Reflection on From the Maccabees to the Mishnah by Shaye J.D. Cohen

               I have been slowly reading books covering different periods in Jewish history and this book covers the period from the Maccabean revolt around in the second century BCE to the completion of the Mishnah in the second and third centuries CE. I always find it interesting to see how Judaism has evolved. In this period the Tanakh was canonized and the Pharisees began to develop into the order of Rabbis, moving into synagogues, a process that would not be completed until the 6^th and 7^th centuries.

               I think it’s so strange how much I thought I knew about Judaism is not based on the Tanakh. For example, there is no prohibition on intermarriage in the Tanakh, except with seven Canaanite nations that no longer exist. Other nations were not bound by any prohibition, yet many modern Jews will tell you that a prohibition exists. It was only in Maccabean times, four hundred years after the destruction of the first temple, that circumcision gained prominence as a marker of Jewishness. Circumcision had been given importance in the Tanakh but was not an essential mark of Jewish identity until later. I learned that in the time of the Second Temple, the high priest rose in power as there was no more king, only a governor of the Persian Empire holding secular power. By the fourth century BCE, the Persians were gone and the high priest had become the head of the Jews, not just the temple. This one really blew my mind: “The word ‘orthodox’ was not applied to a variety of Judaism until the nineteenth century, when the opponents of reform organized themselves under the banner of ‘orthodox and Torah-true Judaism.’ These Jews, in order to delegitimate reform, adopted the historical perspective that the medieval rabbis had turned against the Karaites.” I had never really thought about it, but they only call themselves “orthodox.” There is no real connection between “orthodox” Judaism and to some sort of perfect Judaism that has always been practiced.

I learned other things that couldn’t change my prior ideas because I had never even thought about them in the first place. For example, in Exodus 34 and Numbers 14, God explains that punishment can be deferred from parents to children. This can be explained as a way of showing why sometimes good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Later on, Ezekiel (Ezek. 18:20) explains that children will not be punished for their parents, which is the opposite. It became a major debate in Judaism whether there was an afterlife where people would be rewarded and punished, a major influence in Christianity. It’s weird to think about, but the initial passages in Exodus, while seeming bad to us in an individualistic society, can be interpreted as a form of mercy for the parents. Later on, this was determined to be unjust, especially from the point of view of the children, which must be why Ezekiel said what he said. I also learned how important Ezra was. When he “published” the Torah, he democratized Judaism by making it available to the masses and not just something in the hands of priests. That was a big step in Judaism becoming a religion of the book. The author also points out that the destruction of the Second Temple was not nearly as traumatic as the destruction of the First because Judaism was already being democratized and that the Pharisees, who would later become the Rabbis, were already “ambivalent” to the Second Temple when it existed. The rabbis then began a long process of influencing Judaism more and more. They moved slowly and would not control all the synagogues in Israel until the sixth century.