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.

Winter break.

My plan was to update this blog at least every Wednesday. But now it's Wednesday and I'm sort of having trouble thinking of something to write. I should probably mention that it's also the middle of the winter break - no classes for 6 weeks, whee! - so I'm a little braindead generally.

 I am also supposed to be coming up with a topic for my MA thesis. I'm not having much luck with that either. I proposed one very badly-considered idea to my advisor and he never responded, which was not entirely unexpected, but I hoped he would have some alternate suggestions. On the other hand, the last time I tried that, it resulted in one of the worst papers I've ever written, so maybe he learned we're quite different people.

Here we go. I shall post the abstract of the paper I wrote for my Dead Sea Scrolls class last semester.

4QMMT, Halakhah, and Second Temple Sects

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran opened the study of the history of the Second Temple period wider than it had been before. The historical reconstruction of Jewish belief and practice, especially in the field of halakhah, or Jewish law, has been greatly enhanced by the legal texts found among the Scrolls. But questions about how to read and where to place these texts still linger. E. P. Sanders has convinced many scholars that “covenental nomism” was the common religious ground in the period; other scholars believe that the only common ground was diversity itself. The Qumran legal texts seem to provide evidence that many of the post-Destruction rabbis’ concerns do indeed have roots in the Second Temple intra-Jewish debates, but the question is how to read this evidence and how it illuminates the reconstruction of the Qumran sect, the picture of diversity in Second Temple Judaism(s), and the development of the rabbis.

The discovery and publication of 4QMMT in particular opened the floodgates of debate on halakhah in the Second Temple Period. It reinvigorated two areas of study around the Qumran sect: the first of the identity of the sect, as the text indicated some very intriguing possibilities, and the second of the historicity of Jewish halakhah, especially as it is recorded in the earliest rabbinic texts. 4QMMT witnesses that as today and as among the talmudic rabbis, halakhah was one of the sociological determining characteristics in Jewish culture even before the destruction of the Second Temple. The text not only provides us with a window into this debate, but it also enriches what we know both about the earliest Jesus-followers as they are recorded in the New Testament and the rabbinic traditions which claim to be from the first century either before or just after the Destruction in 70 CE. One of the more interesting angles to be investigated is the depiction of halakhah in the New Testament, and a possible interpretation of Jesus being depicted in some instances in the Gospels as a halakhic authority.