Personal Religion
LAWS FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL; THE FATE OF A PERSON’S SOUL; PERCEIVING THE DIVINE ORDER
The origin of the word “religion” is somewhat obscure; one theory connects it to the Latin verb ligere, “to bind or hold fast.” True or not, this etymology well captures the spirit of religious observance in Second Temple times. Individuals sought to bind themselves to God by performing specific acts and practices enjoined in the Torah. At the same time, however, they could not but wonder at God’s apparent indifference to the fate of His own, chosen people. When would He restore them to their former greatness?
Go back far enough in biblical history and there is little of what could be called personal religion. Sacrifices were offered on behalf of the community in the temples and “high places” that dotted the Israelite landscape; festivals were celebrated as a group activity; clans, tribes, and the nation as a whole turned to God in gratitude or supplication. But gradually all this began to change. The book of Deuteronomy in particular seems to include numerous duties incumbent on each person, starting with the obligation to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might” (Deut 6:5) and going on to list quite a few specific, concrete acts for each person to perform.1 In post-exilic times, the “religion of laws” came to focus increasingly on each person carrying out such duties.
Keeping the Sabbath
The Sabbath is certainly a venerable institution, enshrined in the Ten Commandments:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. You may work for six days and perform all your labor, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God: you may not do any work—you or your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock or the foreigner within your city gates. (Exod 20:8–10; cf. Deut 5:12–14)
But what exactly constituted “work”? Did this mean not performing one’s own profession*—so that, for example, a farmer wasn’t allowed to farm, but he could still fix his leaky roof on the Sabbath, while a roofer could still tend his vegetable garden? Or did practicing anyone’s profession (perhaps implied by the phrase “all your labor”) constitute forbidden work? At one point the Torah commands: “Six days shall you work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; in plowing time and in harvest time you shall rest” (Exod 34:21). Was the mention of these agricultural seasons intended in a general sense (“no matter how pressing the need for intensive labor might be”), or was it a clue as to the specific sort of work forbidden to everyone? Exodus 35:3 added, “You shall not kindle a fire in all your habitations on the Sabbath day.” Did “kindle” mean having any fire at all, even if it was burning before the Sabbath started, or did this word merely refer to starting up a fire once the Sabbath had begun?
For a time, such questions do not appear to have troubled ancient Israelites; indeed, we have seen that such post-Sinai figures as Gideon, Deborah, Samson, and the other heroes of the book of Judges are never even said to have kept the Sabbath; the same is true of David, Solomon, and subsequent Israelite kings and prophets. Still more basically, it is not clear from some biblical texts if observance of the Sabbath was conceived to be the duty of each person individually or if it was a general requirement incumbent on, and enforced by, society as a whole.2
In Second Temple times, the Sabbath was unambiguously to be observed by each and every individual, and this very fact was in keeping with the broad changes traced in the previous chapters. The book of Jeremiah had looked forward to a day when “no longer will one person teach another, [not even] one man teach his brother, saying ‘This [is how] to obey the LORD’ ” (Jer 31:34). That day was now here. Each person was deemed responsible to observe the various Sabbath restrictions, and ancient interpreters offered their aid by pinning down all the specifics required by the Torah’s general statements, occasionally supplementing them with altogether new prohibitions of their own. The Book of Jubilees thus went out of its way to list a few kinds of work forbidden on the Sabbath which were never mentioned in the Torah:
[The angel of the Presence says to Moses:] Command the Israelites to observe this day [i.e., the Sabbath] so that they keep it holy and not do any work on it and not defile it, for it is holier than all [other] days . . . So make it known and tell the Israelites the commandments of this day so that they rest on it and not neglect it through the error of their minds, lest they do [any] work on it—[the day] on which they should not be found pursuing their own desires, [namely] preparing on it anything that is to be eaten or drunk, or drawing water, or carrying in or out of the gates anything that can be carried, and let them not carry in or take out anything from house to house on this day, such that they could not have prepared for themselves at home during the six days of the week; since it is more holy and blessed than any day of the jubilee of jubilees. We [angels] rested on it in heaven before any creature on earth was commanded to rest on it on the earth. (2:26–30)
The italicized items are not found among the Sabbath prohibitions of the Pentateuch. Some do echo things mentioned elsewhere in Scripture (Isa 58:13–14; Jer 17:21–22), while other items are altogether new. This passage in Jubilees was in turn supplemented by still more prohibitions listed at the very end of the book (Jub 50:6–13), apparently an interpolation by some later writer.3
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain further references to Sabbath prohibitions beyond these,4 and rabbinic Judaism was to go still farther:
There are 39 general categories* of work [forbidden on the Sabbath]: [With regard to grain in the field:] planting, and plowing, and harvesting, and binding sheaves; [once the grain is harvested,] threshing, and winnowing; getting rid of foreign material [from the grain], grinding, and sifting, and kneading, and baking; [with regard to wool:] shearing the wool, washing it white, and shaking it [to separate the strands], and dyeing it, and spinning, and weaving, and arranging the threads, and setting the warp and the weft, and weaving two threads, and cutting two threads; [with regard to sewing:] tying [any knot], and untying, and sewing two stitches, and ripping in order to [subsequently] sew two stitches; [with regard to animals:] hunting a deer; slaughtering it, and skinning it, salting it, and curing the skin, and scraping it down, and cutting it; [with regard to writing:] writing two or more letters; and scraping down [the parchment] for the purpose of writing two or more letters; [with regard to construction:] building, and tearing down; [with regard to fire:] extinguishing, and lighting; [also:] striking something with a hammer; carrying something from one property to another. (Mishnah Shabbat 7:2)
All these particulars (and they are only “general categories,” with many offshoots for each category) were deemed to be observed by each individual, hence the necessity of specifying exactly what each person could—and mostly, could not—do.
Loving Your Neighbor
The Torah appears to obligate individual people in numerous other matters whose precise sense seemed to require further specification. How exactly—to take a somewhat different case—could one begin to enumerate all the possible permutations of such a sweeping commandment as the Torah’s “You shall love your neighbor like yourself” (Lev 19:18)? Does this mean that if I win the lottery, the Torah requires me to share the money with my neighbor, and if so, is it supposed to be a fifty-fifty split? Where does “love of neighbor” end? Some ancient interpreters seemed to go rather far in interpreting the extent of this commandment:
And among yourselves, my sons, be loving of your brothers as a man loves himself, with each man seeking for his brother what is good for him, and acting together on the earth, and loving each other as themselves.5 (Jub 36:4)
You shall love your neighbor even above your own soul [life]. ([early Christian] Letter of Barnabas 19:5)
On the other hand, the Dead Sea Scrolls community appears to have endorsed a far more restrictive reading, as if this law applied only to members of their own group, that is, “And you shall love [only] your-neighbor-who-is-like-yourself.”6 A somewhat middle ground was endorsed elsewhere:
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p; Love your neighbor: for what is hateful to you yourself, do not do to him. (A rabbinic targum [translation into Aramaic] of Lev 19:18)
The famous parable of the good Samaritan was specifically addressed to the same question: Who am I required to “love”—anyone, even one of those hated Northerners, the Samaritans? Are they really my neighbors? (See Luke 10:25–29.)
Saying the Shema
Another act of personal piety was deduced from a passage in the Torah that likewise brought with it a number of questions:
Hear this, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone; [thus,] you shall love the LORD your God with your whole [i.e., undivided] heart and self and might. Let these things that I am commanding you this day stay in your mind. And you shall impress them on your children and think about them, whether you are at home or on a journey, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and as frontlets between your eyes, and write them on the doorposts of your house and your gates. (Deut 6:4–9)
Read without presupposition, this appears to be a commandment to keep in mind the various matters (“these things that I am commanding you this day”) that Moses had been, and would be, transmitting to the people of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy. The items mentioned—teaching these things to your children, thinking about them at home or away, from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night,7 keeping them as close to yourself as physical ornaments—seem all to be in the nature of illustrations of how important this commandment is. It is unlikely that any person, ancient or modern, could actually keep thinking of “these things”—apparently, the whole book of Deuteronomy—nonstop all day. Rather, this passage was simply an expansive exhortation to keep in mind the wholehearted devotion to Israel’s God and His laws. Likewise, some scholars have argued that “Bind them as a sign on your hand and as frontlets between your eyes” was not intended to be carried out physically, but was merely a metaphor of closeness, as similar expressions from the Bible seem to demonstrate.8
Ancient interpreters sought to convert this whole exhortation into a series of specific acts of personal piety. If it refers to keeping in mind “these things that I am commanding you this day,” interpreters understood this to mean the specific act of reciting certain words*—not the words of the whole book of Deuteronomy every day, since that would have seemed highly unlikely—but specifically the words just preceding this sentence, namely, “Hear this, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone; and [therefore] you shall love the LORD your God with your whole [i.e., undivided] heart and being and might.” But even if the text intended for people to recite only this sentence, should people recite it all the time, like some sort of mantra? Instead, interpreters understood the reference to “when you lie down and when you get up” not as a merism (“all the time”),9 but as a specification of precisely when this commandment is to be carried out: twice a day, upon going to bed and again upon rising:
“He also commanded that on going to bed and rising, men should meditate on the ordinances of God.” (Letter of Aristeas [late 2nd or early 1st cen. BCE], 160)
“With the entrance of day and of night, I shall enter into the covenant of God, and with the going out of evening and of morning, I shall speak His laws . . . Before I move my hands and feet, I will bless His name; I will praise Him before I go out or enter, or sit or rise, and while I lie on the couch of my bed I will extol Him; I will bless Him with the offering that comes from my lips in the company of men.” (1Q Community Rule col 10:10–14)
Two times each day, at dawn and when it is time to go to sleep, let everyone acknowledge to God the gifts that He has bestowed upon them through their deliverance from the land of Egypt, the offering of thanks being by its nature praiseworthy, and something that is done both in response to past favors and so as to invite future ones. (Josephus, Ant. 4:212)
In these various examples (as well as others),10 there is a marked desire to specify and pin things down, to take what looks like a broad assertion and connect it to specific acts: these are the things that constitute work that you cannot do on the Sabbath, these are the people you are obligated to love like yourself, this is precisely what such love should consist of, and these are the words you must recite each day, morning and evening. Such acts of specification in turn bespeak the same mentality mentioned earlier: fixed prayers at fixed times, a fixed collection of sacred texts, further specified by their fixed interpretation. This very fixity created a solid structure of religious dos and don’ts for each person to follow. And surely the “each person” part is highly significant. The universal God, who was in charge of the fate of nations, was also keeping track of individuals, since He ultimately was to judge each person.
Life After Death
This concern with the fate of individuals was also expressed in an intensified concern with the afterlife evidenced in late Second Temple times. No doubt many people believed—as they do today—that death was simply the end of the road. There was little in the Hebrew Bible itself to counter this idea; as Job asserts, “A man lies down never to rise . . . if a man dies, can he live again?” (14:12, 14). But we have seen above that Plato and later Greek sources had posited a soul altogether distinct from the body, so that a person’s soul could conceivably survive the body’s death and continue to exist in eternity. Perhaps under Greek influence, the idea of some sort of life-after-death came to be important for Jews as well in later biblical times. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes concludes:
The end of the matter, when all has been heard: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of human life. For God will pass judgment on every person11 with regard to everything hidden, whether good or bad. (Eccles 12:13–14)
For the most part, Jewish sources speak not of a Greek-style, immaterial and imperishable soul living forever after death, but of the dead being physically resurrected, brought back to life at some time in the future.
Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, others to reproaches [and] eternal abhorrence. And the knowledgeable will shine as the brightness of the firmament, and those who lead the many to righteousness will be like the stars forever and ever. (Dan 12:2–3)
This famous passage does not merely say that the dead will be resurrected; it says that what happens after they are resurrected will depend on what sort of people they were during their lifetimes. (Similarly, the Ecclesiastes verse cited above says that God will pass judgment “with regard to everything hidden, whether good or bad.”) Some people will be given eternal life, but others will awaken to “eternal abhorrence.” Here then is another important milestone in the career of the “elusive individual.” Each person will be judged on an individual basis and will be rewarded or punished in kind. Something similar is suggested by the Book of Jubilees, a slightly earlier contemporary of the book of Daniel:
[The angel of the Presence describes the righteous in time to come:] They will complete their days in peace and happiness and they will live without any [satanic] Accuser or evil mishap, for all their lifetimes will be lifetimes of blessing and health. Then God will restore His servants, and they will arise and enjoy great peace. He will strike down His enemies and the righteous will look on and give thanks and rejoice forever and ever in happiness. They will see all the punishments and curses [that will befall] their enemies. While the bones [of the righteous] will rest in the earth, their spirits will have great joy, and they will know that the Lord is one who executes judgment but shows kindness to hundreds and thousands and to all who love Him. (Jub 23:29–31)
This individualized resurrection was not, however, the only scenario.12 Other Jewish sources presume a collective resurrection, with no account taken of individual merits and demerits:
[God said to the Israelites in the time of Joshua:] I will plant you like a desirable vine and tend to you like a loving flock; and I will command the rain and the dew, and they will be abundant for you during your lifetime. But also at the end, the lot of each
one of you will be eternal life, for you and your offspring, and I will take your souls and store them in peace, until the allotted to the world will be complete. (Pseudo-Philo, Book of Biblical Antiquities 23:12–13)
All Israel will have their lot in the world to come, as it is written, “And your people are all of them righteous, they will inherit the land for all time; [they are] the shoot that I planted, My handiwork in which I glory.” [Isa 60:21] (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1)
The idea of a bodily resurrection, presumed in the above-cited Dan 12:2–3, Jub 23:29–31, and elsewhere, did not have an easy reception. Everyone knew that bodies begin to decay immediately after death, so that soon all that remains in the ground is the person’s skeleton. How could God restore all that has decayed—wasn’t it gone forever?13 Some Jewish sources therefore seem to hesitate between the two scenarios: the imperishable and eternal (Greek-style) soul, and that other notion, the bodily resurrection of the dead:
Do not dig up the graves of the departed, nor expose to the sun what must not be seen, lest you stir up divine anger.
It is not good to dissolve the human frame, for we hope that the remains of the departed will soon come to light (again)
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