Women In Second Temple Judaism

From The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism:

Women

A discussion of Jewish women in the Second Temple period must first of all take into account the fact that it falls between the biblical and talmudic periods. In both biblical and talmudic times, laws were formulated governing the position and expected behavior of Jewish women, and both were canonized. In some respects these differed one from the other. From the Second Temple period we have some documents reflecting attempts to construct and regulate Jewish women’s lives, but these were not canonized. Thus, this period should be viewed as the “missing link” between the two canonical periods in Jewish history, and it serves as such for many issues relevant to women in Judaism.

The literature about Jewish women in the Second Temple period can be roughly divided into three types: fiction, wisdom texts, and halakah. The following discussion will follow these three branches and then conclude with a few remarks about the historical reality of women.

Heroines in Fiction

Beginning in the Persian period, a new phenomenon developed that made women into the chief protagonists in works of fiction. While the Hebrew Bible does include female heroines such as the matriarchs of Genesis and the women of the book of Judges, they are usually auxiliary figures to the male heroes of these stories. In Second Temple literature this changes. Already two late biblical books are named after women—Ruth and Esther. This phenomenon is further developed with the books of Judith and Susanna. In the book Joseph and Aseneth we find a strong female protagonist, but there is some debate about the date and Jewish or Christian provenance of this book. These women not only give the books their names but are also themselves the heroines and are unexpectedly located at their center. A good example is Susanna. In this book the hero is the young Daniel and the main issue at hand is miscarriage of justice by a corrupt judicial system and leadership. The story of the attempted seduction of Susanna is a subplot within the main story. Yet in this subplot the woman is the virtuous heroine. Neither a women as heroine nor seduction as a topic of miscarriage of justice is necessary, however. A similar story is told in the Bible about Naboth the Jezreelite and his vineyard (1 Kings 21). It employs neither a woman nor seduction as its topic. The choice of a woman heroine and the topic specifically relevant to her are unique to the new interests of Second Temple literature.

The heroines of Second Temple books are some of the most memorable women figures in world literature. Ruth is the widowed, non-Jewish, loyal daughter-in-law who chooses to follow her mother-in-law Naomi into the unknown. Susanna is the virtuous wife who is willing to die rather than compromise her sexual virtue. Esther is the woman who compromises her Judaism and infiltrates the Persian court in order to save her people from annihilation. Judith is the prototype of the zealot, a virtuous widow who changes into a seductress and single-handedly assassinates the enemy general in order to save her city from destruction.

Meaningful female heroines also appear in Second Temple literature in works besides those to which they give their name. In 2 Maccabees 7 the nameless mother of seven sons is one of the first and most memorable Jewish martyrs. Like Judith, she serves as a role model for both men and women, fulfilling the nationalist and religious ideals of Second Temple Judaism. Further, in the book of Tobit we find Sarah, who becomes the ultimate prototype of the killer wife by indirectly causing her seven husbands to die on their wedding night (Tob. 3:7–9).

Many suggestions have been made in order to explain this unusual phenomenon of the new female heroine. A contributing factor was surely the influence of the Greek literary genre of the novel, which became widespread throughout the Hellenistic world from the third century b.c.e. and which indulged in portrayals of powerful women in historical, semihistorical, and purely fictional settings.

Idealization in Wisdom Literature

While the heroines discussed above are, on the whole, virtuous women, Second Temple literature in general views women much more systematically than do biblical texts. Early Jewish writings are inclined to make general, and often very negative, observations on their character. Negative comments of this sort are mainly found in what is usually designated wisdom literature. Much has been said about the biblical book of Proverbs and its portrayal of women. In its first chapters it juxtaposes the highly positive figure of Lady Wisdom, who is a suitable companion to a Jewish man, with the strange, seductive Dame Folly, who is dangerous and should be shunned. At the end of the book, Proverbs presents the woman of valor, who is a diligent and efficient housewife, provider, and paragon of virtue. She is an ideal woman, but it is nowhere suggested that such women do not and cannot exist.

This many-faceted feminine image in Proverbs is condensed in the wisdom literature of Second Temple times to yield the negative, human seductress who represents everywoman. Already in the pessimistic biblical book of Qohelet we read, “and I find woman more bitter than death” (7:26). A similar sentiment is expressed by Jesus Ben Sira, who lived toward the end of the third and beginning of the second centuries b.c.e. He maintained that women in general constitute a threat to the dignity and well-being of men and that the most dangerous threat comes from a man’s own daughter.

Another composition of the same cloth was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and has come to be known as Wiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184). Here a Second Temple author elaborates on and greatly extends the dangers described in Proverbs as those of the foreign seductress.

Portrayal in Philosophically Oriented Works

This pessimistic and negative assessment of women is also found in Jewish literature that is overtly indebted to Hellenistic philosophical discourse. It is already voiced in the Letter of Aristeas (250), but its main propagator is Philo of Alexandria. As has often been shown, Philo accepted the Aristotelian judgment that the female is, in and of herself, inferior to the male. He used this to explain the biblical narratives allegorically. The women of the Bible represent inferior aspects of a person’s psyche, namely the senses, while the male figures represent the superior mind. The creation of woman, for example, is explained as a corruption of the mind by the senses (Opificio Mundi 59).

This short review presents a literature that is indebted to an intensive and unsympathetic male discourse on the very nature and essence of womanhood. Second Temple literature thus displays a sort of internal contradiction where, alongside a large number of virulent diatribes against females and the feminine, we find powerful and sympathetic female figures, some of whom actually save the Jewish people. A middle ground between the two comes in the legal discourse about women evident in Second Temple literature.

Women in Halakah

A large number of issues concerning women, which are clearly formulated in the Mishnah but which have no antecedent in the Bible, have their roots in Second Temple times and are reflected in the literature and documents preserved from this period. This is true of Josephus’ reworking of the biblical laws, Philo’s philosophical discourse on the Special Laws, the reworked Genesis of the book of Jubilees, the New Testament, and the halakic texts from Qumran.

Marriage Contracts

The Mishnah includes an entire tractate devoted to women’s marriage contracts, Ketubbot, even though a marriage contract is nowhere mentioned in the Bible itself. Does this mean that ancient Israelites did not know such a document? A straightforward answer to such a question is not forthcoming, but Aramaic documents from the Jewish settlement at Elephantine in Egypt, dated firmly to the Persian period, include marriage contracts belonging to Jewish women. These documents do not fit the halakic description of a Jewish marriage contract as it appears in the Mishnah (the Mishnah specifies, e.g., that a wife can initiate her own divorce), but they may serve as evidence for a stage in the development of the latter. Another such stage is the marriage contract mentioned in the book of Tobit, written by Sarah’s father to Tobias, giving him his daughter as wife “according to the decree of the law of Moses.” This document is very different from the rabbinic ketubah, because it represents an agreement between father and son-in-law rather than between husband and wife. Yet a similar formulation to the words “according to the decree of the Law of Moses” is found also in the rabbinic ketubah.

Divorce

A similar issue is the question of divorce. Deuteronomic law mentions a bill of divorce which a man writes a woman (Deut. 24:1–4), but this law is not formulated so as to advise male Jews about how to divorce their wives. Instead, it emphasizes a unique case of a man who divorces a woman who in turn goes and marries another man from whom she is then also divorced. The Bible rules that, in such a case, the first husband cannot take her back. Thus, the mention of the divorce document is incidental and does not describe the document or how it functioned as a rule. For example, it does not imply that only a man could write such a document to a woman, but not vice versa. Thus, Josephus informs us that the sister of King Herod, Salome, wrote a divorce bill and sent it to her husband. Josephus is quick to add that this is against Jewish custom, and modern scholars have universally adopted his judgment, claiming that the woman had done this in her capacity as a Roman citizen but not as a Jew. It turns out, however, that Josephus here is voicing his opinion in a debate that was raging at the time, about a woman’s right to divorce her husband, and which was not yet definitively concluded 160 years later, when a certain Jewish woman, Shelamzion daughter of Joseph, wrote a divorce bill to her husband, a document preserved among the scrolls from the Judean Desert. Josephus’ view here probably reflects the fact that he was a Pharisee, as were the forefathers of the rabbis.

Testimony in Court

Divorce is not the only issue on which Josephus agrees with the rabbis against other voices preserved in Second Temple literature. Thus, without having any biblical basis, Josephus states explicitly that women are barred from serving as witnesses in Jewish courts of law “because of the levity and temerity of their sex” (Ant. 4.219). The rabbis, too, exempted women from giving evidence (m. Roš Haš. 1:8); and elsewhere, in another context, also concluded that women are light-headed (b. Qiddušin 80b). Yet this unity of opinion between Josephus and the rabbis is interrupted by the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the Qumran Rule of the Congregation, or Messianic Rule (1QSa), we are informed that at the age of twenty, once members of the sect marry, their wives are called upon to bear witness against them in cases where they transgress the ruling of the community (1QSa 1:11). The simple meaning of the text is that in the Qumran community, where members were constantly expected to testify against their fellow members, women were expected to participate in the system as well. This text shows that the exclusion of women from giving evidence was, in Second Temple times, anything but universal.

Presence in Public

One of the issues hotly debated in Second Temple literature is the question of women’s presence in public. Ben Sira maintained that a person should keep his daughter under lock and key. Philo agreed, claiming, “Market places and council halls and law courts and gatherings and meetings … are suitable for men.… Women are best suited to the indoor life which never strays from the house, within which the middle door is taken by the maidens as their boundary and the outer door by those who have reached full womanhood” (Special Laws 31). The ideal voiced by these two Second Temple Jewish thinkers is realized and glorified in the book of Judith. Although Judith is a very public heroine, when she is not required to act in an emergency she secludes herself on her roof, away from the public eye. Rabbinic literature, however, contains no such strictures against women’s freedom of movement. In this respect, the rabbis proved more lenient than their Second Temple predecessors.

Participation in Ritual Life

The issue of women’s position within Jewish society can serve as a test case for the assertion that the rabbis are the direct heirs of the opponents of the Dead Sea sect (Pharisees?). In most halakic cases we find the Qumran covenanters and the rabbis on two sides of the divide. However, when it comes to the position of women, this is not always true. Thus, in rabbinic literature women are often lumped together with slaves, minors, and other underprivileged individuals, such as the bodily impaired, as exempt from performing certain commandments. A closer look at these commandments shows that they exclude women from a significant percentage of Jewish ritual life. This categorization and exemption is a complete novelty. Nothing even remotely resembling it is found in the Bible. Here, however, the Qumran material constitutes a middle ground between the Bible and the rabbis. Thus, in the Damascus Document we find a list that includes fools, the mentally sick, and the bodily disabled together with minors as forbidden entry into the congregation of the elect “because holy angels are present” (CD 15:15–17; 4Q266). Women are not mentioned in this list, an omission probably indicating that they were allowed to participate in the life of the congregation. However, women are excluded in a similar list found in the Qumran War Scroll, one that itemizes all those who may not enter the camp of war, for the same reason of the presence of angels (1QM 7). Also, in a fragment from Cave 4 minors and women are excluded from partaking in the Pesach sacrifice. As in rabbinic literature, so here women are lumped together with minors. In this the Qumran community resembles the rabbis conceptually. However, it may be of interest to note that the rabbis do not exempt, but rather include, both women and minors in the celebration and consumption of the Pesach sacrifice. This is probably an indication of how the rabbis and the Jews of Qumran differed on minor (and sometimes major) points of law but held a common assumption about gender hierarchy, the partial participation of women in Jewish life, and their affinity to both minors and to deformed and maimed individuals. Although the rabbis do not explain the exclusion of persons mentioned in these lists from ritual as the Qumranites do, as a result of the presence of angels in their midst, they find such lists useful.

Women in History

Some of the most powerful historical female figures feature in the writings of Josephus. These include Miriam the Hasmonean, the wife of King Herod, who was tragically executed by her husband in his fight against her royal house; Berenice, the daughter of King Agrippa, who enticed the Roman general Titus while he was laying siege to Jerusalem; and, most importantly, Queen Shelamzion Alexandra, who ruled the Hasmonean kingdom single-handedly for nine years (76–67 b.c.e.). To these portraits one may also add the figure of the scheming Herodias of the New Testament, who through her machinations has John the Baptist beheaded (Mark 6:14–28; Matt. 14:1–11).

The various literary creations discussed thus far show the Second Temple period as a time of dynamic changes in the perception of gender within Judaism. Ideas were tested and discarded or altered and adopted. Various groups voiced differing opinions on women, their worth, and their place in society. What does this say about the real women of the time? It seems that the most we can say is that the Second Temple period was characterized by a fragmentation of Jewish society and by sectarianism, which had a major impact on women’s lives. Sects by their very nature are more egalitarian than established society and more readily welcome women’s participation. Thus, we know that the Jesus movement included female members. The philosophical conclave of the Therapeutae in Egypt described by Philo counted women among its members. It can be argued that the Pharisees, the Dead Sea sect, and even various military zealot organizations counted women among their ranks. It should also not be forgotten that Second Temple times saw the only legitimate queen in Jewish history. It is a great mystery how this ever came about. Obviously such historical realities may have had some impact on the way women were discussed in and presented by the literature surveyed above.

Bibliography

A. Brenner, ed. 1995, A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. • B. J. Brooten 1982, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press. • L. J. Eron 1991, “ ‘That Women Have Mastery over Both King and Beggar’ (T. Jud. 15.5): The Relationship of the Fear of Sexuality to the Status of Women in Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha: 1 Esdras (3 Ezra) 3–4, Ben Sira and the Testament of Judah,” JSP 9: 43–66. • B. Halpern-Amaru 1999, The Empowerment of Women in the Book of Jubilees, Leiden: Brill. • T. Ilan 1999, Integrating Jewish Women into Second Temple History, Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. • T. Ilan 2006, Silencing the Queen: The Literary Histories of Shelamzion and Other Jewish Women, Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. • A.-J. Levine, ed. 1991, “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, Atlanta: Scholars Press. • B. Mayer-Schärtel 1995, Das Frauenbild des Josephus: Eine sozialgeschichtliche und kulturanthropologische Untersuchung, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. • E. Schuller 1999, “Women in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, ed. P. W. Flint and J. C. VanderKam, Leiden: Brill, 117–44. • D. Sly 1990, Philo’s Perceptions of Women, Atlanta: Scholars Press. • A. Standhartinger 1995, Das Frauenbild in Judentum der hellenistischen Zeit: Ein Beitrag anhand von ‘Joseph und Aseneth,’ Leiden: Brill. • J. E. Taylor 2003, Jewish Women Philosophers of First Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered, Oxford: Oxford University Press. • W. C. Trenchard 1983, Ben Sira’s View of Women: A Literary Analysis, Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press. • L. M. Wills 1999, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Tal Ilan

Orthography In The Hebrew Bible

From A Simplified Guide to BHS:

The Composition Of The Pentateuch (Longman and Dillard)

From An Introduction to the Old Testament by Tremper Longman III and Raymond B. Dillard (Zondervan):

Authorship Of The Pentateuch (DOT:IVP)

AUTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH
Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch (InterVarsity Press)

Early Jewish Biblical Interpretation

From The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism:

Early Jewish Biblical Interpretation

James L. Kugel

Scripture was, by all accounts, a major interest, if not to say an obsession, among a broad spectrum of Jews in the Second Temple period. People argued, sometimes violently, about the meaning of this or that verse in the Torah (Pentateuch), or about the proper way to carry out one or another of its laws. People also wrote a great deal about Scripture: numerous compositions that have survived from the Second Temple period seek to explain various scriptural prophecies and songs and stories, and even those books that are not explicitly exegetical are usually replete with allusions to Scripture and scriptural interpretation. Moreover, a whole new institution emerged in this period, the synagogue, a place where people might gather specifically for the purpose of studying Scripture; indeed, the synagogue went on to become a (one might even say the) major Jewish institution, both within the land of Israel and in the Diaspora.

But perhaps the most striking evidence of Scripture’s importance comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of writings found at Qumran, south of Jericho. This library, apparently the possession of a particular Jewish community that flourished at the end of the Second Temple period, is itself a most impressive thing, consisting of roughly 800 individual manuscripts. (It was no doubt still larger at one point: some of its original contents have certainly been lost to the depredations of nature or human hands.) The library contained not one or two copies of what was to become our Hebrew Bible, but, for example, thirty-six different manuscripts of the Psalms, twenty-nine copies of Deuteronomy, and so forth. In all, these scriptural manuscripts made up a little more than a quarter of the library’s total contents. But the remaining three-quarters were scarcely less tied to Scripture: nearly all of these other compositions seek, in one way or another, to explain, allude to, or expand upon things found in biblical books. Indeed, the rules governing the daily life of the community that lived at Qumran specify that the study of Scripture is to be a steady, ongoing activity: “Anywhere where there are ten people, let there not be lacking a man expounding the Torah day and night, continuously, concerning the right conduct of a man with his fellow. And let the [Assembly of the] Many see to it that in the community a third of every night of the year [is spent] in reading the Book and expounding the Law and offering blessings together” (1QS 6:6–8).

In short, Scripture was on nearly everyone’s mind. The words of Ps. 119:97—“How I love your Torah; I speak of it all day long”—might have served as the motto of all the different Jewish communities and sects in Second Temple times. Now when one stops to consider this state of affairs in its larger context, it should appear more than a little strange. After all, religious piety elsewhere in the ancient Near East consisted principally of the offering of animal sacrifices at one or another sanctuary, participation in mass religious revels with singing and dancing, or solemn rites to ward off evil and demonic forces. None of these elements was absent from Second Temple Judaism, but along with them, and ultimately displacing them, was the oddest sort of act: reading words written centuries earlier and acting as if they had the highest significance for people in the present age. How did this come about?

The Rise of the Bible

The idea of a specific set of writings called the Bible did not exist before the end of the Second Temple period. Before that, there existed a somewhat inchoate group of books considered sacred by one or more of the various religious communities that flourished during this period. The heart of Scripture, all communities agreed, was the Torah or Pentateuch, that is, the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These books were attributed to the authorship of Moses, and from an early time their laws in particular were looked to for guidance in matters of daily life. Along with them were other works—historical writings covering the period from the death of Moses to later times; prophetic books and visions associated with various figures from the past; psalms, hymns, and similar works, many attributed to King David; wise sayings and other wisdom writings, some attributed to King Solomon; and so forth. Some of these texts were actually composed within the Second Temple period, but many went back far earlier, to the time before the Babylonian exile in the sixth century b.c.e. For example, most modern scholars agree that large parts of our biblical books of Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah go back to the eighth century b.c.e.; to a still earlier period belong a number of other texts—for example, some of the songs and psalms found in the Bible, along with a portion of the historical and legendary material later included in different books.

If these texts had thus been preserved for hundreds of years before the start of the Second Temple period, they must have played some active role in the lives of those who preserved them. After all, the parchment or papyrus on which texts were generally written begins to disintegrate after a century or so; recopying books was a tedious, and expensive, process. If these writings were nonetheless saved and recopied, it seems likely that, far back into the biblical period, people were using them for some purpose. Ancient laws were no doubt written down to preserve their exact wording, so that they might be explicated and applied to real-life cases; if psalms and hymns were similarly recorded, it was probably because they were an actual part of the liturgy in use at one or another ancient sanctuary; tales of past heroes and their doings were written down to be read in court or at festive occasions; and so forth.

Nevertheless, it is only some time after the return from the Babylonian Exile at the end of the sixth century b.c.e. that we begin to find frequent reference to the Scripture (principally the Pentateuch) and its interpretation. This is truly the time when these ancient texts begin to move to center stage in Judaism. Several factors combined to make Scripture so important.

One of these is a rather universal phenomenon. Scripture may have come to play a particularly important role in Judaism, but in many religions and civilizations (some of them quite unrelated to Judaism), writings from the ancient past also play a special role—the Vedas in Hinduism, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the writings of Confucius, and so forth. What is behind this phenomenon? With regard to premodern societies, our own view of knowledge as a dynamic, ever-expanding thing is rather inappropriate. In such societies people generally conceived of knowledge as an altogether static, unchanging thing, and they therefore tended to attach great significance to the wisdom found in writings from the ancient past. Indeed, as the chronological distance between such writings and themselves increased, so too did the esteem in which these ancient pronouncements were held. After all, what the ancients knew, or what had been revealed to them, was timeless truth, part of that great, static corpus of knowledge; it could never be displaced by later insights (nor would anyone want it to be).

Israel’s ancient writings had no doubt long enjoyed a similar cachet. But added to this were several more specific things that heightened the role of Scripture in the early postexilic period. The first was the fact of the Babylonian Exile itself. Though it lasted scarcely more than half a century, it profoundly disrupted things for the exiled Jews. Institutions like the royal court, the Jerusalem Temple, and other formerly crucial centers were no more; soon, the traditions and ways of thought associated with them began to fade. Instead, the exiles’ heads were now filled with foreign institutions, a foreign language, and a way of thinking that hardly bothered to take account of the tiny nation from which they had come. Under such circumstances, Israel’s ancient writings offered an island of refuge. Here, the royal court and the Jerusalem Temple still lived in their full glory; here the God of Israel still reigned supreme, and His people and their history occupied center stage; and here was the exiles’ old language, the Judean idiom, written down in the classical cadences of its greatest prophets and sages. It seems altogether likely that, during those years in Babylon, such writings as had accompanied the Judeans into exile only grew in importance—if not for all, then at least for some significant segment of the population. And once the exile was over, these same ancient texts continued in this role: they were the history of the nation and its pride, a national literature and more than that, a statement about the ongoing importance of the remnants of that kingdom, for its God, and for the world.

The Mode of Restoration

When the Babylonian Empire collapsed and its conqueror, the Persian king Cyrus, issued his famous decree (538 b.c.e.) allowing the exiled Judeans to return to their homeland, the ancient writings took on an additional, and still more central, role. After all, not all the exiles took up Cyrus’ offer. Some had settled into life in Babylon, whatever its hardships, and were loath to make the long trek back to an uncertain future in their ancestral home. The returnees were thus a self-selected group. All of them had, in one way or another, resolved to go back to the place of an earlier existence. No doubt their motives varied, but this mode of restoration, of going to back to what had been before, was common to all.

But how exactly could one know what had been before? The landscape itself was mute; one could not pick up a rock or interrogate a tree to find out. The past lived only in those same ancient writings, and to the extent that the returnees sought consciously to restore their land and themselves to a former way of being, their first point of reference was necessarily what those texts said or implied about how things had been before the Exile. Israel’s ancient writings thus acquired a potentially prescriptive quality. What they said about the past could easily be translated into a potential program for the future.

Of course, the returnees were not all of one mind. Some wished only to settle down to life as residents of an obedient province in the Persian Empire, while others clung to the hope that their nation would soon find the opportunity to shake off foreign rule and return to political independence, indeed, to regain the political and military preeminence that had existed in the days of David and Solomon. Descendants of the former power elites—members of prominent families and clans, not to speak of the royal dynasty and the hereditary priesthood—must have hoped that the old social order would be re-created. Others—visionaries, prophets, reformers of various allegiances—saw in the return from exile just the opposite prospect, an opportunity to reshuffle the social deck. But precisely because all were in this mode of restoration, they all sought to use accounts of the past to justify their own plans for the future.

One of the most striking illustrations of this mentality is the biblical book of Chronicles, composed, according to most scholars, relatively early in the postexilic period. Although much of this book simply repeats material narrated in the biblical books of Samuel and Kings, modern scholarship has revealed subtle changes introduced here and there by the author of Chronicles, changes that embodied his own definite program for the future. He believed, for example, that the Davidic monarchy should be restored, and he looked forward to a day when the inhabitants of Judah would join forces with their northern neighbors in Samaria to form a great, United Kingdom as in days of old. He also had his own ideas about the Temple, the priesthood, and the very nature of God. Yet he did not put these ideas forth in the form of a political manifesto or religious tract. Instead, he presented them as part of a history of preexilic times, in fact, a crafty rewriting of that history that would stress all that he believed in while suppressing everything else. Why did he do so? The apparent reason is that he, and the rest of his countrymen, looked to the past for guidance about what to do in their own time.

The Laws of the Pentateuch

Of all the writings that made up Israel’s Scripture, it was probably the laws of the Pentateuch that played the most important role in restored Judea. These laws covered all manner of different things: civil and criminal law, Temple procedure, ethical behavior, ritual purity and impurity, proper diet, and so forth. Nowadays, a country’s laws do not play a very active part in most people’s lives—certainly not in their religious lives. Someone who breaks the law may have to pay a fine or even go to prison, but this in itself has no particular spiritual dimension. Likewise, someone who upholds the law may be proud to be a good citizen, but nothing more. In restored Judea, by contrast, the laws of the Pentateuch were held to come from God, and this automatically gave them a wholly new significance. To break a law ordained by God was not merely to commit a crime; it was to commit a sin. Likewise, observing the laws and doing what they said was not merely good citizenship but a form of divine service, a way of actively seeking to do God’s will. This view of things may have existed in preexilic times, but it became particularly prominent after the return from exile.

Perhaps it was the very course of recent events that made Second Temple Jews so concerned with biblical law. Many of them must have asked themselves why their homeland had been conquered by the Babylonians, and why the Babylonian Empire had in turn collapsed shortly thereafter. Some, no doubt, gave to these questions a purely practical answer: the Babylonian army was simply stronger than that of little Judah, so it won; similarly, once the Medes and the Persians had combined forces, they easily overcame the Babylonians and took over their whole empire. But the Bible contains a different, more theological explanation: God allowed His people to be conquered as a punishment for their failure to keep His laws, the great covenant He had concluded with their ancestors. “Surely this came upon Judah at the command of the Lord” (2 Kings 24:3). By the same token, lest anyone think it was by any merit of the Babylonians that Judah had been overcome, He subsequently dispatched the Persian army to reduce them to ruin. So now, returned to their ancient homeland, the Judeans (or at least some of them) set out to draw the obvious theological conclusion and avoid repeating their ancestors’ mistake. This time they would scrupulously obey all of God’s commandments; this time, everyone would be an expert in the application of divine law, so that there would be no mistakes (Jer. 31:31–34).

There was probably another, more practical side to the importance attributed to these ancient laws. The Bible reports that the Persian administration actually adopted them as part of the Israelite legal system to be instituted in their new colony. The Persian king Artaxerxes I is thus reported to have written a letter to Ezra, a Jewish priest and sage who took over as a leader of the reestablished community:

“And you, Ezra, according to the God-given wisdom you possess, appoint magistrates and judges who may judge all the people in the province [of Judah] who know the laws of your God; and you shall teach those who do not know them. All who will not obey the law of your God and the law of the king, let judgment be strictly executed on them.” (Ezra 7:25–26)

It may always be, of course, that one or another element in the Bible is the result of exaggeration or wishful thinking on the part of the biblical historian, but skepticism in this case is probably unwarranted. Other, extrabiblical sources have shown the Persians to have generally been enlightened rulers who sought to accommodate their subject peoples by, among other things, maintaining the local legal system; it would simply have been good sense to adopt such an approach with the Judeans as well.

The Rise of Biblical Interpreters

For all such reasons, Scripture came to be a major focus of attention in the Second Temple period. But Scripture needed to be interpreted in order to be understood. So it was that a new figure emerged in Judean society, the biblical interpreter, and he would soon become a central force in postexilic society.

One of our first glimpses of this new figure at work is found in the biblical account of Ezra’s public reading of the Torah to the assembled returnees in Jerusalem:

When the seventh month came—the people of Israel being settled in their towns—all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the Law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the Law. The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose.… And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the Law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. (Neh. 7:73b–8:8)

A few things stand out in this account. It is not at Ezra’s initiative, but that of the people, that this great public reading is said to have taken place. Apparently, “all the people” knew that this great book of law (presumably our Pentateuch) existed, but they were still somewhat fuzzy about its contents. So they willingly stood for hours, “from early morning until midday,” in order to hear its words firsthand. It is remarkable that this assembly included “both men and women and all who could hear with understanding,” that is, children above a certain age: the Torah’s words were, according to this passage, not reserved for some elite, or even for the adult males of the population, but were intended for the whole people to learn and apply. But—most significantly for our subject—this public reading is accompanied by a public explanation of the text. The Levites “helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places”; thus, “they read from the book, from the Law of God, with interpretation.”

Why should Scripture have needed interpreters? No doubt the need began with very down-to-earth matters. After all, every language changes over time, and by the Second Temple period some of the words and expressions used in preexilic texts were no longer understood. Even such basic concepts as get, take, need, want, time, and much were expressed with new terms by the end of the biblical period; the old words had either shifted their meaning or dropped out of the language entirely. Under such circumstances, some sort of interpreter would be necessary to make the meaning of the ancient text comprehensible. The same was true with regard to other things—names of places that no longer existed or historical figures or events long forgotten or social institutions that had ceased to be.

In addition to such relatively mundane matters, however, interpreters ultimately came to address far broader and more consequential questions. As already discussed, the returning exiles had looked to texts from the ancient past in order to fashion their own present, and this way of approaching Scripture as prescriptive for the present went on long after the return from exile was an established fact; interpreters continued to look to these ancient writings for a message relevant to their own day. But at first glance, at least, much of Scripture must have seemed quite irrelevant. It talked about figures from the distant past: what importance could their stories have to a later day other than preserving some nostalgic memory of people and events long gone? Why should anyone care about laws forbidding things that no one did any more anyway, indeed, things that no one even understood anymore? Part of the interpreter’s task was thus to make the past relevant to the present—to find some practical lesson in ancient history, or to reinterpret an ancient law in such a way as to have it apply to present-day situations, sometimes at the price of completely distorting the text’s original meaning. It appears that interpreters only gradually assumed these functions, but as time went on, they became more daring in the way they went about things while, at the same time, settling into a more important and solid niche in Judean society.

In the case of Ezra’s reading, we have no way of knowing what sort of interpretation was involved. Was it a matter of explaining an odd word or phrase here or there? Or were the interpreters (as one ancient Jewish tradition has it) actually translating the whole text word-for-word, presumably into Aramaic, then the lingua franca of the Near East? Or did they go beyond even this, explaining how this or that biblical law was to be applied—what was involved in “doing no work” on the Sabbath, for example?

Interpretation inside the Bible

If the Bible provides no solid leads in the case of Ezra’s reading, it does offer a number of other examples of ancient biblical interpretation; in fact, the most ancient examples of biblical interpretation that we have are found within the Bible itself, where later books explain or expand on things that appear in earlier books. Often, the things that ancient interpreters felt called to comment upon were apparent inconsistencies or contradictions within the biblical text. Take, for example, the law in Exodus about the Passover meal:

Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats.… They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. (Exod. 12:3–9)

This passage could hardly be less ambiguous: the Passover meal was to feature the meat of a lamb (though, apparently, goat meat was also acceptable, “from the sheep or from the goats”), and it was not to be boiled, but roasted. But if so, then how is one to explain this passage from Deuteronomy?

You shall offer the Passover sacrifice to the Lord your God, from the flock and the herd, at the place that the Lord will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall boil it and eat it at the place that the Lord your God will choose; the next morning you may go back to your tents. (Deut. 16:2, 7)

The phrase “from the flock and the herd” presumably means that a calf or a bull would be just as acceptable as a lamb or goat, and whichever animal was chosen, its meat was apparently to be boiled—precisely what the earlier passage had forbidden. What was a person to do?

The author of the book of Chronicles, an early postexilic work, seems to have been aware of the contradiction between these two texts, since he addressed at least part of it in his own history:

They [the Israelites] slaughtered the Passover offering, and the priests dashed the blood that they received from them, while the Levites did the skinning.… Then they boiled the Passover offering in fire according to the ordinance.… (2 Chron. 35:13)

“Boiled”—the same word used earlier by Deuteronomy—need not necessarily mean “boiled in water,” this passage suggests; instead, it might just be a circumlocution for roasting, that is, “boiling in fire.” If so, then there really was no contradiction between the Exodus and Deuteronomy passages—both of them really meant “roast”; it was just that Deuteronomy had, for some reason, not used that word explicitly.

Another little problem found within an early book of the Bible was addressed by a later one; this time, the issue concerned the inheritance rights of the firstborn son. According to biblical law, the firstborn son was to receive a larger portion of his father’s estate—just because he was the firstborn. But what happened if the father had two wives and wished to give precedence to the son of his other wife, even though that son was not his first? This was probably not an uncommon situation, since the law in Deuteronomy is quite emphatic:

If a man has two wives, and one of them is favored over the other, and if both the favored one and the other have borne him sons, the firstborn being the son of the disfavored one; then on the day when he wills his possessions to his sons, he is not permitted to grant the son of the favored wife preference over the son of the other, who is the firstborn. Instead, he must acknowledge as firstborn the son of the one who is not favored, giving him a double portion of all that he has; since he is the first issue of his virility, the right of the firstborn is his. (Deut. 21:15–17)

The firstborn son is to get the double portion no matter how the father feels about the boy’s mother. But if so, then how does one explain what happened in the biblical story of Jacob and his sons? Jacob marries Leah and Rachel, but it is clear from the start that Rachel is his favorite (Gen. 29:17–18). Nevertheless, Reuben, Leah’s son, is Jacob’s oldest boy, so by rights the double portion is to be his. As things turn out, however, Reuben gets pushed aside: it is Joseph, Rachel’s son, who effectively ends up with the extra inheritance (Gen. 48:5–6). To later readers of Scripture, this surely seemed to be a blatant violation of biblical law. To make matters worse, Reuben kept being referred to as Jacob’s “firstborn” (Exod. 6:14; Num. 1:20; 26:5; etc.). Was he—and if so, why did he lose his inheritance?

Once again, the author of Chronicles went out of his way to explain an apparent contradiction in the text:

The sons of Reuben, the firstborn of Israel [that is, Jacob]. (He was the firstborn, but because he defiled his father’s bed, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph son of Israel, so that he is not enrolled in the genealogy according to the birthright.) (1 Chron. 5:1)

In Reuben’s case, the Chronicler explains, an exception was made to the general rule because of Reuben’s egregious sin with his father’s concubine (Gen. 35:22). He was still, in genealogical terms, the firstborn, but the firstborn’s special inheritance (the “birthright”) was given instead to Joseph, Rachel’s son.

Interpretations outside the Bible

Biblical scholars have been diligent in uncovering little spots of interpretation such as these within the Hebrew Bible itself: later versions of earlier laws sometimes modify their wording or reconfigure their application; original biblical prophecies are sometimes supplemented or rearranged to stress the new interpretation now given to them; later editors sometimes inserted phrases that glossed earlier texts whose wording was no longer understood. But considered as a whole, these inner-biblical interpretations pale before the great body of ancient interpretation that has been preserved outside of the Jewish Bible, in works composed from about the third century b.c.e. to the second century c.e. and beyond. This was the golden age of biblical interpretation, the period in which various groups of (largely anonymous) interpreters put their stamp on the Hebrew Bible and determined the basic way in which the Bible would be interpreted for the next 2,000 years.

The writings in which their interpretations are attested are quite varied. Some of them are originally Jewish compositions included in Christian Bibles—identified there as “Deuterocanonical Books” or “Old Testament Apocrypha”—works such as the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sira (second century b.c.e.) and the Wisdom of Solomon (first century b.c.e. or c.e.). Others are categorized as “pseudepigrapha,” compositions falsely ascribed to ancient figures from the Bible but actually written in a later period—works such as the book of Jubilees (early second century b.c.e.) or the Testament of Abraham (first century b.c.e. or c.e.). Much ancient biblical interpretation is also preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls; some of these texts go back to the third century b.c.e. or earlier. Ancient translations, such as the Old Greek (Septuagint) translation of the Pentateuch (third century b.c.e.) or various targums, translations of the Bible into Aramaic (probably originating in the first century c.e. or earlier, though later material was often added in the process of transmission), also contain reflections of ancient biblical interpretation. Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 b.c.e.–ca. 50 c.e.) or Josephus (ca. 37 c.e.–100 c.e.) also present a great deal of biblical interpretation—part of it entirely of their own fashioning, but much else gathered from or influenced by the work of earlier interpreters. Christian writings of the first two centuries c.e., including the New Testament and other early compositions, also contain a good deal of biblical interpretation—much of it rooted in the pre-Christian exegesis. Finally, later Jewish writings such as the Mishnah (put in its final form around 200 c.e.), along with the Tosefta and the tannaitic midrashim (both from roughly the same period), contain a great deal of exegetical material, much of it continuing the line of earlier biblical interpretation. Considered together, this is a vast body of writings, many times greater than the Hebrew Bible itself. In studying it, scholars are able to piece together a developmental history of how the Bible was understood starting early in the second b.c.e. or so and continuing through the next three or four hundred years—a crucial period in the Bible’s history.

A note about the form of biblical interpretation: relatively few of the above-mentioned texts are written in the form of actual commentaries, that is, writings that cite a biblical verse and then explain what the interpreter thinks the verse means. Such commentaries did exist—they were the preferred genre of Philo of Alexandria, and commentary-like texts have been found as well among the Dead Sea Scrolls. But the favorite form for transmitting biblical interpretation in writing was the retelling. Most writers simply assumed that their readers would be familiar with the biblical text, indeed, familiar with the exegetical problems associated with this or that verse. So he or she would retell the text with little interpretive insertions: a word no longer understood would be glossed or replaced with a word whose meaning everyone knew; an apparent contradiction would be resolved through the insertion of an explicative detail; the retelling would take the trouble to explain why A or B had done what they did, or how they did it, thereby answering a question left open in the laconic biblical version of the same story. Such retellings are a common phenomenon in ancient interpretation: the book of Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, and Pseudo-Philo’s Book of Biblical Antiquities are good examples of compositions that are, from start to finish, interpretive retellings. So, in a sense, are Aramaic targums such as that of Pseudo-Jonathan or Neofiti; they “translate” the Pentateuch into Aramaic, but with so many interpolations that they are actually more like retellings than real translations.

The Four Assumptions

Why was this a crucial period? Because, as already mentioned, these interpreters established the general way in which the Bible was to be approached for the next two millennia—indeed, to a certain extent, their approach is still with us to this day. Their way of reading and explaining texts was anything but straightforward—it was a highly ideological (and idealistic) form of exegesis, one that relied on a somewhat idiosyncratic combination of very close reading and great exegetical freedom. The interpretations these ancient sages came up with soon acquired the mantle of authority; they were memorized and passed on from generation to generation, sometimes modified in one or more detail, but basically maintained as what the Bible really means for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As best we can tell, the ancient interpreters were a highly varied lot. Some lived in the land of Judea and were steeped in the Hebrew language and traditional Jewish learning. A few others, however, seem to have lived elsewhere and had a thoroughly Hellenistic education and orientation—for example, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon or Philo of Alexandria, both of whom wrote in Greek, alluded to Greek philosophical ideas, and generally cited Scripture in its Septuagint translation. (Some contemporary scholars doubt that Philo was even competent to read the Hebrew Bible in the original.) And even among those interpreters who inhabited Judea there was great variety: the author of Jubilees was a would-be religious innovator and a bit of a rebel; his contemporary, Ben Sira, was quite the opposite, a creature of the establishment who would probably have refused to sit at the same table with Jubilees’ author. Pharisees battled with Sadducees over matters of interpretation, and the proprietors of the Dead Sea Scrolls (most likely to be identified with a third group, the Essenes) disagreed with both these other groups; some of them, having withdrawn to the desert, vowed to keep their own interpretations of Scripture hidden from all but the members of their own community, meanwhile waiting for the “day of vengeance” when God would strike down the other groups for their false teachings and errant practices.

And yet, for all their diversity, all these ancient interpreters went about the business of interpreting in strikingly similar fashion. It seems as if they all had, as it were, the same general set of marching orders; or, to put it differently, they all shared the same basic assumptions about how Scripture is to be interpreted and what its message ought to be. This is most surprising. It would appear likely that if they all shared the same basic approach—one which, as we will see, was very much influenced by the ancient Near Eastern concept of “wisdom”—this was because they were all descended, directly or otherwise, from a “wisdom”-influenced way of thinking about Scripture that existed even before these various groups of interpreters developed.

However these groups of ancient interpreters came to exist, modern scholars can, in examining their writings, deduce the basic assumptions underlying their way of explaining biblical texts. These assumptions may be broken down into four fundamental postulates:

1. All ancient interpreters assumed that scriptural texts were basically cryptic; that is, while the text may say A, often what it really means is B.

2. They also assumed that, although most of Scripture had been written hundreds of years earlier and seemed to be addressed to people back then, its words nevertheless were altogether relevant to people in the interpreters’ own day—its stories contained timeless messages about proper conduct; its prophecies really referred to events happening now, or in the near future; its ancient laws were to be scrupulously observed today, even if they seemed to refer to situations or practices that no longer existed; and so forth. In a word, the basic purpose of Scripture was to guide people nowadays; although it talked about the past, it was really aimed at the present.

3. On the face of it, Scripture included texts written by different prophets and sages, people who lived hundreds of years apart from one another and who came from different strata of society. Nevertheless, these diverse writings were assumed to contain a single, unitary message. That is to say, Scripture’s different parts could never contradict one another or disagree on any matter of fact or doctrine; indeed, what Scripture taught would always be perfectly consistent with the interpreters’ own beliefs and practices, whatever they might be (Greek philosophical doctrines; common historical or geographical lore; the halakic teachings of later postbiblical teachers). In short, Scripture was altogether harmonious in all its details and altogether true; carried to its extreme, this approach postulated that there was not a single redundancy, unnecessary detail, or scribal error in the text: everything was perfect.

4. Some parts of Scripture directly cite words spoken by God, “And the Lord said to Moses …” and so forth. Other parts, however, are not identified as divine speech—the whole court history of King David and King Solomon, for example, or the book of Psalms, whose words are addressed to God. Nevertheless, ancient interpreters came to assume that all of Scripture was of divine origin, that God had caused ancient sages or historians or psalmists to write what they wrote, or that their writings had somehow been divinely guided or inspired. In short, all of Scripture came from God and all of it was sacred. 

How Interpretation Worked

To see how these assumptions combined to shape the way in which interpreters interpreted, it might be appropriate to consider an actual text from the Bible, the biblical account of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac:

And it came to pass, after these things, that God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” and he answered, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. Then sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you.” So Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey. He took two of his servants with him, along with his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and then set out for the place that God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. Abraham told his servants, “You stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go up there, so that we can worship and then come back to you.”

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac; then he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked together. But Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father?” and he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked together.

When they came to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood on it. He then tied up his son Isaac and put him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son. But an angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not harm the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. (Gen. 22:1–13)

Ancient interpreters were no doubt troubled by a number of elements in this story. Did not the very fact of divine omniscience seem to make this divine “test” of Abraham unnecessary? Surely God knew how it would turn out before it took place—He knew, as the angel says at the end of the story, that Abraham was one who “fears God.” So why put Abraham through this awful test? Equally disturbing was Abraham’s apparent conduct vis-à-vis his son. He never tells Isaac what God has told him to do; in fact, when Isaac asks his father the obvious question—“I see fire and the wood for the sacrifice, but where is the sacrificial animal?”—Abraham gives him an evasive answer: “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” This actually turns out to be true; God does provide a ram at the last minute—but Abraham had no way of knowing this at the time. Along with this is Abraham’s problematic coldness. God orders him to sacrifice his son, who, God reminds him, is “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,” and Abraham does not utter a word of protest; in fact, the text says explicitly that Abraham “got up early in the morning,” as if eager to carry out the deed.

Such problems were clearly on the minds of ancient interpreters when they commented on this story, and they did their best to find a solution to them. It is important to stress that ancient interpreters generally were not out to arrive at a modern-style critical or objective reading of Scripture’s words. In keeping with Assumption 2, they began with the belief that Scripture had some important lesson to teach them, and in the case of this story, it had to be a positive lesson about all concerned—not only Abraham and Isaac, but about God as well. If that lesson was not immediately apparent, then it had to be searched for through a careful weighing of every word, since, in keeping with Assumption 1, the meaning of any biblical text could be hidden: it might say A when it really meant B.

With regard to the first question mentioned above—why should God need to test anyone if He is omniscient?—interpreters set their eye on an apparently insignificant detail, the opening clause of the passage: “And it came to pass, after these things.…” Such phrases are often used in the Bible to mark a transition; they generally signal a break: “The previous story is over, and now we are going on to something new.” But the word “things” in Hebrew (dĕbārîm) also means “words.” So the transitional phrase here could equally well be understood as asserting that some words had been spoken, and that “it came to pass, after these words, that God tested Abraham.” What words? The Bible did not say, but if some words had indeed been spoken, then interpreters felt free to try to figure out what the words in question might have been.

At some point, an ancient interpreter—no one knows exactly who or when—thought of another part of the Bible quite unrelated to Abraham, the book of Job. That book begins by reporting that Satan once challenged God to test His servant Job (1:6–12; 2:1–6). Since the story of Abraham and Isaac is also described as a divine test, this interpreter theorized that the “words” mentioned in the opening sentence of the passage (“And it came to pass, after these words, that God tested Abraham …”) might have been, as in the book of Job, words connected to the hypothetical challenge spoken by Satan to God: “Put Abraham to the test and see whether He is indeed obedient enough even to sacrifice his own son.” If one reads the opening sentence with this in mind, then the problem of why God should have tested Abraham disappears. Of course God knew that Abraham would pass the test—but if He nevertheless went on to test Abraham, it was because some words had been spoken leading God to take up a challenge and prove to Satan Abraham’s worthiness. One ancient interpreter who adopted this solution was the anonymous author of the book of Jubilees. Here is how his retelling of the story begins:

There were words in heaven regarding Abraham, that he was faithful in everything that He told him, [and that] the Lord loved him, and in every difficulty he was faithful. Then the angel Mastema [i.e., Satan] came and said before the Lord, “Behold, Abraham loves his son Isaac and he delights in him above all else. Tell him to offer him as a sacrifice on the altar. Then you will see if he carries out this command, and You will know if he is faithful in everything through which you test him.” Now the Lord knew that Abraham was faithful in every difficulty which he had told him.… Jub. 17:15–16

Here, the “words” referred to in Gen. 22:1 are words of praise uttered by the other angels. “And it came to pass, after these words” were uttered, that Satan felt moved to challenge God concerning his faithful servant. God takes up the challenge, but the author of Jubilees goes to the trouble to assure his readers that there was really no need for the God to test Abraham, since “the Lord knew that Abraham was faithful in every difficulty which he had told him” and would certainly pass this test as well.

As noted, this revised version of the biblical story contains a lesson for today (Assumption 2): Abraham was faithful to God, even when put to a very difficult test; you should be too, and you will be rewarded as Abraham was. It also illustrates Assumption 3, the idea that the Bible is not only internally consistent, but that it agrees with the interpreter’s own beliefs and practices—in this case, the belief that an all-knowing God would have no need to put Abraham to the test. (As a matter of fact, however, the idea of divine omniscience is never stated outright in the Hebrew Bible—apparently, this notion did not come into existence until later on.) Finally, it is thanks to Assumption 1, that the Bible speaks cryptically, that this interpretation was possible: When the Bible said “after these things,” although this looked at first glance like a common transitional phrase, what it really meant was “after these words,” and it thereby intended readers to think of the book of Job and the divine test with which that book begins.

All this was well and good, but interpreters still had not completely resolved the matter of what God knew beforehand. They were still troubled by the way the test ended:

The angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham! Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not put your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” (Gen. 22:12)

“Now I know” certainly seems to imply “I did not know before.” Why should God say such a thing if He was really omniscient? To this problem, too, the book of Jubilees had an answer:

Then I [the angel who narrates the book of Jubilees] stood in front of him [Abraham] and in front of Mastema [Satan]. The Lord said: “Tell him not to let his hand go down on the child and not to do anything to him, because I know that he is one who fears the Lord.” So I called to him from heaven and said to him: Abraham, Abraham!” He was startled and said, “Yes?” I said to him, “Do not lay your hands on the child and do not do anything to him, because now I know that you are one who fears the Lord. You have not refused me your firstborn son.” (Jub. 18:9–11)

This passage is basically a rewording of the biblical verse cited above, Gen. 22:12, but the author of Jubilees has done something that the biblical text did not: he has supplied the actual instructions that God gave His angel before the angel cried out to Abraham. God instructs the angel, “Tell him not to let his hand go down on the child and not to do anything to him, because I know that he is one who fears the Lord.”

The author of Jubilees loved little subtleties. God’s instructions to the angel are identical to what the angel says in Genesis—except for one word. God does not say “now I know”; He simply says, “I know.” For the author of Jubilees, such a scenario explained everything. The angel may not have known how the test would turn out, but God certainly did. “I know that he is one who fears the Lord,” He tells the angel in Jubilees—in fact, I’ve known it along! Thus, the words that appear in Genesis, according to Jubilees, do not exactly represent God’s command, but the angel’s rewording of it. It is the angel who only now found out what God had known all along.

As for Abraham’s hiding his intentions from Isaac—once again it all depends on how you read the text. Ancient interpreters noticed that the passage contains a slight repetition:

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac; then he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked together. But Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father?” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked together. (Gen. 22:6–8)

Repetition is not necessarily a bad thing, but ancient interpreters generally felt (in keeping with Assumption 3) that the Bible would not repeat itself without purpose. Between the two occurrences of the clause “and the two of them walked together” is the brief exchange in which Abraham apparently hides his true intentions from Isaac. Here Abraham’s words were, at least potentially, ambiguous. Since biblical Hebrew was originally written without punctuation marks or even capital letters marking the beginnings of sentences, Abraham’s answer to Isaac could actually be read as two sentences: “God Himself will provide. The lamb for the burnt offering [is] my son.” (Note that Hebrew has no verb “to be” in the present tense; thus, this last sentence would be the same whether or not the word “is” is supplied in translation.) Read in this way, Abraham’s answer to Isaac was not an evasion but the brutal truth: “You’re the sacrifice, Isaac.” If, following that, the text adds, “And the two of them walked together,” this would not be a needless repetition at all: Abraham told his son that he was to be the sacrifice, and Isaac agreed; then the two of them “walked together” in the sense that they were now of one mind to carry out God’s fearsome command. Thus, in keeping with Assumptions 1 and 3, the apparent repetition was no repetition at all, and Abraham’s apparent evasion was actually an announcement to Isaac of the plain truth. The conduct of both Abraham and Isaac was now above reproach: Abraham did not seek to deceive his son, and Isaac, far from a mere victim, actively sought to do God’s will no less than his father did. Indeed, their conduct might thus serve as an example to be imitated by later readers (Assumption 2): even when God’s decrees seem to be difficult, the righteous must follow them—and sometimes they turn out merely to be a test.

But did interpreters actually believe their interpretations? Didn’t they know they were distorting the text’s real meaning? This is always a difficult question. It seems likely that, at least at first, ancient interpreters were sometimes quite well aware that they were departing from the straightforward meaning of the text. But with time, that awareness began to dim. Biblical interpretation soon became an institution in ancient Israel; one generation’s interpretations were passed on to the next, and eventually they acquired the authority that time and tradition always grant. Midrash, as this body of interpretation came to be called, simply became what the text had always been intended to communicate. Along with the interpretations themselves, the interpreters’ very modus operandi acquired its own authority: this was how the Bible was to be interpreted, period. Moreover, since the midrashic method of searching the text carefully for hidden implications seemed to solve so many problems in the Bible that otherwise had no solution, this indicated that the interpreters were going about things correctly. As time went on, new interpretations were created on the model of older ones, until soon every chapter of the Bible came accompanied by a host of clever explanations that accounted for any perceived difficulty in its words.

Words and Verses

One final point about the “how” of ancient biblical interpretation: it always worked via a scrupulous examination of the precise wording of the biblical text. Even when the issues addressed by interpreters were broader—divine omniscience, Abraham’s character, Isaac’s apparent passivity—these were always approached through the interpretation of a specific verse, indeed, sometimes through a single word in the verse. “Do you want to know what ‘after these things’ means in the story of Abraham and Isaac? It means after these words.” “Do you know why the two of them walked together is repeated? The second time is a hint that Abraham had just told Isaac he was to be sacrificed, and he agreed.” It was always from such precise points of wording that larger issues were approached.

Ancient biblical interpretation was thus, no matter how broad its intentions, formally an interpretation of single verses. And this is what enabled specific interpretations to travel so widely. Teachers in school as well as preachers in synagogue or church would, in the course of explaining a biblical text, inevitably pass on an insight into this or that verse: “Here is what it is really talking about!” Thereafter, all the listeners would know that such was the meaning of that particular verse, and they would think of it every time the verse was read in public; indeed, they would pass on the explanation to others. Since the biblical text was known far and wide and often cited—the Torah, in particular, was learned by heart at an early age—a clever answer to a long-standing conundrum would circulate quickly throughout the population.

Nowadays, such verse-centered interpretations are known as exegetical motifs—“motifs” because, like musical motifs, they were capable of being inserted into different compositions, reworked or adapted, and combined with other motifs to make a smooth-running narrative. After a while, retellers sometimes did not even bother to allude to the particular biblical verse in question, but simply incorporated the underlying idea into their retelling. Thus, for example, the idea that Abraham had explained to Isaac that “the lamb for the burnt offering [is you,] my son,” and that Isaac, far from fleeing, had willingly embraced his martyrdom, shows up in a variety of retellings, some of them terse, but others lovingly expanding on the basic idea:

Going at the same pace—no less with regard to their thinking than with their bodies … they came to the designated place. (Philo, On Abraham 172)

This is indeed intended as a precise explanation of the two occurrences of “and the two of them walked together” in the Genesis tale; the first refers to their physical walking (what Philo designates as the motion of “their bodies”), whereas the second refers to their agreement that Isaac should be sacrificed (Philo’s “with regard to their thinking”).

Remember … the father [= Abraham], by whose hand Isaac would have submitted to being slain for the sake of religion. (4 Macc. 13:12)

When the altar had been prepared (and) he had laid the cleft wood upon it and all was ready, [Abraham] said to his son: “My child, myriad were the prayers in which I beseeched God for your birth, and when you came into the world, I spared nothing for your upbringing.… But since it was by God’s will that I became your father and it now pleases Him that I give you over to Him, bear this consecration valiantly.…” The son of such a father could not but be brave-hearted, and Isaac received these words with joy. He exclaimed that he deserved never to have been born at all if he were to reject the decision of God and of his father.… (Josephus, Ant. 1.228–32)

And as he was setting out, he said to his son, “Behold now, my son, I am offering you as a burnt offering and I am returning you into the hands of Him who gave you to me. But the son said to the father, “Hear me, father. If [ordinarily] a lamb of the flocks is accepted with sweet savor as a sacrifice to the Lord, and if such flocks have been set aside for slaughter [in order to atone] for human iniquity, while man, on the contrary, has been designated to inherit this world—why should you be saying to me now, ‘Come and inherit eternal life and time without measure?’ Why if not that I was indeed born in this world in order to be offered as a sacrifice to Him who made me? Indeed, this [sacrifice] will be the [mark of] my blessedness over other men.…” (Ps.-Philo, Bib. Ant. 32:2–3)

The Wisdom Connection

It was suggested above that the common ancestor of all the diverse biblical interpreters of ancient Judaism and Christianity was the ancient Near Eastern sage, who pursued what the Bible calls “wisdom.” Wisdom was an international pursuit, and a very old one; some of the earliest texts that we possess from ancient Sumer and Babylon and Egypt are collections of proverbs, the favorite medium for transmitting wisdom. What wisdom was is not given to easy summary, but its basic premise was that there exists an underlying set of rules (including, but not limited to, what we would call “laws of nature”) that governs all of reality. The sage, by studying the written words of earlier sages as well as through his own, careful contemplation of the world, hoped to come to a fuller understanding of these rules and, hence, come to know how the world works. His wise counsel was therefore sought by kings and princes, and he was often a teacher who trained the next generation of sages.

At a certain point in Second Temple times, the job description of the Jewish sage was changed. Now, instead of contemplating the proverbs of previous generations, it was the Torah that occupied the sage’s attention: he became a biblical interpreter. In a sense, this transformation takes place before our eyes, in books like the Wisdom of Ben Sira (or: Sirach). The second-century-b.c.e. author is, in many ways, a traditional sage: his book is full of clever, pithy proverbs, many of them his own rewording of the insights from earlier generations and centuries. But along with this traditional sort of wisdom writing, Ben Sira also explains laws and stories from the Bible; indeed, his book concludes with a six-chapter review of biblical heroes and the lessons their stories are designed to impart. This is because, for him, it is the Torah that is the great repository of wisdom. Indeed, he says as much in an extended paean to wisdom in the middle of his book, in which Wisdom (here personified as a woman) tells of her own existence.

“I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist. I dwelt in the highest heavens, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud. Alone compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss.” (Sir. 24:3–5)

But God then orders Wisdom to transfer her headquarters out of heaven and take up residence on earth:

He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.…” [So] I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, His heritage. (Sir. 24:8, 12)

In recounting this, Ben Sira is not merely being a proud Jew who asserts that wisdom is the peculiar possession of his own people. Rather, he has something more specific in mind:

All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the Torah that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob. (Sir. 24:23)

In other words, Wisdom is the Pentateuch, “the book of the covenant of the Most High God.” Thus, if you wish really to know how the world works, to know about the underlying set of rules that God established for it, then the Pentateuch is your basic resource.

The wisdom connection apparent in Ben Sira explains much about the character of ancient biblical interpretation—not only for him, but for his contemporaries and predecessors as well. For when these sages-turned-exegetes approached the Pentateuch, they brought to their reading of it many of the same expectations and interpretive techniques that they had used in reading collections of proverbs and other wisdom compositions. Thus, the full meaning of a proverb was not immediately apparent; its words had to be studied and sifted carefully before they would yield their full significance. So too did all of Scripture have to be scrutinized, since the meaning of a particular word or phrase or prophecy or story might similarly be hidden from view. And just as proverbs were full of lessons for today, so biblical texts, even though they seemed to talk about the past, were likewise understood to have a message for the present; indeed, those two favorite opposites of ancient wisdom, the “righteous” and the “wicked,” might turn out to be embodied in a biblical narrative about the (altogether righteous) Abraham or Jacob, and such (altogether wicked) figures as Lot or Esau. The insights of wise proverbs were part of a single weave of divine wisdom, the great pattern underlying all of reality; even when one proverb seemed to contradict another (see Prov. 26:4–5), there really was no contradiction. Similarly, the Bible, the great compendium of divine wisdom, could contain no real contradiction; careful contemplation of its words would always show that they agree. Finally wisdom, although it was transmitted by different sages in different periods, truly had no human author; these tradents were merely reporting bits and pieces of the great pattern that had been created by God. Similarly, the books of Scripture may be attributed to different authors, but all of them, since they are full of divine wisdom, truly have only one source, God, who guided the human beings responsible for Scripture’s various parts. The various characteristics mentioned here are, it will be noticed, none other than the Four Assumptions shared by all ancient interpreters. It seems likely, therefore, that these common elements all derive from the wisdom heritage of the earliest interpreters, going back at least to the time of Ezra, “a sage skilled in the law of Moses” (Ezra 7:6). Although Scripture’s interpreters included people from many different orientations and walks of life, wild-eyed visionaries, priests and temple officials, experts in law and jurisprudence, and so forth—all appear to have been touched by this crucial consilience of scriptural interpretation and ancient Near Eastern wisdom.

Such was biblical interpretation in early Judaism. To modern eyes, some of it may not appear to be interpretation at all; certainly some of the claims made about the meaning of this or that verse or passage seem to us highly fanciful, if not patently apologetic or forced, though in fairness one ought to note that modern biblical commentaries are themselves not entirely free of such traits, even if they are usually more subtle about their intentions. But whatever one’s judgment of the work of these interpreters, their importance can scarcely be gainsaid. It is not just that, as mentioned earlier, they determined the basic way that the Bible would be approached for the next two millennia. Their Four Assumptions continued to be assumed by all interpreters until well after the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century; indeed, they are, to a great extent, still with us today. But still more important was the effect that these ancient interpreters had on their own contemporaries. Had they not succeeded in persuading their listeners that biblical texts did indeed have a message vital to people in their own day; and that the biblical corpus was perfectly consistent and harmonious, free of any error or defect; indeed, that these texts had been given by God for the purpose of guiding humans on their path, if only they were clever enough to understand the hidden meaning of many of its verses—had they not succeeded in getting these basic ideas and this basic approach across through myriad examples of actual interpretations, it seems quite unlikely that the writings of ancient Israel would ever have become what they did, the centerpiece of two great biblical religions, Judaism and Christianity.

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