Graduation approaches

Hebrew started this week, so I think blog posts (assuming I remember to write them) are moving to Thursday.

As the title says, graduation doth approach, which means I am starting to feel kind of stressed out about my thesis.  Since I am, I'll write about that today.  It turns out that I did indeed decide to build my thesis on top of my good paper from last semester.  I'm just adjusting it slightly so that it's not a paper about 4QMMT anymore, but about a sociological analysis of Second Temple Jewish groups.

It's generally accepted now that during the Second Temple period, Judaism was moderately diverse and divided into different groups or sects and even to speak of "Judaisms."  Most analysis of these follows standard sociological constructs, in the vein of Max Weber or and Ernst Troeltsch. These scholars both built generally applicable sociological models to explain groups or sects in any human society.

One aspect of the Second Temple sects that I think has been overlooked is the importance that halakhah played in these groups' various self-definitions and also as a cause for sect formation in the first place.  I am using "halakhah" (הלכה) to refer not to the Torah itself, but to its interpretation and specifically practical interpretation.  The discovery of the documents known as 4QMMT at Qumran and the apparent attestation to a halakhic debate that also appears in the Mishnah invigorated study of the Qumran sect and their possible provenance, but I still think even Jewish scholars overlooked the importance of halakhah itself.

I am arguing that halakhah was in some cases the cause of group/sect formation (as in the case of 4QMMT) and definitely one of the primary characteristics of self-definition.  Josephus tries to explain the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes to his Gentile audience by making them look like Greek philosophical schools, but he cannot hide that many of the disagreements between the groups were halakhic in nature.  Even, I am arguing, the Jesus movement cared about halakhah, recorded their group's halakhic decisions, and cast Jesus as their group's halakhic authority.