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Antigonos of Sokhoh received [the oral tradition] from Simon the Righteous. He was wont to say: Do not be like servants who serve the master in order to receive a reward, but be like servants who serve the master not in order to receive a reward; and let the fear of heaven be upon you.
3:
The popular uprising against the Hellenist overlord was accompanied with much suffering for the insurgents. The Second Book of Maccabees, preserved in the Apocrypha, is an account of the uprising composed for the benefit of the large Jewish community in the diaspora in Alexandria, Egypt. It dwells at considerable length on the atrocities that were perpetrated against the Jewish people at that time. Possibly, the best known of them, is the story of a woman named Hannah who saw six of her seven sons go to their death rather than forsake their faith. When her seventh and youngest son was about to be murdered, she kisses him and whispers, "Say to Father Abraham, 'Do not pride yourself on having built an altar and offered up your son Isaac. Our mother built seven altars and offered up seven sons in one day. Yours was only a test, but hers was real.'" [ 2 Maccabees 7]
4:
Under such circumstances, at that time as in ours, there must have been many who asked themselves what could be the purpose of all this suffering, how might God relate to the torturing and butchering of those who hold fast to his law? The biblical promise of blessing in exchange for obedience and curse only in exchange for disobedience is expressed in many places in the Torah. The most well-known place must be the second paragraph of the Shema [Deuteronomy 11:13-17]:
If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil – I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle – and thus you shall eat your fill. Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For the Lord's anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to you.
And here, Hannah and her contemporaries were experiencing the exact opposite: it was those who refused to be "lured away to serve other gods" who were doomed to "perish from the good land".
5:
A new conceptualization of Divine retribution was needed, because the old one did not seem to fit the facts of life. According to modern scholarship it was at this time that the book of Daniel was composed, and it was composed in order to give effect to the new teaching. Daniel and his colleagues are depicted as resisting attempts to make them conform to the gentile way of life, being prepared to suffer for their faith and finding all sorts of ways to maintain its precepts under the most difficult circumstances. But for the readers all this was but 'moral uplift'. The real message of the book is to be found at the end of the book [Daniel 12:1-4]:
At that time Michael, the great prince who watches over your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress unlike any other from the nation’s beginning up to that time. But at that time your own people, all those whose names are found written in the book, will escape. Many of those who sleep in the dusty ground will awake – some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting abhorrence. But the wise will shine like the brightness of the heavenly expanse. And those bringing many to righteousness will be like the stars forever and ever. But you, Daniel, close up these words and seal the book until the time of the end.
6:
Although Daniel is depicted in his book as being a prophet his book is not to be found in the second section of the Tanakh, the Prophets, but in the last section, the Writings. This is because the canon of the prophets had already been sealed by the time the book was written, so eventually, when it was decided to preserve it as sacred literature, it had to be included in the Writings. The new message of the book was that while the righteous may suffer at this present time, at the very end of history the dead will awaken, there will be a Great Judgement at which the wicked will be eternally punished and the righteous will at last receive recompense for their suffering: "Many of those who sleep in the dusty ground will awake – some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting abhorrence."
To be continued.
Al Sporer writes concerning sacrifices:
The sacrifice ritual which you assert, "the people loved," is likely not the same ritual you discuss in the Mishnah and which religious Jews recall nostalgically today. The Haftarah reading for the second day of Pesach [in the diaspora – SR] (Kings II, chapter 23), especially the parts omitted in the Haftarah reading, makes it clear that only during Josiah's short reign were the rituals reinstituted. Josiah had to destroy idols to Ashtoreth and Chemosh which Solomon instituted (for his concubines). Josiah destroyed Asherahs and Baalim and chased out the male prostitutes. From a reading of Kings II it is clear that the institution of sacrifices according to Torah ritual was the exception and not the rule during the reign of most of the Kings, including David and Solomon. And what was Josiah's reward? He died a fool's death in an unnecessary war with Egypt at an early age, while his father lived to a ripe old age despite his despicable reign.
I respond:
Admittedly the love of the people for the Temple ritual was most superbly manifest during the period of the second Temple. However, in order to understand the changing relationship of the people to the Bet Mikdash during the monarchy we would have to describe the politics of the period as well as the religious philosophies: for this we do not have the space in this context. Also, I think we should be very wary of drawing conclusions based on the policies of the governing classes during a comparatively short period. Furthermore, Al is confusing Josiah's father with Josiah's grandfather! Amon, the father, was only 22 years old when he attained power and reigned only for two years before being assassinated! (See 2Kings 21:19-23).
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