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  • The Commerce of the Sacred: Mediation of the Divine Among Jews in the Greco-Roman World by Jack N. Lightstone
  • Alan J. Avery-Peck
The Commerce of the Sacred: Mediation of the Divine Among Jews in the Greco-Roman World. By Jack N. Lightstone. Columbia University Press, 2006. 224pages. $26.50.

Lightstone’s study, first published in 1984, is reprinted here with a new forward (by Willi Braun) and an updated bibliography (by Herbert Basser). It deserves renewed attention because, as Basser’s bibliography shows, Lightstone’s rethinking of the character and focus of late antique diaspora Judaism has had insufficient impact on how scholars continue today to think about this Judaism, its practices, its worldview, and, especially, its relationship to Hellenistic paganism and nascent Christianity, on the one hand, and Rabbinism, on the other.

Lightstone argues that because scholars’ perceptions of Judaism are shaped by the pervasive success of Rabbinic Judaism, they tend rather systematically to misread the character and concerns of late antique Judaism, in particular diaspora Judaism, in the period prior to the emergence of Rabbinism and during the first centuries CE, when Rabbinism was still in formation. Rabbinic Judaism came to define the practices and theology of Judaism from the sixth century and until our own day. The problem is that, in light of this success, scholars imagine all Judaisms in all periods and all places to closely mirror the Rabbinic model. As a result, without regard to the evidence for the real interests and concerns of Greco-Roman and Hellenistic diaspora Judaism of the Second Temple period through the first centuries CE, this Judaism is interpreted rather consistently as focused on study (that is, Talmudism) and as centered on an intricately detailed system of rituals and required behaviors (that is, halakhah).

Lightstone’s point is that Greco-Roman diasporic Judaism is far removed from the Rabbinism that only later shaped Jewish practice and thinking. He identifies at the heart of diaspora Judaism, rather, an attempt by Jews who were temporally and spatially removed from the Jerusalem Temple to create an [End Page 421] economy of the sacred that performed the functions filled for Jews in the land of Israel by the Jerusalem Temple itself. He summarizes the point like this:

I shall argue that Judaism of the Greco-Roman diaspora reflects a different configuration in appropriating and mediating the sacred, a shamanistic model in many respects. Removed first by distance (before 70 CE), and later (after 70 CE) by the cult’s demise, from the “socio-systemic” sacred order of the Temple, the Yahwehists of the Greco-Roman world depended upon various and varied local loci at which the sacred could be had—this to effect health, order, and prosperity in this lower realm (p. 5).

In practice, this means that, like their pagan and, in the later period, Christian, neighbors, Greco-Roman Jews turned to holy men understood to embody the divine so as to be able to produce spells and amulets that protected those who turned to them; they identified as loci of holiness the tombs of known miracle workers; and they introduced into the synagogue the Torah scroll, conceived as a holy object, paraded around the congregation and venerated as a relic (p. 83), and stored in a niche decorated as a gateway to the divine realm. In each of these three areas—the holy man as an embodiment of the divine, the tomb as a passageway to the realm of the divine, and the synagogue as a gateway to heaven—diaspora Judaism reveals to Lightstone its central concern for finding ways to mediate between the earthly and heavenly so as to assure divine protection, sustenance, and success for the Israelite nation and for individuals who availed themselves of these points of access to God.

The book is organized to substantiate this reading of Greco-Roman diasporic Judaism. Beyond the methodological introduction, chapter 2 is dedicated to “Magicians and Divine Men,” chapter 3 to “The Dead and Their Tombs,” chapter 4 to “The Life of Torah in the Diaspora,” chapter 5 to “The Synagogue,” and chapters 6 and 7 to synthetic issues; in chapter 6, “The Synagogue and the Church...

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