The Jewish War: First half of Book 1

[cahn]

I am super not promising to always have this on Saturday, but yay long weekend!

Last week: I know some of you reading this study Talmud -- Josephus asserts at the very beginning that the "sufferings of the Jews" (presumably, in context of Josephus' writing, Titus destroying the temple, etc. though we won't get there for a while) are their own fault: "no foreign power is to blame." It was pointed out that the Talmud may (?) have its own opinion(s) as to whether the destruction of the Temple and the resulting diaspora was divine punishment? And regardless of the former, may also blame Titus? (I also don't know yet, because we haven't gotten there yet and won't for a while, whether Josephus himself thinks it's divine punishment or just plain old temporal consequences. My vague recollection of Feuchtwanger's Josephus is that he was thinking more of the latter, which is also very much borne out by this week's reading.)

This week: First half of Book 1 (Ch 22 / Par 444):

Okay, I must say the first part of this was a slog for me -- flitting between a lot of people I didn't know. Good thing we have this reading group or I might not have got through it. As it was, I had to take copious notes to even make a stab at writing up a summary (I won't promise I'll do this every week, but I had a little extra time and quite frankly I knew I wouldn't remember who any of these people were next week if I didn't), and I'm going to put them in comments so this post doesn't get super long. At least Josephus felt it was "inappropriate to go into the early history of the Jews," which would have made it really long. Anyway, it got substantially more interesting once Herod showed up!

Next week: Finish book 1.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I know some of you reading this study Talmud -- Josephus asserts at the very beginning that the "sufferings of the Jews" (presumably, in context of Josephus' writing, Titus destroying the temple, etc. though we won't get there for a while) are their own fault: "no foreign power is to blame." It was pointed out that the Talmud may (?) have its own opinion(s) as to whether the destruction of the Temple and the resulting diaspora was divine punishment? And regardless of the former, may also blame Titus?

So I can't speak to Josephus at all, not having read him, but I can give a general overview of the rest of it, without knowing how Josephus's own opinions go into it, and which sect, if any, he might have aligned himself to.

The Rabbis in the Talmud work under an understanding of the world in which God controls everything. Therefore, if the Jews suffer, then God is allowing it. How can that be? Why is that happening? It must be for our sins.

For the exiles, this must require Big Sins. The Big Sin of the destruction of the first temple was idolatry. The Big Sin of the destruction of the second temple was sinas chinam, which we can translate here to internal divisions, factionalism, etc. I feel this also has the side benefit of being likely along the lines of why it actually happened, too.

But even with it being divine punishment, it's still free will. There's at least one (I recall one, there might be more?) story of someone being sent to destroy the Jews, realizing this, and completely noping out of it. So the people who do it are at fault as well.

The Talmud has a bunch of stories about Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and my own feelings on those stories is that I don't necessarily assume any historical accuracy of the stories themselves -- but are of interest that "these are the stories that these people were telling about the people who conquered them/oppressed them".

So when it comes to "stories about the rabbis dealing with caesar" (of which there are many), I don't put any faith in their actual historical accuracy, just that it shows their opinions of those dealings. There's the very famous story of "Yavheh and its sages" -- R' Yochanan ben Zakkai gets smuggled out of the city to talk to Vespasian and convinces Vespasian to let the Rabbis go to a completely different city, but doesn't ask him to spare Yerushalayim. So the question is, hey, he should have done that! But the answer is "okay but that was never going to happen, might as well get what you can from them".

And when it comes to putting the actual blame to the destruction, one of the few things that we're allowed to learn on Tisha B'av, a time when learning isn't allowed because learning Torah makes you happy, is the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, a story that poses the question of "which of these specific Jews is the one responsible for the destruction. No, the people who actually did it are not being considered the ones responsible (because, remember, it's because of our sins). One of these dudes are."

[cahn]

Thank you so much, I really appreciate all your thoughts on this!

Ah, yeah, Josephus definitely is pushing internal divisions, factionalism, etc. as something that was constantly going on and which led to Bad Things happening (though we won't get to the actual destruction of the temple for a few more weeks, I think). But that's super interesting about it being both divine punishment and free will. I see that right after the story of Yavheh and its sages it talks about Titus -- which as selenak observed last week, and as you say here, is perhaps not particularly historical, but is interesting in that it shows their -- understandably -- not-very-high view of him as the destroyer.

Thank you for the link to Yavheh and its sages, and Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, and the commentary. Those were really fascinating to read.

[lannamichaels]

Slight typo correction, since I was commenting right before bed: the city is Yavneh, whoops.

In other topics, the Rabbis are not generally speaking fans of the Hasmoneans. There may be somewhere someone saying something nice about them, but it doesn't come to mind. I think this can be down to several issues, including the very long spread of time we're talking about here and what feelings still linger after a long time.

I haven't studied it specifically but I feel the enmity stems from a few possible sources. 1) religious-moral: the Hasmoneans were kohanim, and thus were not of the correct tribe to be kings. So they shouldn't have kinged themselves, it was Wrong. 2) religious-political: I don't actually know how far into the past the Tzedukim/Perushim divide went (it vanished after there stopped being a temple service to fight over, but I don't know when it started), but the Talmud preserves a lot of fights over how things should be done in the temple, and I have no idea how many kohanim were tzedukim vs. perushim, but there were a lot of arguments over how things should be done, and the perushim felt like they had the correct religious framework for how things should go, and that the tzedukim did not. And the Talmud is a bit "written by the victors" here because the rabbis are Perushim, and they're the ones who worked out how post-apocalypse Judaism would work, and the Tzedukim didn't, so the Perushim won. 3) general-political: they likely had different views on how to deal with non-religious political matters, and who would suffer for those decisions.

The gemara brings up a ton of kings here and there and there was also one king who massacred a bunch of rabbis but I'm not sure if that king was a Hasmonean or not. But there were several seperate massacres, which all led to the decision that an oral tradition must be written down or otherwise it will get lost -- I don't think the Rabbis were very happy to have to write things down but it was a decision they made, knowing that a lot had already been lost (there are several parts of the gemara where there's an argument about something that certainly used to be known, but the chain of transmission was broken and so they have to work it out from first principles). For instance, one of the 10 martyrs was a translator and disseminator of teachings, who translated teachings into the vernacular. So there's also a post-apocalypse feelings of loss permeating everything.

[cahn]

Oh huh, that's interesting. Having only scanned 1/2 Maccabees, I guess I had the idea the Hasmoneans were heroes. But I guess those were written by someone different?

1) religious-moral: the Hasmoneans were kohanim, and thus were not of the correct tribe to be kings. So they shouldn't have kinged themselves, it was Wrong.

Ah, cenozoicsynapsid above mentions that the whole high priest / king thing was odd. So it's interesting to know that they really were abrogating to themselves powers they weren't supposed to have.

So there's also a post-apocalypse feelings of loss permeating everything.

Gosh. That makes a lot of sense.

[lannamichaels]

Oh huh, that's interesting. Having only scanned 1/2 Maccabees, I guess I had the idea the Hasmoneans were heroes. But I guess those were written by someone different?

Not necessarily written by someone different (although I'm sure it was; I just don't know who wrote that one, and of course the Talmud compiles hundreds of rabbis across centuries), but also which people/events are being discussed. The Rabbis of course like the rededication of the Temple and fixing things up, that was a good thing (like bsaically the only good things they ever say about Herod is him improving the Temple, for instance). However, there really isn't much about Chanuka in the Talmud and the impression that I have about why is because of anti-Hasmonean sentiment.

[cahn]

Ah, that makes sense that it depends on the people and events being discussed. And I didn't know that there wasn't much about Chanuka in the Talmud, that's interesting.