History, Fiction, and the Construction of Ancient Jewish Identities

Any expedition through the scholarship on Second Temple literature over the last several decades will reveal a number of twists and turns in the quest to reconstruct the history of Jews in that period. One of the most frequently asked questions, of course, has been: Do these works tell us what happened? Even questions about authorship, date, provenance, or literary genre have often served a broader interest of determining just how trustworthy or dependable a text might be; which parts of a text appear to be sound historical reflections; and which elements are problematic enough to warrant ignoring them in our reconstructions. Scholars have tried to answer such questions as these: Which version of the events surrounding the Maccabean revolt gives us the "best" account, 1 or 2 Maccabees? How do the apocalyptic visions of Daniel support, correct, or supplement the narrative accounts? Does the Letter of Aristeas tell us about the origins of the Septuagint? Examples could be multiplied.

More recently, many scholars have relegated the "what happened" question to a secondary status and have read these texts to reconstruct a different kind of history. The traditional concern with historical accuracy and reliability gets demoted, and texts are read as literary products whose objectives extend beyond the details of what "happened." They do not aim primarily at offering the usual "historical" reconstructions. Instead, groundbreaking studies have focused on finding answers to questions such as whether a text is directed inwardly to Jews or outwardly to gentiles; whether the material reflects a Jewish community at ease with or in tension with its environment; or whether the author and the community seem comfortable or anxious about gentile influence (often called Hellenism). Such questions are less tied up with the problem of what happened and are more focused on perceptions of the texts' authors and their reading communities.

As biblical studies have paid increasing attention to postmodern concerns, not only has interest in the "what happened" receded further into the background, but any clear and certain answer to the question itself has been thought in some corners to be largely unattainable. Whatever the authors of ancient texts might have understood themselves to be doing, modern scholarly readers approach the texts for what they reveal about how the works functioned in the construction of the identity(-ies) of their ancient Jewish authors and readers. Although many contemporary readers do not engage in traditional historical readings or constructions, they do attempt to uncover a different set of "realities"—the ways the discourse preserved in these texts encoded and forged selves and communities within their historical worlds. Each of the three books featured in this essay, in its own way, engages the postmodern effort to excavate Second Temple Jewish works in order to discover identity formations.

In Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity, Steven Weitzman notes that though the works he examines certainly contain fictional constructions, "they do personify a real struggle for cultural survival" (3); accordingly, he emphasizes the role of imagination and storytelling in the Jewish "art of cultural persistence." In Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context, Sara Raup Johnson tries to problematize the genre of "Jewish novel," which in her mind obscures the fundamental purpose of what she calls "Jewish fictions," in which each author "sought to recreate the past in his own particular way in order to shape his own particular vision of contemporary Hellenistic Jewish identity" (xv). Finally, in The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran, Carol Newsom understands the sectarian texts found at Qumran to represent a "community of discourse," and examines the Serek ha-Yahad and the Hodayot so as "to model a way of reading the sectarian texts that draws...