A Tale of Two Cities

December 19, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Tonight, as we near Hanukkah, we will begin rehearsing 600 years of Jewish history. The 600 years that interest us begin 300 years before the common era and end 300 years after the common era began. As I speak, my words will be like the oil in the Hanukkah menorah. Destined to last only ten or fifteen minutes, they will miraculously burn through hundreds of years. Actually, I intend for them to last the next few Friday evenings as we pass from 2008 to 2009. So this is the first in a series of connected sermons.

Before the year 300 BCE, the Judeans were a moderately successful little people living in a small stretch of land from Jerusalem to just above the Sea of Galilee, and from Jerusalem down to the little village of Beersheba. They remembered a time when their kings David and Solomon once ruled a great Empire that dominated the entire central region of the Ancient Near East, with treaties setting Israel on an equal footing with Egypt and Assyria. In those days, the Israelites were called "the People of the Bow" because of their ferocious military force.

But the Judeans of 300 BCE were no military force. For two hundred years, they had lived in a province owing allegiance and getting protection from the Persian Empire. In return for annual tribute, the Persians allowed the Judeans freedom to practice a religion which centered around the sacrifices offered in a diminutive Temple in the small town of Jerusalem. The Temple priests were the Jewish government, the High Priest and his family negotiated with Persia.

Originally, the priesthood was like a guild, a high-class labor union that a Judean could enter as an apprentice and work in for a lifetime. But by the year 300, Israel's priesthood was strictly hereditary, an occupation passed from father to son. The priesthood consisted of Kohanim and Levites, superior and servant priests, organized by families or clans. Priests could be found from one end of Judea to the other, but the most important priestly clans, the highest ranking families, worked in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Ordinary Judeans believed that the stone beneath the Temple was the foundation stone of the world, the Temple was the home of YHWH, and YHWH still communicated with the High Priest once a year inside the Holy of Holies. Oh, and one more thing united the Judeans as one people. They were the people of "the Law and the Prophets," meaning, the priests had a scroll that outlined the history of the people and told of its former greatness, specified the laws used in the Temple and in sacrifice, and set the holy times when ordinary folk were supposed to appear in Jerusalem (or, at least, send money to the Temple in Jerusalem). And they read this scroll aloud and explained it weekly.

Not all Judeans were farmers. Some joined with the Phoenicians, becoming sea-farers and traders. Some lived in distant lands, yet they remained loyal to YHWH and they sent annual dues to the Temple in Jerusalem, whether they lived in Spain or Turkey or Egypt or Yemen. Other gods ruled in other lands, but YHWH ruled in Judea, so any synagogue or house of study outside the Holy Land was only a makeshift affair. The real religion, all authentic worship, was conducted by the priests in the Temple.

The province of Judea was so insignificant to the world at large that Alexander the Great, who conquered Egypt and Persia and even penetrated India, never bothered to conquer Jerusalem or Judea. Later rabbis would create legends about meetings with Alexander, but in truth the conqueror had little or nothing to do with Judea. And, despite this, it was Alexander's death at a young age that caused the Judeans one of their most significant periods of suffering and change.

Alexander died on June 11, 323 BCE. He had no clear successor and his only son was mentally deficient. So, by the year 270, his vast Empire was divided among three of his generals: Atigonus who ruled in Greece, Ptolemy who ruled in Egypt, and Seleucus who ruled  in Assyria.

In redrawing the world map, the backwater province of Judea fell to Ptolemy of Egypt, so the annual tribute of the Judeans was now sent to Egypt and the tiny Judean settlements in Egypt were suddenly significant. Especially Alexandria, the port city. Alexander had invited Jewish traders to Alexandria to take the place of the Phoenicians who had controlled Mediterranean shipping because he destroyed their great port city of Tyre when the Phoenicians opposed him. In Alexandria, Judaism came face to face with Hellenism, the Greek world of philosophy and culture. By the year 200, this encounter produced the first Greek translation of the Holy Scriptures. Legend said seventy scholars formed the translation committee and the word septuaginta means "seventy," so the book was called the Septuagint.

This posed a dilemma for the priests in the Temple in Jerusalem. Up to now, the work of interpreting the Torah and the Prophets had been their exclusive domain. But they were unschooled in Greek so they could not control the interpretations that entered into the Septuagint. At the same time, most of the Judeans in Alexandria could not understand the Hebrew scriptures or the special Aramaic translation and interpretation of those scriptures called the Targum which was controlled by the priests of Jerusalem.

Two things happened: The priests of Jerusalem feared they were losing control over the Bible, over what Judeans everywhere believed. Why? Because the authority of the priests and the High Priest was based on the position of Aaron in the Torah. The priests considered this the most important teaching in the Torah. Now, the fact that other Judeans could read Bible differently scared them. So the priests resisted this change. They stiffened their backs and they treated Greek culture as a new and ultimate enemy to the Jewish way of life. Even though the Greeks had not worshiped idols for nearly three hundred years, the priests in Jerusalem now taught that Greek statues and emblematic Greek city gods were idols. Imagine some modern rabbi being upset by Super Sunday and calling the sports teams of modern cities, the stadiums, and the team mascots, a religion of idol worship. What good would it do? Just as Jews today are drawn to football or baseball or even to the movies, average Judeans were drawn to Greek culture. But the priests of the Temple remained resolute. They condemned Greek culture and philosophy from the very get-go.

Still, a second thing happened: In Alexandria, a new way of reading the Bible was born, a way which combined the notions of Socrates and Plato and Greek philosophers with Jewish learning. In particular, there eventually emerged a singular Bible scholar and Jewish philosopher named Philo (20 BCE-50CE), who not only rewrote Jewish religious history, but went on to set the stage for Christianity and build the foundation for all Western Philosophy -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- from his time right down to the 1650s, the time of Baruch Spinoza, another Jew who set the stage for the Enlightenment and modern philosophy.

The real wonder is we have no evidence that Philo could even read a single word of Hebrew. He remade Jewish thinking based entirely on the Greek translation of the Bible! His great advantages were first, that he was far from the Temple, out of reach of the priests; second, that he spoke and wrote in a language the priests could hardly understand; and third, that he was reading an interpretation of the Bible they did not control; and fourth, that he was writing for literate average Greek Jews.

It became a Tale of Two Cities. At one and the same time, the priests in Jerusalem stiffened their resistance to Greek culture, Alexandrian Jews in Egypt began the long process of combining ancient Hebrew thinking with what was then current Greek philosophy. And these divergent paths created the basis for all the conflicts in Jewish thinking and religion for the next thousand years. Come back next Friday evening and you will hear what Hanukkah really means. For now, let us say: Amen.