrupted the world and seduced human women, as in the myth of the giants, found in the Book of Giants, the Book of the Watchers, and elsewhere (cf. Genesis 6:1-4). The hero of the Enochians is the pre-Flood patriarch Enoch (cf. Genesis 5:18-24). The Enochians may have had priestly connections and they certainly show interest in priestly matters, but they are hostile to the Second Temple and to the Zadokite priesthood who administer it. They show little interest inthe Mosaic Torah, focusing instead on the divine wisdom revealed to Enoch in his visions. Boccaccini argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls were collected and preserved by an extremist sect of Enochic Judaism (which had meanwhile accepted the importance of Mosaic Torah alongside Enoch’s revelations), which, if true, means that our major library of certainly Jewish literature was collected by a rather untypical group with somewhat fringe views. Presumably it would contain both extremist sectarian literature (i.e., the Community Rule) and older foundational literature (i.e., biblical and Enochic books) but would leave out the rival Zadokite literature. Thus the sample of works in the Qumran library is skewed both in what it contains and what it omits. By and large, the elements of Dunn’s common Judaism (apart from monotheism) apply more readily to Zadokite than to Enochic Judaism. Indeed, George Nickelsburg has argued persuasively and at length that Enochic Judaism (as represented in the Enochic works) rejected the Mosaic Torah and was actively hostile toward the Jerusalem Temple in the period in question . [2]
It is an absolute nonsense – Jewishness without Torah is no Judaism and the phraseology underlined above is a kind of contradiction in terms of Miss Boccaccini. In any case, the author of this book consider Jewish authorship in antiquity based on, and abide by: worship of the God of Israel alone; acceptance of the Torah (Pentateuch) as Jewish scriptures given as revelation by this God; the following of Jewish customs, laws, and rituals; participation in or support of the Temple cult in Jerusalem; self-identification with the Jewish nation; membership in and acceptance by a particular Jewish community; and acceptance of Judea as the holy land promised and giveth by God. The feature used by us in order to designated a specific book as “Jewish” literary work are:
- Prior scholars designation supported by serious considerations.
- Jewish content concerning Jewish rituals and cultic matters (temple, priesthood, ritual purity, calendar, festivals, Sabbaths, circumcision).
- A strong internal evidence that the work was composed in the pre-Christian era.
- Concern with Jewish national interests, particularly polemics against gentile polytheistic religions and internal Jewish polemics.
- Compelling evidence that the work was translated from Hebrew, which, as far as we can tell, was used only by Jews in antiquity (compositions in Hebrew by Jewish Christians remain a possibility and Jews also wrote works in Aramaic and Greek, but Hebrew was the Jewish sacred language)
Other criteria for separating Jewish from Christian compositions is worth mentioning, although both are more subjective than the first five . Comprehensive eschatological scenarios, especially those explicitly involving eschatological redeemers or divine mediators, are unlikely to be Christian compositions if Jesus does not figure in them.
Notes:
[1] Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans 1998).
[2] George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Enochic Wisdom: An Alternative to the Mosaic Torah?” In Hesed Ve-Emet. Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs (ed. Jodi Magness and Seymour Gittin; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1998), 123-32
[3] James R. Davila – New Testament, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls Seminar at the British New Testament Conference in Cambridge, England, on 5-7 September 2002