The Nations That Know Thee Not: Ancient Jewish Attitudes Toward Other Religions (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 282 Reviews ments is to be appreciated. There is no reason to assume that macrofamily structure of the early Iron Age period was identical to that of the Hellenistic or Roman eras any more than that of modem Americans can be read simplistically into ancient texts. Third, the recurring caveats about limited data and situational variables evidence a healthy scholarly humility that belongs in this kind of research. Fourth, the multiple indexes (Hebrew words, scripture and extra-biblical references, authors) will prove to be quite useful. Finally, this reviewer notes that these essays were enjoyable to read! Who says scholarly writing must be dense or brow-bending? Anyone with a hint of imagination can read these pieces and picture a David deftly negotiating family convolutions, a Ruth working around land complexities caused by a relative's premature death, or a wealthy Jewish divorcee of the Roman period pondering relational possibilities that had been unknown to her ancestors. People live in these pages. Jonathan M. Watt Geneva College Beaver Falls, PA 15010 jwatt@geneva.edu THE NATIONS THAT KNOW THEE NOT: ANCIENT JEWISH ATTITUDES TOWARD OTHER RELIGIONS. By Robert Goldenberg. pp. xi + 215. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Cloth, $37.50. Before the eighteenth century, Jews, unlike pagan Romans, Christians, and Muslims, rarely had occasion to think systematically about the status of other religions. They did, especially in antiquity, think carefully about the extent to which they could mix with outsiders, and, at all periods, about the halakic problems created by the exigencies of life among gentiles. But given that the Jews confronted others as rulers only for the two generations of Hasmonean quasi-independence (and the debates which surely accompanied Judaea's absorption of large non-Israelite populations have disappeared without a trace), they were generally free to think what they wished about the position of other religions in their own religious system, or ignore the issue altogether. In fact, in post-biblical antiquity, core Jewish responses came in two basic varieties, which were by no means mutually exclusive. One was to regard other religions as simply erroneous, beneath contempt; the other Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 283 Reviews was to think that they were nevertheless good enough for the gentiles, or, to put it more positively, that everyone had the right to observe their ancestral religious customs (however silly they may be). These were, of course, not the only possibilities. As Goldenberg observes , the Hebrew Bible contains traces of the idea that in the remote past, the nations were distributed among the gods: Israel was Yahweh's lot, just as Moab and Ammon were Kemosh's and Milkom's. The national gods may thus be hostile to each other, and are not equally powerful, but all are appropriately worshipped by their respective peoples. In the Hellenistic period , there are several attested cases, even apart from the Jerusalemite reformists of the 170s B.C.E., of Jews' participation in pagan rituals, and one wonders whether the city councilors in places like Tiberias and Sepphoris in the second and third centuries C.E., who had images of the Greek gods stamped on their municipal coins, were not engaged in similar compromises. But such syncretism or eclecticism never received unambiguous literary expression; presumably it was unacceptable to the priests, scribes, and rabbis who produced the surviving literature. The closest thing we can fmd is the partial identification of Judaism with Greek philosophical skepticism, which was often characterized by monotheistic beliefs, in books written by Jews but attributed to pagans, like the Leller ofAristeas and Sentences of Phocylides. But this was a matter of ideology, with no predictable effect on practice: a Philo might regard enlightened Greeks with favor, but would still not have married off his daughter to one. Robert Goldenberg provides an account mainly of such core Jewish responses to foreign religions, briefly surveying the Hebrew Bible, some Hellenistic Jewish literature, and the rabbinic corpus, and cursorily considering the implications of the main ancient Jewish revolts. He succeeds in demonstrating that both responses described above are found throughout, often coexisting not only in a single literary corpus, but even in the same books. The omissions will...