Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua; Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets and the prophets passed it on to the Members of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be moderate in judgement, Create many students, and Make a fence around the Torah.
The law of truth was in his mouth and no wrong was to be found on his lips; he walked with Me [God] in peace and equity and kept many from sinning. For the lips of the priest must guard knowledge, people seek Torah from his mouth: he is the representative of the Lord of Hosts [Malachi 2:6-7].
22:
The remotest origins of what was later to develop into the synagogue are to be sought in the assemblies of the exiles in Babylon. Surely it was but natural that they come together on those days that would have brought them together to congregate in Jerusalem before the exile. In these assemblies there must have emerged an anonymous religious leadership that was not necessarily from the priestly caste: anyone who could offer comfort and hope to the exiles was welcome to try. However, when the exiles were permitted to return to Eretz-Israel [538 BCE] at the first opportunity they instinctively assembled in Jerusalem and started to rebuild the Bet Mikdash (which was not completed until 516 BCE). In the early days of the second Bet Mikdash the priesthood was seen as corrupt and the priests were roundly condemned by the last of the prophets, Malachi and Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah.
23:
As we have seen, in the fall of the year 444 BCE a momentous revolution took place – the last historical event recorded in the bible. Ezra (himself a priest) and Nehemiah (the political leader) managed to get the people to accept the Torah as the "constitution" of the state and this acceptance was ratified by all the leaders of the community signing a covenant. Historically speaking, at the end of this scene the lights go out and the stage is in almost impenetrable darkness. The lights only come up again about a century later with the arrival of Alexander the Great in the Middle East in the year 333 BCE. When the lights come on again we find that alongside the Bet Mikdash in Jerusalem a new institution had come about: in the outlying towns and villages of the countryside people would congregate in "Assembly Rooms" (Bet Knesset, synagogue) to hear the Torah which was the constitution of the state explained and expounded by teachers called sages. And these teachers, these sages, were not necessarily priests.
24:
The fact that the synagogue had come into being did not mean the end of the ritual in the Bet Mikdash. In fact these two institutions continued to exist side by side until the destruction of the Bet Mikdash in the year 70 CE. Indeed, there was a synagogue functioning in the Bet Mikdash itself and it was used by the officiating priests themselves. However, the priestly caste reacted to the emergence of the new leaders of the synagogue, the Ĥakhamim, Sages, exactly as they had reacted to the prophets of the biblical period. Except for changes in nomenclature I can repeat what I wrote before: "the love of the priests for the sages was like the love of any bureaucratically minded official for the 'unqualified layman' who starts pounding his turf. This antipathy was further enhanced by the fact that some of the sages were renegade priests." It was not all the priests who evinced antipathy towards the sages, of course. It was the higher echelons of the priestly caste who were the most antipathetic; the middle-class priests and the working-class priests had little difficulty in finding much in common with the followers of the sages.
25:
As the "party" of the sages waxed greater so the high-priestly caste saw themselves more and more threatened. However, it was the arrival of Alexander the Great in the Middle East that caused the ultimate rift between the two. Alexander was a conqueror, but he was a conqueror with a mission. He did not only want to amass territory (which he did in enormous leaps and bounds). What Alexander wanted was to bring the "benefits" of the Greek way of life to the "natives". It was the need to confront "Hellenism" (the "Western way of life") that created two distinct ideologies within the Jewish people. The high-priestly caste had the most to lose by not finding a modus vivendi with the conquerors – prestige, income and power. The sages wanted only the right to carry on with their developing way of life. This rift was buttressed by ideological differences. The greatest ideological difference was with regard to the "Unwritten Torah", Torah she-b'al-Peh. The idea that the Written Torah, which was accepted by both parties, was not immutable but could be modified by interpretation and re-understanding, was the most important plank in the platform of the sages. (This modification of the Written Torah was not perceived by them as anything but a divinely sanctioned amplification of the text of the Torah, as much the Torah of God as the written text.) The second most important plank in their platform was the study of the Unwritten Torah in the Bet Midrash (or Bet Knesset) that existed in almost every town and village. These two planks were anathema to the High-Priestly caste. The ruling caste traced its ancestry back to a High Priest named Zadok, so they began to be called 'Zadokites', which was 'Europeanized' by the conquerors as 'Sadducees'. The party of the sages was derisively termed 'Perushim', 'Separatists' by their detractors – but the name stuck and was later borne with pride. (There are other explanations of the origin of the name which was 'Europeanized' into 'Pharisees', but I have offered here the most ubiquitous.)
26:
Thus the Sadducees rejected the Unwritten Torah out of hand and controlled the Bet Mikdash and its ritual, which was the object of their existence, while the Pharisees continued to grow and expand. The defection of a large portion of the middle- and lower-class Sadduceans to the Pharisaic party was caused by the threat of imminent persecution by the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes – and the rest of that story is well-known because of the festival of Ĥanukah. When the Sadducean defectors swelled the ranks of the Pharisees two groups were formed within the party: the proletarians which later became the 'House of Hillel' and the more bourgeois elements which later developed into the 'House of Shammai'. We have already discussed this dichotomy within the world of the sages in other connections. The destruction of the Bet Mikdash in 1st century CE caused the eclipse of the Sadducean party, and the Pharisees were left alone in the field. (The Sadducean ideology had two later resurrections. In the Jewish world, the Sadducean rejection of the Unwritten Torah – the heart and soul of rabbinic Judaism – was adumbrated in the Karaite schism which rocked the Jewish world in 8th century CE. There are still a small number of Karaites in existence to this day. In the non-Jewish world the Sadducean insistence that the ritual of the Temple was supreme found its way into Christian worship, which to this day has at its core priests, altars and the atoning power of sacrifice.)
To be continued.
Much correspondence, containing your comments and questions, has piled up on my desk, but I have decided to hold these items over until next time in order to move our historical survey forward.
due to the incidence of Purim the next shiur will be on Wednesday March 10th. Shabbat Shalom and Purim Samé'aĥ to everybody.
