/pdf/the-grammar-of-messianism-an-ancient-jewish-political-idiom-3n5bw63x3g.pdf

The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users

/pdf/rethinking-the-community-as-temple-discourse-and-spatial-unei7su3wq.pdf

Rethinking The Community As Temple: Discourse And Spatial Practice In The Community Rule (1qs)

Tracing Roman Ideas on Female Singleness: Virgil’s Aeneid

The story of Phinehas’ zealous slaying of an Israelite man and the Midianite woman with whom he dared consort in public (Numbers 25) is perhaps the most notorious of a number of famed pentateuchal narratives that are marked with vigilante violence. Significantly, these narratives feature members of the Israelite priesthood or their eponymous ancestors. When reading these texts together, we uncover a consistent literary undercurrent which associates the priesthood with acts of interpersonal violence –– a phenomenon which I refer to as the motif of priestly violence. This dissertation examines the origins and discursive functions of this motif, and, employing the violence of Phinehas as a test-case, explores its interpretive afterlife in biblical and Jewish literature. I argue that likely impelling the motif of priestly interpersonal violence is the cultural memory of the violence of the sacrificial cult –– be it the violence inherent in the slaughter of animals, or the possible Israelite prehistory of human sacrifice. Despite these seemingly negative associations, the discourse of priestly violence functions as a critical legitimating component of the priestly imagination in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, numerous biblical texts insinuate that it is violence, not the right lineage, that generates priestly identity. Exploring the

/pdf/sacred-slaughter-the-discourse-of-priestly-violence-as-50ldwkwnug.pdf

Sacred Slaughter: The Discourse of Priestly Violence as Refracted Through the Zeal of Phinehas in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Literature

How did Jews perceive the first Christians? By what means did they come to appreciate Christianity as a religion distinct from their own? In The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Professor Joshua Ezra Burns addresses those questions by describing the birth of Christianity as a function of the Jewish past. Surveying a range of ancient evidences, he examines how the authors of Judaism's earliest surviving memories of Christianity speak to the perspectives of rabbinic observers who were conditioned by the unique circumstances of their encounters with Christianity to recognize its adherents as fellow Jews. Only upon the decline of the Church's Jewish demographic were their successors compelled to see Christianity as something other than a variation of Jewish cultural expression. The evolution of thought in the classical Jewish literary record thus offers a dynamic account of Christianity's separation from Judaism counterbalancing the abrupt schism attested in contemporary Christian texts.

The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory

A series of important changes overtook the Jewish high priesthood in the early Seleucid period. Zadokites in the family line of Joshua the son of Jehozadak had passed the office along in hereditary fashion for about 350 years before Menelaus, a person with different family connections (2 Mace 3:4), usurped the office in 172 B.C.E. At Menelaus's death in 162 B.C.E., Alcimus, whose familial connections are unknown,1 succeeded him by royal appointment (162-159 B.C.E.). After Alcimus came that sacerdotal black hole from 159-152 B.C.E. Then in 152, Jonathan, a son of Mattathias, became the first Hasmonean high priest; members from his family retained the office until 37 (and briefly again in 35) B.C.E. In the scholarly literature one often meets the claim that the Hasmoneans were not Zadokites;2 that is, they assumed an office not belonging to their family and thus occasioned charges against their legitimacy by groups such as the Essenes and Pharisees. What information do we have about this? Do we actually know that the Hasmoneans were not Zadokites? And do we know that Essenes and Pharisees questioned the genealogical right of the Hasmonean family to hold the high-priestly office? These questions are pursued in the sections below. I. Were the Hasmoneans Zadokites? Genealogy We should first examine the genealogical data that have been transmitted. 1 Maccabees is our oldest direct source of information about the family history of the Hasmoneans. When he introduces Mattathias, the author tells the reader: "In those days Mattathias son of John son of Simeon, a priest of the family of Joarib, moved from Jerusalem and settled in Modein. He had five sons ..." (1 Mace 2:1-2 NRSV; cf. 14:29). Josephus, a priest who traced his own ancestry to the Hasmoneans (Life 1.1-6), wrote as he paraphrased 1 Mace 2:1-2: "At this time there was a man living in the village of Modai in Judaea, named Mattathias, the son of Joannes, the son of Symeon, the son of Asamonaeos [Aσαμωαιoυ], a priest of the course of Joarib and a native of Jerusalem. He had five sons . . ." (Ant. 12.265-66 [trans. Marcus, LCL]).3 So the historian appears to trace the line another generation and by doing so provides the origin of the name usually given to the family. But the additional ancestor-Asamonaios-is otherwise unknown in earlier sources and thus is of no help in discovering the priestly family or clan from which the Hasmoneans came. Other References in 1 Maccabees Some scholars have argued that 1 Maccabees itself offers more specific information relevant to the question than the genealogy alone. We learn later in ch. 2 that Mattathias, seething with anger, killed both the Jew who stepped forward to offer sacrifice on the altar at Modein and the officer sent to enforce the new religious practice. "Thus he burned with zeal for the law, just as Phinehas did against Zimri son of SaIu" (2:26). The reference to the event described in Num 25:6-15 compares Mattathias's act to Phinehas's deed. From this one could conclude that, as Phinehas was a son of Eleazar (e.g., Num 25:7), Mattathias may have been as well. If this is true, Mattathias and thus his sons would have been Zadokites, since Zadok belonged in the family of Eleazar (see below). The Priestly House of J(eh)oiarib in 1 Chronicles 24 The key name in Mattathias's genealogy for our purpose is Joarib, which, according to 1 Chr 24:7, was the name of the first of the twenty-four ancestral houses of priests who were to serve in the temple.5 The list in 1 Chronicles 24 is made up of descendants of Aaron's two sons: sixteen heads of houses from the line of Eleazar and eight from the line of Ithamar (24:4). Zadok, who was present when the division was made, is said to be from the line of Eleazar (24:3),6 but in the list itself no one of the twenty-four names is identified as belonging to Eleazar or to Ithamar.7 Therefore, while any one of the twenty-four was twice as likely to be from the Eleazar line as from that of Ithamar, we cannot demonstrate from the list alone that Jehoiarib and thus the Hasmoneans were Zadokites in a genealogical sense. …

Were the Hasmoneans Zadokites

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Were the Hasmoneans Zadokites