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This chapter compares rabbinic and Josephan traditions about the Sadducees. It shows that traditions in the Bavli tend to be hostile toward the Sadducees, while traditions in Palestinian compilations tend to reflect a more neutral perspective. The Palestinian traditions acknowledge, or even revel in, the existence of individual Sadducees who are wicked, but these individuals are always quickly punished with death by God for their evil deeds, and the Sadducees as a group are harmless, obedient, in fact, to the rulings of the Pharisees. It is also shown that since it is a fundamental tenet of rabbinic thought that the rabbis possessed traditions that were authoritative despite their independence from scripture, the introduction into Babylonia of traditions that portray the Sadducees as accepting only scripture and rejecting traditions external to the Bible motivated these hostile Babylonian portrayals. It is argued that the Bavli's portrayal of the Sadducees as a group that accepts only scripture derives either from (1) Josephus, or (2) traditions drawn upon independently by both Josephus and the rabbis.

The Second Temple period covers the legal system from the period in which the Judaean community under Nehemia and Ezra were able to restore the operations of various institutions that were authorized by the Persians, to the downfall of the initial revolt against Rome in 70 C.E. and the destruction of the Temple. This chapter demonstrates how this period underwent a wide range of approaches, since cultural environments varied greatly between the Palestine and Hellenized communities of Egypt; between the Palestines and the Pharisees, Sadducees, and other entities who seeked to achieve Jewish political hegemony; and between those who attempted to veer away from the then dominant rule in Jerusalem. As the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls played no small part in determining the legal developments in this period, this chapter shows that the law could be defined by the following approaches: Second Commonwealth halakhah; a pluralistic and historical approach; and the positivistic approach, which looks into the rise of formal institutional sources.

The new tendency of the Sadducees to appeal to Scripture for practical guidance caused a cultural and religious chain reaction. This chapter deals with the issue of the authority of the holy text versus traditional religious norms, delving into the Second Temple period. It explores the disputes and mutual agreements between Pharisaic and Sadducee-priestly halakhic systems in order to enable a detailed description and analysis of the changes that took place from that time onward. It explains the old traditions in accordance with their biblical origins. The exegetical techniques used in these explanations turned into creative tools, and new norms that resulted from the reading of Scripture were introduced, authorized by rewriting the Pentateuch in accordance with them. Due to the fact that any direct evidence for the Pharisees' legal tradition is not available, the inquiry is based on several methodological assumptions and involves some serious difficulties. While the sectarians left a relatively large textual inheritance of their literary creation, all present day knowledge of the Pharisaic halakhah stems from indirect sources. These include the writings of Flavius Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, the references to the Pharisees and their halakhah in the New Testament, rabbinical traditions concerning their forefathers' halakhah, and of course, what the scrolls themselves testify concerning the sectarians' rivals.

With the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the Sadducees, the Qumran sectarians, and other Jewish groups disappeared and only the Pharisees' tradition survived within the rabbinic movement. This chapter assesses the findings related to Halakhah and suggests a new explanation for the disappearance of the sects after the destruction of the Temple and for the hegemony of the rabbinic movement thereafter. The categories of stringency versus leniency differentiate between two groups within the Pharisaic-Rabbinic movement itself: the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai. The creation of these lists by itself testifies that in the eyes of its authors, stringency and leniency were real characteristics of the two schools' halakhic traditions. Further, the analysis makes the point that the Temple Scroll simply rewrites the Bible to include the extra prohibition. Looking into the different strategies used by the scrolls on the one hand and the Rabbis on the other to solve the contradiction between the tradition and the Bible is illuminating. The phenomenon that various groups disappeared, creating one rabbinic movement, had much to do with the fact that the Pharisees and their heirs, the Rabbis, actually adopted some basic concepts of the Sadducees' legal system.

The chapter examines the conceptualization and role of holiness in classical rabbinic and para-rabbinic literature. The first part contends that while holiness structured the thought world of sectarians in the late Second Temple period, it figures less importantly for the rabbis themselves, who in an assortment of texts appear self-consciously to disrupt holiness-based hierarchies. They instead assign a structuring role to law. The second part of the chapter surveys the ways in which texts from rabbinic Palestine deploy holiness discourse, and ventures that the rabbis continue to think of holiness as closer to a natural property than to an evaluative shorthand.

As resurrection increased in its reception among a range of groups within the second century BCE, it did so against a cultural backdrop in which other attitudes toward death already occupied a traditional role within Jewish society. The present chapter examines the rationale for denial of an afterlife. Jews who resisted hope in an afterlife viewed life and death within the creation differently; they valued the continuity of the Jewish people on earth; and they held differing claims about divine justice. Negations of the afterlife were not the minority view of a narrow aristocratic cadre of Sadducees, but had strong and widespread precedents in earlier tradition. Reconstructing the rationale of denial helps to set the resurrection hope into deeper contextual relief: those who affirmed resurrection advanced a more insurgent and controversial theodicy that posed inherent contradictions with earlier tradition.

Chapter 4 returns to the temple arena with the account of an event in which either Alexander Janneus (Josephus) or an anonymous priest (Mishnah, Tosefta) is pelted with citrons in the temple. In Josephus this etiological story explains the circumstances underlying Janneus’s erection of a wooden barrier in the temple and, as in the previous chapter, evidences tension between Janneus and the people. The rabbinic tradition also concerns the history of the temple and its laws, but from a different direction, a conflict over the performance of the water libation. As opposed to the legends treated in the previous chapters, we cannot definitely state that these two versions derived from a single Ur-text.

Josephus (37–100 CE) was a Jewish Roman scholar, historian, general, and advisor to Vespasian and Titus. For a brief period he led Jewish troops in a rebellion against the Roman occupation but was eventually reconciled to Roman rule and his own role as an intermediary. According to his autobiography, divine guidance figured prominently in his life, especially when he fully expected to be executed after being captured by Vespasian in the Jewish War. Although dreams and special revelation clearly play a role, Josephus, like Philo (for whom he had a high regard), places Moses and the scriptures at the center of divine guidance. But Judaism was not monolithic, and Josephus describes some of the features distinguishing Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. In common with most Jews of his day, Josephus displays a remarkable degree of freedom in approaching biblical interpretation.