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.
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If, from the historical point of view, the Great Assembly was not the body described by Rambam – what was it? In order to understand fully the answer to this question we must recapitulate a little of the historical background that we have already covered in a small measure. After the Great Assembly convened by Ezra and Nehemiah in the year 444 BCE the lights go out on the stage of the history of Judah; the stage is brilliantly relit in the year 333 BCE with the arrival of Alexander of Macedon in the Middle East. Alexander was a conqueror with a mission: his self-appointed mission was to being the benefits of the Greek way of life, Hellenism, to the peoples that he conquered.
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As far as we know the initial contact between Israel and Europe was positive, for Alexander was no despot and he expected the people that he conquered to adopt the Greek way of life because of its obvious virtues. It never occurred to him that other peoples might consider their way of life just as beneficial and just as virtuous. After toppling the Persian Empire decisively, Alexander drove his army in a wide swathe across Asia and stopped only on the banks of the Indus River in India because his troops refused to go any farther! Rather disconsolately he returned to Babylon where he was suddenly taken seriously ill. Despite persistent rumours that he was poisoned the truth is probably that he had caught malaria. He died on July 23rd 323 BCE. He had created an empire which stretched from the Balkans to the Indus and from Turkey to the Sudan – and he was hardly 33 years old when he died! Since his death was wholly unexpected his empire was divided between his squabbling generals, who created mini-empires from the spoils and declared themselves kings. They too followed a policy of Hellenization, but with increasing frustration that not all the peoples under their sway seemed desperately eager to adopt the Greek way of life.
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Among the peoples who demonstrated an uncertain attitude towards Hellenism was the people of Israel. As I suggested in an earlier shiur, we can broadly discern two reactions to the lures of Hellenism: one section of the people was happy to adopt the Greek way of life, to a greater or lesser extent, and another section of the people viewed the growing hellenization of Jewish culture with dismay. By the time we reach the middle of the 3rd century BCE the problem is so great that something has to be done. What it needed was for one influential Pharisee to cross over into the Sadducean camp or for one influential Sadducee to cross over into the camp of the Pharisees. And this is what happened. The late Rabbi Professor Eliezer Finkelstein, in his book on Rabbi Akiva, thus describes the development:
During the First Commonwealth the defense of the plebeians had been conducted largely by the prophets; in the Second Commonwealth, the prophet was replaced by the scholar, whose forum was his school room… The control of both the religious and civil life of the people was vested in a Gerousia or Council of Elders, the patrician "heads of the families", who qualified by lineage rather than accomplishment. Even the High Priests, who presided over this Gerousia, stood generally on no higher intellectual or cultural level than the other members. The decisions of the Gerousia in religious and ceremonial, as well as civil, questions, were based entirely on observed practice or precedent fixed by earlier patrician landowners. The objections of the plebeian scholars or scribes remained unheard in the counsels of the great…
The advent of Alexander the Great, and the ease with which he demolished the great Persian Empire, had wrought a spiritual revolution, in Judea as well as in the rest of the Near East, without parallel in the history of the world. The patricians, who had always been inclined to imitate the ways of their imperialist masters, were carried away by their admiration for the Greeks… The [plebeian] scholars realized that much more than class interest was at stake in the conflict between them and the patricians. The whole of Jewish tradition was likely to be swept away by the flood of Hellenization… So long as the plebeians had merely demanded new rights and recognition for their own customs, they found the patrician group united against them. But when they threw themselves into the breach to oppose the flood of Hellenism, they gained support from many members of the aristocracy… The foremost of the converts to the plebeian cause was the distinguished statesman-ecclesiastic, Simon the Righteous… Simon convoked a Great Assembly to discuss the problems confronting the people and their faith… Led by the high priest, who presided, the Assembly reached a number of decisions which became of historic importance… But the most important decision was of a constitutional nature: they replaced the ancient Gerousia with a new Sanhedrin, which was to include in its membership plebeian scribes as well as patrician elders.
