Intertestamental Judaism

"From the time that the last prophets -- Chaggai, Zechariah, and Malachi -- died, the Holy Spirit ceased to exist among Israel." -- Tosefta Sotah 13¹

"All the varieties of Judaism in the Hellenistic period, of both the Diaspora and the land of Israel, were hellenized, that is, were integral parts of the culture of the ancient world." -- Shaye Cohen, 2014²

Summary

The Jewish world between the last prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the ministry of Jesus is well documented by the standards of the ancient world.  It is not a blank.  The phrase "400 silent years" describes a gap in one canon, the Protestant Old Testament, and a Jewish belief that recognized prophecy had stopped.  It does not describe a gap in the record.  This article asks what that world was like and how securely each part of the picture is known.

1. The silence is canonical, not historical. Josephus in the 90s AD said books written after Artaxerxes did not have "the like authority" because the succession of prophets had failed.³ 1 Maccabees and the Tosefta say the same thing in their own words.⁴¹ But the same centuries left the Elephantine papyri, Ben Sira, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the books of Enoch, more than 900 manuscripts from the Qumran caves, Philo, Josephus, Greek and Latin reports, coins and inscriptions.⁵⁶ Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include several of these books. "Intertestamental" is a Christian label for a period, not a description of what Jews themselves thought was happening.
2. The outline of events is secure, and the best-attested points have more than one kind of evidence. Persian rule after 539 BC, Alexander in 332, Ptolemaic then Seleucid control, the crisis under Antiochus IV in 167 to 164 BC, the Hasmonean state, Pompey's capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC and Herod's kingship belong to a chronology supported by Jewish and non-Jewish texts, papyri and inscriptions. These checks vary in strength. Polybius wrote in Antiochus's own century; Tacitus and Diodorus preserve later accounts whose sources must be assessed separately. A hostile writer is not automatically an independent witness.
3. "Hellenization" was not one thing. It meant Greek language, Greek names, Greek schools, Greek city status, Greek translation of the scriptures and Jewish books written in Greek. Jews who resisted Antiochus used much of this. Judas Maccabee's envoy to Rome was Eupolemus, probably the same Jewish author who wrote in Greek that Moses taught the alphabet to the world.⁴⁷ 2 Maccabees, a Greek book, condemns "hellenization" in Greek.⁸ The fight was over particular acts, such as a gymnasium under a high priest, abandoning circumcision and an altar of foreign worship in the Temple. It was not a choice between all of Greek culture and none of it.
4. A common Judaism existed, and it was real enough for outsiders to describe. Greek and Roman writers who disliked Jews still knew them by the Sabbath, circumcision, food laws, one imageless God and the Temple in Jerusalem. Diaspora communities sent money to that Temple every year, which Cicero complained about in 59 BC.⁹ Ritual baths and stone vessels turn up in houses from Jerusalem to Galilee.⁶ The variation was real too: a Jewish temple at Elephantine in Egypt, a rival calendar at Qumran, and disputes over purity, priesthood and the afterlife.
5. Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes were small parties, and none of them left more than a sliver of self-description except the people of the scrolls. Josephus counts "above six thousand" Pharisees and "about four thousand" Essenes and says the Sadducees were few.¹⁰¹⁰ E. P. Sanders draws the obvious conclusion that "relatively few Jews belonged to one of the parties."¹¹ Josephus calls them "philosophies" to explain them to Greek readers.² Common claims need checking: no source found for this article before the third century AD says the Sadducees accepted only the five books of Moses, and Josephus, himself a priest, says he lived as a Pharisee.¹²¹³
6. Qumran preserves direct community voices, and the Essene identification is an argument, not a label. Rules for separated communities, a calendar of 364 days, and legal rulings that the Mishnah later puts in Sadducean mouths occur in the scrolls.^14141415 The scrolls never use the word "Essene." The identification rests on overlap between community texts and outside reports, and on Pliny placing Essenes on the west shore of the Dead Sea.⁶ It is a strong explanation, but neither every scroll's authorship nor its connection to the settlement follows from it.
7. Hope for the future took several forms. Daniel, 2 Maccabees and the Pharisees expected bodily resurrection. The Sadducees denied it. The books of Enoch are five separate works of different dates, the oldest of them older than the Maccabean revolt.¹⁶ Messianic hopes were varied as well. That subject is argued in full in Second Temple Messianic Expectations, and only an orientation is given here.
8. What this context can and cannot do for the New Testament. It shows that the Gospels' Pharisees, Sadducees, Sabbath disputes, purity rules, Temple tax and resurrection debate fit a real first-century setting. It cannot show that any particular saying or miracle happened, and similarity to Qumran does not prove that Jesus or John borrowed from the sect.

Verdict:  the Jewish world between the Testaments is known well in outline and patchily in detail.  The outline rests on independent kinds of evidence.  The details of the parties rest heavily on Josephus, on polemic, and on a single sectarian library.  Christianity began inside this world, among Jews who already argued about resurrection, purity, the Temple and the meaning of their scriptures.

Part 1: What "intertestamental" and "400 silent years" mean

A Protestant Bible ends the Old Testament with Malachi, a prophet of the Persian period, and opens the New with Matthew.  About four centuries lie between them.  Popular teaching calls them the "400 silent years," as if God, Israel and history all fell quiet.  Two different claims hide in that phrase, and only one of them is true.

The true claim: Jews themselves said prophecy had stopped

Jewish sources from and about the period describe a break in the succession of prophets.  They do not establish that every Jew rejected every later claim to inspiration.

1. 1 Maccabees was written in Hebrew and survives in Greek translation, with later versions derived from it. It ends by pointing readers to "the chronicles" of John Hyrcanus's priesthood, so it was finished in or after his time, the late second century BC.⁴¹⁷ It describes the priests of 164 BC storing the stones of a defiled altar "until there should come a prophet to shew what should be done with them."⁴ It dates a later disaster by saying there was nothing like it "since the time that a prophet was not seen among them," and it makes Simon high priest "until there should arise a faithful prophet."⁴⁴
2. Josephus, writing Against Apion in the 90s AD, says the Jews have 22 sacred books. Of later works he says: "'Tis true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly; but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers; because there hath not been an exact succession of Prophets since that time."³
3. The Tosefta, a rabbinic collection compiled after the Mishnah, says that after Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi died "the Holy Spirit ceased to exist among Israel." The same passage then tells stories of a heavenly voice heard by John Hyrcanus, a Hasmonean high priest of the late second century BC.¹¹ The Babylonian Talmud repeats the saying.¹⁸

These sources express a sense of living after the age of the prophets.  That belief is part of why the Hebrew canon closed where it did.  The question of which books belong in the canon is argued in The Biblical Canon.  Here it is enough to see that "no accepted prophet" is a claim about authority.

The false claim: nothing happened, or nothing was written

The same four centuries produced a large body of Jewish writing and physical evidence.  A partial list, oldest first:

1. Aramaic letters and contracts from a Jewish military colony at Elephantine in Egypt, from the fifth century BC. One petition of 408 or 407 BC names "Johanan the high priest and his colleagues the priests who are in Jerusalem" and "Delaiah and Shelemiah the sons of Sanballat governor of Samaria."⁵
2. Greek translations of the Law, then of the Prophets and other books, in Egypt. Ben Sira's grandson, who arrived in Egypt "in the thirty-eighth year, in the reign of Euergetes the king," that is 132 BC, already knew Greek versions of "the Law itself and the Prophets and the rest of the books."¹⁷¹⁷
3. Ben Sira itself, a Hebrew book of wisdom from Jerusalem written two generations before its translation, around 180 BC,¹⁹ and Jewish works in Greek such as the history of Eupolemus, the Exodus play of Ezekiel the Tragedian, and the books later called 2 and 3 Maccabees.⁷
4. The books of Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon.
5. More than 900 manuscripts, most of them fragments, from eleven caves near Qumran.⁶
6. The large surviving works of Philo of Alexandria (died about AD 50) and Josephus (died about AD 100).
7. Greek and Latin reports about Jews, from Hecataeus of Abdera around 300 BC to Tacitus around AD 100.
8. Coins of the Hasmonean rulers, Greek and Hebrew inscriptions from Jerusalem, ritual baths, tombs and the excavated settlement at Qumran.

Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach and Wisdom.  The "silence" therefore belongs to one canon.  It also depends on how Daniel is dated.  If Daniel 7 to 12 were written during the crisis of 167 to 164 BC, as the critical dating holds, a canonical book stands inside the "silent" period.  If they were written in the sixth century, Daniel 11 is a prophecy of it.  When Was the Book of Daniel Written? weighs that question and finds a layered book.  This article uses Daniel only as a witness to belief in resurrection.  Under either dating discussed there, that belief precedes Christianity.

The same centuries are often called the Second Temple period instead, after the Temple rebuilt in 515 BC and destroyed in AD 70.  That is the Jews' own frame.  It has the further advantage of not implying that the people living in it were waiting for a second Testament.

Part 2: A chronology from Cyrus to Herod, and how each step is known

The table below gives the main events and, for each, the sources that report it.  The last column says whether anything outside the Jewish literary tradition checks it.  The length of the Persian period itself is disputed in traditional Jewish chronology, which counts it much shorter than the Persian and Babylonian records do.  That dispute is weighed in Traditional Jewish Chronology and is not reopened here.  Dates in 1 Maccabees are given in years of the Seleucid era, which began in 312 or 311 BC;  converting them can shift an event by a year.²⁰

Three points about this table matter for the rest of the article.

The core sequence does not depend on 1 and 2 Maccabees alone.  Polybius was a Greek historian of the same century, and the passages used here never mention the Jews.  He still confirms the king's eccentricity, his humiliation by Rome in 168 BC, and his death after trying to plunder a temple in Elymais.²³²³²³  Tacitus, writing around AD 100 and openly contemptuous of Jews, says that "King Antiochus strove to destroy the national superstition, and to introduce Greek civilization."²⁴  This shows that a hostile Roman account also knew of the persecution.  Tacitus does not identify his source here, so his hostility alone cannot establish independent access to the event.

The theological framing is the authors' own, and the two books frame it differently.  1 Maccabees tells a dynastic history.  It ends by sending readers to "the chronicles" of John Hyrcanus, and it treats Mattathias's sons as God's chosen deliverers.⁴  2 Maccabees is a Greek abridgment of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene.  Its translator Joachim Schaper notes that chapter 7, 12:43-45 and other passages "seem alien in the context of Jason’s history."⁸⁸  2 Maccabees reads the disaster as punishment for Jewish sin and the victory as God's answer to martyrs.  It includes angels on horseback and the flogging of Heliodorus.  The inscription addresses "King Seleukos to Heliodoros his brother greetings" and concerns an appointment over sanctuaries in Coele-Syria and Phoenicia.²²  It corroborates the official and the administrative setting, not his alleged visit to Jerusalem or the flogging.  The books also present events in different orders:  1 Maccabees narrates Antiochus's death after the Temple's cleansing, while 2 Maccabees places his death in chapter 9 before the cleansing in chapter 10.⁴  Narrative order alone does not settle whether a passage follows chronology or groups events by subject.  The exact sequence needs evidence beyond this comparison.

Year counts need separate checking.  Josephus says Aristobulus I put on the diadem "four hundred eighty and one years and three months after the people had been delivered from the Babylonish slavery."¹⁰  Counted from the return of 538 BC, that would put Aristobulus in 57 BC.  He reigned in 104 to 103 BC, so the figure is about 47 years too long.³¹  The Damascus Document dates its own movement "three hundred and ninety years" after Nebuchadnezzar, which matches the number of years of Israel's punishment in Ezekiel 4:5.¹⁴  The second number has an evident scriptural parallel; the cause of Josephus's different error is unknown.  Neither should be treated as an independently established date for the event it describes.

Part 3: What "Hellenization" actually meant

Older textbooks often told this period as a contest between pure Judaism and corrupting Greek culture, won by the Maccabees.  The sources do not support so simple a story.  Shaye Cohen of Harvard puts it bluntly:  "All the Jews of antiquity were hellenized to some degree."²  He adds that "It is a mistake to imagine that the land of Judea preserved a “pure” form of Judaism and that the Diaspora was the home of adulterated or diluted forms of Judaism."²  His reason is that every variety of Judaism in the period used the language, the goods and the institutions of the wider Greek-speaking world, and the question was only which parts and how far.

The forms it took

1. Language and scripture. By 132 BC Jews in Egypt read the Law, the Prophets and other books in Greek, and Ben Sira's grandson apologized that Hebrew "does not have the same force" in another language.¹⁷ Jews in Judea also used Greek. The notice on the balustrade of Herod's Temple, warning that "No foreigner is to enter," was written in Greek, a language the foreigners it warned could read.³² A Jerusalem synagogue inscription, also in Greek, honors "Theodotos son of Vettenos, priest and archisynagogos," who built the synagogue "for the reading of the Law and teaching of the commandments" and a guest-house for visitors "from abroad."³² A priest with a Greek name, a father with a Latin-sounding one, and a Greek inscription, all serving the reading of the Law: that is what Hellenization usually looked like.
2. Names. The high priest Jesus took the name Jason, and Onias called himself Menelaus.¹⁰ The Hasmonean rulers who fought the Seleucids gave their sons the Greek names Hyrcanus, Aristobulus and Alexander.
3. Jewish books written in Greek. Eupolemus, as quoted by the compiler Alexander Polyhistor, said in Greek that Moses "was the first to teach the Jews letters, and from the Jews the Phoenicians received them, and from the Phoenicians the Greeks."⁷ Ezekiel the Tragedian turned the Exodus into a Greek verse play.⁷ Jason of Cyrene wrote a five-volume history of the revolt in Greek, which survives in the abridgment called 2 Maccabees.⁸ These works use Greek forms to defend Jewish claims, and Eupolemus's claim is that the Greeks got their alphabet from Moses.
4. Institutions. Here the conflict lay. 2 Maccabees says Jason paid Antiochus IV for permission "to establish by his authority a gymnasium and a body of youth for it and to draw up the list of the ‘Antiochenes’ amongst those in Hierosolyma." The phrase points to a Greek-style citizen body named after the king.⁸ Young nobles wore "the Greek hat," priests left the altar for the wrestling ground, and Jason sent money to Tyre "for the sacrifice to Heracles," though his envoys spent it on warships instead.⁸⁸
5. Houses and graves. Under Herod, wealthy Jerusalem houses were decorated in Roman style but without the figured images Roman art used. They also had ritual baths and large numbers of stone vessels, which many Jews believed could not become impure.⁶ Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina notes that "It is not a coincidence that ossuaries first appeared during Herod’s reign," when Roman fashions came to Judea through the court.⁶

So the people of this period did not choose between Greek culture and Judaism as wholes.  Most took a great deal from the first and gave up nothing they counted essential in the second.  Cohen calls that the common aim:  "For most Jews, the ideal solution was to create a synthesis between Judaism and Hellenism."²

Where the line was drawn, according to each source

The three main accounts of the crisis agree that a gymnasium was built in Jerusalem.  They disagree about who asked for it and what it meant.

1. 1 Maccabees blames "wicked men" who said "Let us go and make a covenant with the heathen that are round about us." They "built a place of exercise at Jerusalem according to the customs of the heathen: And made themselves uncircumcised, and forsook the holy covenant."⁴⁴ The book does not name the high priests involved. Its heroes are the family of Mattathias, and its villains are the king and the "wicked."
2. 2 Maccabees names Jason, "who was impious and no true high priest," and describes "such an extreme of hellenization and increase in the adoption of allophylisma."⁸ Allophylismos means the ways of foreign tribes. The same book uses the Greek word Ioudaismos, "Judaism," for the way of life its heroes defended, praising those "who behaved themselves manfully for Judaism."⁸⁸ In this Greek book the two words stand as opposites.
3. Josephus says Menelaus and "the sons of Tobias" told Antiochus they wished "to leave the laws of their country" and "follow the king's laws, and the Grecian way of living," and so asked for the gymnasium.¹⁰ Josephus wrote two and a half centuries later, and his account differs from 2 Maccabees on who asked.

None of these writers objects to Greek speech, Greek names or Greek books.  Two of them wrote in Greek.  What they object to is a gymnasium run by the high priest, the hiding of circumcision, priests leaving the altar, money for Heracles, and finally the king's ban on Jewish law.  The line runs through practices tied to the covenant, not between two cultures.

Why did Antiochus persecute?

The king's motive is the hardest question of the period, and the sources give different answers.  1 Maccabees says Antiochus "wrote to his whole kingdom, that all should be one people."⁴  None of the Greek and Roman accounts used in this article mentions such a decree.  2 Maccabees blames Jewish sin and says the Samaritans themselves asked for their temple on Gerizim to be renamed for "Zeus-the-Friend-of-Strangers."⁸  Tacitus says the king wanted "to destroy the national superstition, and to introduce Greek civilization."²⁴  Cohen's judgment is honest:  "What provoked the persecution by Epiphanes remains an enigma in spite of intense study by many scholars, but a persecution there was".  His reason for calling it an enigma is that "In antiquity, religious persecutions were something of a rarity."²

What is not in doubt is what the persecution targeted.  1 Maccabees lists it:  sacrifice of "swine's flesh, and unclean beasts," children left "uncircumcised," the books of the law burned, and women put to death who "had caused their children to be circumcised."⁴⁴  Resistance took the same form:  "many in Israel were fully resolved and confirmed in themselves not to eat any unclean thing."⁴  Those markers are the ones the next Part examines.

Part 4: What joined Jews across their differences

E. P. Sanders, in Judaism: Practice and Belief (1992), set out to describe "common Judaism, that of the ordinary priests and the ordinary people."  He argued that "the special views of the famous parties (Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes)" had to be "relegated to their proper place," because "the parties were quite small."¹¹  His case is that what most Jews did matters more for the history than what the parties argued about.  The evidence supports him on the main markers.

The markers, and who reports them

1. One God, without images. The account usually attributed to Hecataeus of Abdera, around 300 BC, says Moses "made no representation or image of gods, because he considered that nothing of a human shape was applicable to God," though it then identifies the God of Israel with "heaven." It describes a people whose customs were "wholly different from all other nations" and who were led by a high priest regarded "as the messenger and interpreter of the mind and commands of God."²¹ This is a Greek interpretation, not an insider's creed. Tacitus, around AD 100, says Pompey found the Temple sanctuary empty, "with no similitude of gods within."²⁴
2. The Temple in Jerusalem. Jews far from Judea paid for it. Cicero, defending the Roman governor Flaccus in 59 BC, complains that "gold, under pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem," until Flaccus banned its export from Asia.⁹ Philo says Augustus knew the Jews of Rome were "in the habit of contributing sacred sums of money from their first fruits and sending them to Jerusalem."³³ The Theodotos synagogue in Jerusalem kept rooms "for the lodging of those who are in need of it from abroad," which could accommodate visiting pilgrims.³²
3. The Sabbath. Agatharchides, a Greek writer quoted by Josephus, mocked the Jews for letting Ptolemy take Jerusalem because on the seventh day "they make no use of their arms, nor meddle with husbandry, nor take care of any affairs of life."³ Cassius Dio says Pompey's men breached the Temple wall on the days of Saturn, and "the defenders were captured on the day of Saturn, without making any defence."²⁹ 1 Maccabees shows the same rule in Jewish hands. A thousand refugees refused "to profane the sabbath day" and were killed without fighting, after which Mattathias's party decided to fight if attacked on the Sabbath.⁴⁴ Here is common practice and debate about it in a single story.
4. Circumcision. The persecution tried to end it, and the Hasmoneans imposed it on a people they conquered. John Hyrcanus let the Idumeans stay in their land "if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews," after which "they were hereafter no other than Jews."¹⁰
5. Food. "They chose rather to die, that they might not be defiled with meats."⁴
6. Purity. Ritual baths and stone vessels appear in Jerusalem mansions, in Galilean towns and at Qumran.⁶⁶⁶ These are physical evidence of a shared purity practice that crossed class and region.
7. Festivals. 1 Maccabees records the founding of an eight-day festival of the altar's dedication from the 25th of Kislev, which is Hanukkah.⁴ An Aramaic letter of 419 BC to the Jews at Elephantine gives dated instructions for the days from the 14th to the 21st of Nisan. The papyrus is badly damaged, and its editor Arthur Cowley restored much of the wording, including the festival names.⁵

That is a real common identity.  Hostile outsiders could recognize it, and Jews would die for its markers.  Sanders's conclusion follows from the sources, not from a preference for harmony.

The variation was real too

Common practice did not mean one authority or one interpretation.  Four cases show how wide the range was.

1. More than one temple. The Jews at Elephantine had their own temple of "the God Ya'u," with meal-offerings, incense and sacrifice, in the fifth century BC. When it was destroyed they wrote both to Jerusalem and to the sons of Sanballat in Samaria for help. They report that Jerusalem's high priest never answered: "They have not sent any letter to us."⁵⁵ The Samaritans worshipped at their own temple on Gerizim until John Hyrcanus destroyed it.¹⁰
2. More than one calendar. The Qumran texts count "a complete year of three-hundred and sixty-four days," a calendar out of step with the Temple's.¹⁴ Its commentary on Habakkuk says the Wicked Priest came to attack the Teacher of Righteousness "during the rest of the day of Atonement," on what was for the sect "the day of fasting, the sabbath of their rest."¹⁴ A priest who could travel on that day was not keeping the sect's calendar.
3. More than one view of the high priesthood. Diodorus's account portrays priestly leadership as the Jews' ancestral system, even claiming that they "have never had any king."²¹ Taken literally about their whole history, that is false. The Hasmoneans later combined kingship and high priesthood, while a Qumran commentary attacks a "Wicked Priest" who "deserted God and betrayed the laws for the sake of riches."¹⁴ These are competing portraits of proper leadership, not interchangeable reports of a single arrangement.
4. More than one reading of purity law. The Qumran letter 4QMMT rules that "liquid streams can not separate impure [from] pure."¹⁴ The Mishnah, compiled more than a century after the Temple fell, records the Sadducees complaining that the Pharisees "declare an uninterrupted flow of a liquid to be clean."¹⁵ The two texts agree on what the dispute was, which is strong evidence that it was real and old.

The balance is the point.  The variation is mostly about how to keep the shared markers, not whether to keep them.  Sanders's "common Judaism" and the vivid sectarian arguments are both true, and the sources do not force a choice between them.

Part 5: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and who tells us about them

Almost everything popularly "known" about the three parties comes from a short list of writers, each with a purpose.  Before asking what a group believed, it helps to ask who is speaking.

No surviving work can be securely identified as a Sadducee's account of his own party.  Paul identifies himself as a Pharisee; Josephus describes his earlier affiliation in a work written after AD 70.  The Essenes may be represented in a much larger library, if the identification argued in Part 6 holds.  Every confident sentence about these groups should be read with that table in mind.

Josephus's "philosophies" are a presentation

Josephus writes, "Jewish philosophy, in fact, takes three forms."³⁴  He explains the parties by their views of "Fate," the soul and the afterlife, the topics that divided Greek schools.  Pharisees "attribute everything to Fate and to God," while the Sadducees "do away with Fate altogether."³⁴³⁴  His translator, H. St. J. Thackeray, notes, following Théodore Reinach, that Josephus wrote "Fate" where a Jewish teacher would have said "Providence," for the sake of his Gentile readers.³⁴  Cohen draws the conclusion:  "Josephus’s presentation of the three groups as “philosophical schools” was for the benefit of his non-Jewish readers," and the real disputes were more likely about law and practice.²  Josephus himself supplies the evidence for that, because his most concrete report is a legal one:  "the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them."¹⁰

Josephus gives most of the numbers.  The Pharisees who refused an oath to Herod were "above six thousand."¹⁰  That counts the refusers, not explicitly every Pharisee.  The Essenes were "about four thousand men."¹⁰  Philo gives "above four thousand" Essenes.³⁵  The Sadducean teaching "is received but by a few, yet by those still of the greatest dignity."¹⁰  Sanders, who estimates the priests and Levites at 18,000 to 20,000, concludes that "relatively few Jews belonged to one of the parties."¹¹  These are rough figures for different categories, not a census that divides the whole population among three parties.  They support Sanders's warning against treating party membership as universal.

Three common claims checked

1. "The Sadducees accepted only the five books of Moses." Josephus never says this. He says they rejected the Pharisees' unwritten "observances" and did not "regard the observation of any thing besides what the law enjoins them."¹⁰¹⁰ That is a rule about practice. The Mishnah has Sadducees arguing about whether "the Holy Scriptures" make the hands impure, without limiting the term to the Torah.¹⁵ The earliest statement of the Pentateuch-only view found for this article is Origen, in the third century AD, who pairs "Samaritans and Sadducees, who receive the books of Moses alone."¹³ Origen may have had good information, but his claim comes long after the destruction of the Temple, when the Sadducees cease to be securely attested, and should be marked as his.
2. "Every Jew belonged to a party, and membership was fixed." Josephus says that at sixteen he resolved to try "the several sects that were among us," went "through them all," then lived three years with a desert hermit named Banus, and at nineteen "began to conduct myself according to the rules of the sect of the Pharisees."¹²¹² The arithmetic of that story is loose. It still shows a young man moving among the groups, which does not fit a picture of fixed membership. Josephus also says Sadducees in office "addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them," so a party label did not settle how a man acted.¹⁰
3. "The priests were Sadducees." Some leading priestly families were, and Josephus links the Sadducees to "the rich" and to men "of the greatest dignity."¹⁰¹⁰ But Josephus was himself from a priestly family and chose the Pharisees.¹² Theodotos the archisynagogos was a priest, though his inscription gives no party affiliation.³² The Qumran rule puts its community under "the authority of the sons of Zadok, the priests," and Josephus says the Essenes chose priests as stewards.¹⁰¹⁴ Priesthood and party affiliation were different categories. These examples disprove an equation between priest and Sadducee; the surviving numbers do not establish what fraction of priests were Sadducees.

What each group can be said to have held

1. Pharisees. Held traditions "from their fathers" beyond the written law, believed in reward and punishment after death and a return to life for the righteous, and had popular influence.¹⁰¹⁰ Paul, Josephus, Acts and the later rabbis agree on that much. The New Testament adds their disputes over Sabbath, purity and tithing. The Gospels are hostile witnesses, and their picture of a Pharisee is a portrait by opponents. The Mishnah is a friendly witness written long after. The rabbinic claim that the Pharisees' traditions came from Sinai is argued in Is the Oral Torah from Sinai?.
2. Sadducees. Denied the survival of the soul and rewards after death, rejected the Pharisees' unwritten traditions, and drew support from the wealthy and from men of high rank.¹⁰³⁴ Acts 23:8 adds that they say "there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." Every word about them comes from people who disagreed with them.
3. Essenes. Shared property, practiced a long initiation, kept strict purity, and were mostly unmarried, though Josephus knew "another order of Essenes" who married.³⁴ Philo says they lived in villages and avoided cities in one work, and that they lived "in many cities of Judaea and many villages" in another.³⁵³⁵ Even the outside reports do not agree on details.

Part 6: Qumran and the communities speaking in the scrolls

What was found

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, yielded "the remains of more than 900 different scrolls," most of them small fragments.⁶  Roland de Vaux excavated the nearby settlement from 1951 to 1956.  Magness summarizes the dating:  "the sectarian settlement was established during the Hasmonean period (ca. 100 B.C.E.), and existed until its final destruction by the Romans at the time of the First Jewish Revolt (68 C.E.)."⁶  The settlement had an aqueduct and pools, and "Ten of the pools were used as Jewish ritual baths."⁶  One fact frames the whole debate:  "No scrolls were discovered in the settlement at Qumran; instead, all of them come from caves around Qumran."⁶

Not every scroll is the sect's creed

The caves held copies of most books of the Hebrew Bible and many other Jewish works.  Some of the non-biblical books are older than the Qumran settlement.  The Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch include the Astronomical Book, whose oldest copy J. T. Milik dated to "the end of the third or the beginning of the second century," and the Book of the Watchers, which John Collins calls "one of the oldest, pre-Maccabean Enochic works."¹⁶¹⁶  A sect that collected such books did not necessarily write them.  So the scrolls must be sorted.  The sectarian texts are those that describe a separate community with its own officers, entry rules, history and enemies.  The rest are a library.

What the sect says about itself

1. Separation. The Community Rule tells members "to walk to the desert in order to open there His path," citing Isaiah 40:3, and defines that path as "the study of the law wh[i]ch he commanded through the hand of Moses."¹⁴ It puts the community under "the authority of the sons of Zadok, the priests."¹⁴ The letter 4QMMT says, as restored by its editors, "we have segregated ourselves from the multitude of the peop[le …]."¹⁴
2. A founding story. The Damascus Document says God "caused to sprout from Israel and from Aaron a shoot of the planting," that its people "were like blind persons ... over twenty years," and that God then "raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness."¹⁴
3. Enemies. The commentary on Habakkuk describes a "Wicked Priest" who was "called loyal at the start of his office," then grew proud "when he ruled over Israel."¹⁴ The phrase fits a high priest who also held political power, which describes the Hasmoneans. Which Hasmonean is meant is not stated, and the candidates run from Jonathan to Alexander Jannaeus.
4. Calendar and law. The Wicked Priest attacked the Teacher on the sect's Day of Atonement.¹⁴ 4QMMT's purity rulings, including the one on "liquid streams," match positions the Mishnah attributes to the Sadducees.¹⁴¹⁵ That match is strong evidence that the sect's law came out of priestly circles, whatever name outsiders used for it.

Manuscript dates are not composition dates

A scroll's date is the date of that copy.  The work can be older.  The figures for the sect's two best-known scrolls show how wide the uncertainty is:

Mladen Popovic's team notes that 4Q259 "is notorious for its widely varying palaeographic estimates in the second-first centuries BCE."³⁷  The authors reject the fourth-century BC possibility by comparing the script with dated Aramaic manuscripts.  Their preferred 210-100 BC range could place the copy before the settlement, but the younger 70-55 BC possibility remains in the radiocarbon result.  It therefore does not establish that the rule was copied by 100 BC.  Radiocarbon also dates the animal skin, not the act of writing, so the copy's age and the work's composition require separate arguments.

Restored words are not legible words

The Study Edition prints restored text in square brackets, and those brackets matter.  A much-quoted line of 4QMMT tells the reader to "understand the book of Moses [and] the book[s of the pr]ophets and Davi[d …]."¹⁴  Half of "prophets" and the end of "David" are restorations.  The commentary on Nahum mentions a Greek king whose name survives only as "]trius"; the editors restore "Deme]trius."¹⁴  It also describes an "Angry Lion" who took revenge on "those looking for easy interpretations, who hanged living men."  The usual reading takes the lion as Alexander Jannaeus, who crucified about 800 opponents according to Josephus.¹⁰  That reading is strong, because Josephus also reports that Jannaeus's Jewish opponents called in a Seleucid king named Demetrius.¹⁰  It remains an identification made by matching, not a name in the text.

Why the Essene identification is held, and what it rests on

The scrolls never use the word "Essene."  Magness, who holds the identification, says so first:  "nowhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls are Essenes mentioned, at least not by that name."⁶  Her case has three parts.

1. Overlap. Josephus, Philo and Pliny "describe a Jewish sect called the Essenes, with beliefs and practices that overlap with information from the Dead Sea Scrolls (for example, holding communal meals, pooling possessions, and a long initiation process)."⁶
2. Location. Pliny "is the only author who situates the Essenes on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea — that is, in the same geographical area where Qumran is located."⁶ His Essenes live west of the lake, have "no women among them," and have the town of Engedi below them.³⁸
3. Expected silence. "Essene" may be an outsiders' name, while members called themselves "Sons of Light" and other names.⁶

The weaknesses are real.  Philo says the Essenes lived in villages and avoided cities, and in another work that they lived in many cities.³⁵³⁵  Josephus and Philo, Magness herself concedes, "presented a partial picture of the Essenes."⁶  Josephus knew of marrying Essenes, while the excavated burials at Qumran are overwhelmingly adult men.⁶  The two alternatives considered here deserve their own reasons.  Yizhar Hirschfeld argued that "Qumran of the Herodian period fits well into this model of the manor house."  He compared its square plan, corner tower and reinforced tower base with other estates in Judea and Samaria.³⁹  Norman Golb argued that the scrolls were "Taken from Jerusalem libraries and personal collections at a crucial hour and hidden away in many places in the wilderness."  His account treats their varied ideas as evidence for several Jewish currents rather than one sect's library.⁴⁰

The Essene identification remains a strong explanation because it combines the community rules' similarities to outside descriptions with Pliny's location and the caves' proximity to the settlement.  Cave 4 was cut into the same marl terrace on which the settlement sits.⁶  The ritual baths fit this account, but baths also occur at other Jewish sites and cannot identify a sect by themselves.  Nor does finding Essene-like texts alone refute Golb: a collection from several Jerusalem groups could include such texts.  The disputed step is connecting the communities in the texts, the people who stored the scrolls and the residents of the excavated buildings.  Calling Qumran "Essene" is shorthand for an argument about those connections.

Part 7: Apocalypses, resurrection, wisdom and law

There was no single Jewish "theology of the period."  A few dated passages show how far apart the writers stood.

Hope after death

1. Ben Sira, about 180 BC, urges enjoyment and thanksgiving in this life rather than promising resurrection. "Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades instead of the living and those who give thanks?"¹⁷ "In Hades there is no seeking of luxury."¹⁷ These passages portray a diminished existence in Hades; they do not deny every kind of survival after death.
2. Daniel 12:2 says: "many of those who sleep in a mound of earth will be awakened, these to everlasting life and those to shame and everlasting contempt."⁴¹
3. 2 Maccabees 7, a martyr story, has a dying son tell the king that "the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws."⁸ In 12:43-44 Judas collects money for a sin offering for fallen soldiers, "taking account of the resurrection," because "if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead."⁸
4. The Pharisees, in Josephus's account, held that the souls of the virtuous "shall have power to revive and live again," while the wicked are "detained in an everlasting prison."¹⁰
5. The Essenes, he says, "teach the immortality of souls," which in his telling sounds more like Greek immortality than bodily resurrection.¹⁰
6. The Sadducees "will have none" of the soul's survival or of rewards after death.³⁴ When the Gospels and Acts show Sadducees denying the resurrection, they agree with Josephus.

So a Jew of the first century could hold no afterlife, a bodily resurrection or an immortal soul, and each view had a respected advocate.  Where these ideas came from is a separate question, weighed in The Late Development of Afterlife and Satan.

Apocalypses

John Collins's working definition, set out in the journal issue Semeia 14 in 1979, describes an apocalypse as "a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient."¹⁶  The most important Jewish collection of them is 1 Enoch, which Collins stresses "is not just one work, but is a major collection of apocalyptic writings."¹⁶  Its five parts have different dates:

1. The Book of the Watchers, chapters 1-36, older than the Maccabean revolt.¹⁶
2. The Astronomical Book, chapters 72-82, with a Qumran copy dated by Milik to the late third or early second century BC.¹⁶
3. The Book of Dreams and the Epistle of Enoch, also represented at Qumran.¹⁶
4. The Similitudes, chapters 37-71, the only part with no copy at Qumran, which Collins dates "to the early or mid first century c.e."¹⁶

Anyone citing "1 Enoch" as evidence for pre-Christian belief must say which part.  The Similitudes are the part with the "Son of Man" judge, and they are the part whose date is least secure.  4 Ezra, often quoted in the same breath, was written after the Temple fell in AD 70.  It opens "In the thirtieth year after the downfall of the City," which G. H. Box took as a hint at AD 100, and he fixed its final redaction at "A.D. 100-135."⁴²  It shows what some Jews thought after that disaster, not before it.  A pre-Christian manuscript of an apocalypse also proves only that the book is old.  It does not show that its visions were true or that its stories of angels and giants happened.

Wisdom and law

Ben Sira, the most conservative of these writers, joins wisdom to the Torah.  After a long poem in which Wisdom speaks of herself, he says:  "All these things are the book of the covenant of the Most High God, a law that Moyses commanded us."¹⁷  The Community Rule defines its desert path as "the study of the law."¹⁴  2 Maccabees' martyrs die "for his laws."⁸  Across the differences on afterlife and calendar, the writers agree that God's revealed law is the measure, and they argue about how to read and keep it.

Part 8: Messianic hopes, in brief

Messianic hope existed in this period, but it was not a single, universal expectation.  The texts include a royal son of David, a priestly messiah alongside him, a prophet like Moses, and in a few later texts a heavenly figure.  The pre-Christian texts surveyed in Second Temple Messianic Expectations do not unambiguously combine an identified messiah's suffering, death for sins and resurrection into the later Christian sequence.  That article weighs the disputed passages and their dates.  The claim that first-century Judea was full of rival messiahs is tested in Was Jesus One of Many Would-Be Messiahs?.  This article adds only a historical orientation: Psalm 2 of the Psalms of Solomon describes Pompey's body "carried about on the waves" in Egypt and is therefore dated after his death in 48 BC.³⁰  That dates this poem, not every poem in the collection.  The collection's Davidic hope responds to failed priestly and foreign rule; it does not mark the beginning of hope for a Davidic king.

Part 9: What this context can and cannot check about the New Testament

What it confirms as setting

The Gospels and Acts describe this world in many small details, and the details match sources the writers did not control.

1. The parties. Acts says "the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both."⁴³ Josephus says the same about the afterlife.³⁴ Mark's Pharisees hold "the tradition of the elders," which matches Josephus's "observances by succession from their fathers."¹⁰⁴³ Paul calls himself "as touching the law, a Pharisee."⁴³
2. Purity. At Cana there were "six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews."⁴³ Stone vessels were used because many Jews held that stone could not become impure, and they are found across Judea and Galilee.⁶
3. The Temple's boundary. Paul is accused of having "brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath polluted this holy place."⁴³ The Greek warning stone from the balustrade says no foreigner may enter and that whoever is caught "will himself be responsible for (his) consequent death."³²
4. The synagogue. James says Moses is "read in the synagogues every sabbath day."⁴³ The Theodotos inscription describes a Jerusalem synagogue built "for the reading of the Law and teaching of the commandments."³²
5. Festivals and money. John places Jesus in the Temple at "the feast of the dedication, and it was winter," the festival 1 Maccabees founds in Kislev.⁴⁴³ The collectors of the Temple tax in Matthew 17 fit the annual flow of money to Jerusalem that Cicero and Philo describe.³³⁹
6. Greek among Jews. Acts 6:1 describes a dispute between "Grecians," Greek-speaking Jews, and "Hebrews" among the first Jerusalem believers.⁴³ A Jerusalem priest who dedicated a synagogue in Greek shows that such people existed there.³²

These matches show accurate knowledge of features of first-century Jewish life.  Such knowledge could come from direct experience or from earlier written or oral sources.  Several of the practices also outlasted the Temple.  These matches therefore do not, by themselves, date a Gospel or identify its author.  That question is argued in When Were the Gospels Written?.

What it cannot show

1. It cannot confirm a particular saying or event. A Sabbath dispute in a Gospel fits the period, because Jews argued about the Sabbath. That makes the scene plausible. It does not show that this dispute happened as told.
2. It cannot confirm a miracle. Background can show that Jews expected resurrection, or that some did not. Whether Jesus rose is a separate historical question with its own evidence.
3. Similarity is not borrowing. The scrolls and the Gospels share a light-and-darkness vocabulary, communal meals and a wilderness reading of Isaiah 40:3. Magness concludes "By now it should be clear that Jesus was not an Essene," because the sect expected "at least two messiahs," believed in predeterminism, extended priestly purity to all members and excluded whole classes of people. Jesus "is portrayed as coming into contact with the most impure members of Jewish society."⁶ John the Baptist is closer, but she judges that by the time the Gospels describe him "he could not have been an Essene."⁶ Shared Jewish scripture and a shared setting explain the overlaps without any direct dependence.
4. It cannot settle the Gospels' portrait of the Pharisees. The Gospels and Acts are a party to the dispute. Josephus and the Mishnah support the outline, that Pharisees held to ancestral traditions and had popular influence, but nothing outside the New Testament checks whether particular Pharisees said what the Gospels report.

Christianity belongs inside this world

Every element of early Christian preaching that its opponents found hard, a crucified Messiah, a resurrection, a new reading of the Law and the Prophets, a community that called itself the true Israel, was argued in a Jewish idiom that existed before it.  The Qumran sect also claimed to be the faithful remnant, read the prophets as fulfilled in its own history and expected God to act soon.  The Pharisees already expected the righteous to "revive and live again."  The early church did not arrive from outside history.  It began among Jews who already disagreed about resurrection, purity, the Temple and the meaning of their scriptures, and its claims have to be weighed in that setting, by the same standards used for the sect and the Pharisees.  How the church and the synagogue later separated, and the wars of AD 66-135 that shaped the separation, are the subject of The Jewish Revolts and the Parting of the Ways.

Objections and responses

1. "The '400 silent years' is a Christian talking point. Jews never thought God fell silent." Jewish sources from and about the period describe a break in prophecy: 1 Maccabees three times, Josephus, and the later Tosefta.⁴³¹ What is wrong is the inference from no prophets to no history or no God. The same sources describe God delivering Israel without a prophet, and the Tosefta has heavenly voices heard by sages and by John Hyrcanus.¹
2. "1 and 2 Maccabees are propaganda, so the Maccabean story is unreliable." Both books are partisan, but that does not erase their evidence. Polybius corroborates parts of Antiochus's career, while Tacitus and Diodorus preserve additional accounts of the Jewish crisis and Hasmonean rule.²⁴²³ The inscription supplies a different kind of evidence for the Seleucid officials and administration.²² The strength of corroboration depends on the event: none of these sources independently confirms every detail of either Maccabean book.
3. "There was no 'Judaism,' only many Judaisms." The variety was real, and Part 4 lists it. But Greek and Roman outsiders who disliked Jews identified them by the same short list of practices, and Jews died over that list in 167 BC. 2 Maccabees already uses a single word, Ioudaismos, for the way of life its heroes defended.⁸ Diversity in how the markers were kept is not the absence of a shared identity.
4. "The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that Christianity copied the Essenes." The overlaps are of vocabulary, scripture and setting. The differences go to the center: the sect's priestly purity and exclusion against Jesus' contact with the impure, two messiahs against one, and predeterminism.⁶ Two Jewish movements that read the same Isaiah are expected to share words.
5. "The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the Gospels' background, so they prove the Gospels." They prove a setting. A true setting is necessary for a true account and not sufficient for one. Part 9 lists what background can and cannot check.
6. "The Qumran-Essene link is an assumption scholars repeat without evidence." It is an inference with stated evidence: overlapping practices, Pliny's location and the settlement's proximity to the scroll caves.⁶⁶ Its weakness, that the scrolls never use the name, is admitted by its defenders. Hirschfeld offers architectural parallels for an estate, and Golb proposes a collection drawn from several Jerusalem groups. The overlap with Essene descriptions supports the identification but does not, by itself, settle where the books were collected or who lived at the site.
7. "The Sadducees only accepted the Torah, which is why Jesus answered them from Exodus." Josephus says they rejected unwritten traditions; he does not say they rejected the Prophets.¹⁰ The earliest explicit Pentateuch-only claim located for this article is Origen, a Christian of the third century.¹³ Jesus' choice of a Torah text shows what argument he chose, not what canon his hearers held.
8. "Josephus was a Pharisee, so his account of the parties is biased toward them." It may be, and that is a reason to read him with care. But he also reports facts unfriendly to the Pharisees, such as their quarrel with John Hyrcanus and their political scheming under Herod, and he calls them "A cunning sect."¹⁰ His reports have to be checked against Qumran and the Mishnah, as this article does.
9. "Daniel was written in the second century BC, so the 'silent years' include a canonical book that predicts after the fact." That depends on the dating of Daniel, which is weighed in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?. This article's conclusions do not depend on Daniel's date. Daniel is used here only for its belief in resurrection, which both dating models place before Christianity.
10. "Herod's Temple, the parties and the synagogues all show Second Temple Judaism was a human development, so why treat any of it as revelation?" The historical evidence shows how Jews applied and argued about their scriptures. It does not by itself decide whether those scriptures were revealed. A Christian claim about revelation has to rest on its own evidence, such as prophecy and the resurrection, and this article does not try to settle it from background.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The persecution's cause is unknown. 1 Maccabees' empire-wide decree has no independent support among the sources used here, and Cohen calls the motive "an enigma."² The best-known modern theories, that Jewish reformers asked for it or that it punished a revolt, were not checked against their authors' own texts for this draft.
2. The Heliodorus correspondence is cited in English translation. The original edition by Hannah Cotton and Michael Worrle in Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 159 (2007), and the later publications of the additional fragments, remain useful checks on the Greek and its restorations. The translation used here identifies its published sources.²²
3. The Hasmonean coins were not read in a catalogue with anchored pages. Coins naming Yehohanan as high priest and Alexander as king would add physical evidence for the Hasmonean titles, but Ya'akov Meshorer's catalogue was read only by leaf, so the coins are left out of the evidence here.
4. The modern debate over Hellenism needs a fuller comparison. Martin Hengel, Victor Tcherikover, Elias Bickerman and Erich Gruen offer important arguments beyond the Cohen and Sanders passages evaluated here. The relevant passages in their books remain unverified for this draft, so this article does not rank their explanations of the persecution.
5. The parties' self-descriptions remain thin. No surviving work can be securely assigned to a self-identified Sadducee. Whether 4QMMT is Sadducean in some sense, or only shares Sadducean rulings, is open.
6. Numbers of manuscripts depend on definitions. "More than 900" is Magness's count of scrolls from the eleven Qumran caves.⁶ How many are biblical, sectarian or neither depends on how a fragment is assigned, and no count of sectarian texts is given here.
7. Josephus's "481 years" may have a source. The number is too long for the actual interval, but whether it comes from a chronographic tradition or an error was not traced.³¹

Verdict

The Jewish world between the Testaments is well known in outline.  Persian rule, the Greek conquest, the crisis under Antiochus IV, the Hasmonean state and the arrival of Rome belong to a chronology supported by Jewish texts, outside accounts and physical evidence.  The independence and precision of those checks vary.  The "400 silent years" describe a gap in the Protestant canon and a tradition, stated by several Jewish sources, that the succession of prophets had stopped.  The period's books, letters, scrolls, coins and buildings make it far better documented than the phrase suggests.

Jews of the period shared a recognizable way of life, centered on one God, the Torah, the Jerusalem Temple, circumcision, the Sabbath, food laws and purity.  Outsiders saw it and Jews died for it.  Within that common life they argued, sometimes violently, about the priesthood, the calendar, the afterlife and how to read the Law.  The famous parties were small.  Their own voices survive unevenly: Paul identifies himself as a Pharisee, no work can be securely identified as a Sadducee's self-description, and the Qumran texts preserve direct community voices whose relationship to the Essenes has to be argued.

That world supplies a real setting for the New Testament and a check on many of its details.  It does not prove the New Testament's central claims, and it gives no ground for saying that Christianity copied a sect.  It shows that the first Christians were Jews arguing with other Jews about questions those Jews were already asking.

Sources

The literature review accounts for the sources used and considered.  Selected scholarly quotations state several of the interpretations evaluated above.