Herod, King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (review)

Book Reviews 125 result ofhis later polemic against the '~Judaizers"?); th<;: meaning of the phrase "works ofthe Law" in Paul's thought (Does it refer to an Old Testament and/or Jewish legalism ofworks-righteousness? to boundary markers ofJewish identity now raised to the level of a nationalistic code of status? to the Law's prescriptions as a whole? to the statutes ofthe old covenant?); the meaning of"sin" in Gal. 2:15-18; the meaning ofRom. 4:4-5 in relationship to the Law; the problem ofbalancing continuity and discontinuity in 2 Cor. 3 (cf. p. 320: "as intractable here as anywhere in Paul, if not more so"); and the significance ofthe covenant concept and Paul's apocalyptic framework for his view of the Law (cf. Rom. 5:12-21; Gal. 1:4; 3:23-26; 4:1-31; 2 Cor. 3:6-14). Finally, the symposium demonstrated once again that the crux ofthe debate is how to understand and correlate Paul's apparently "negative" statements concerning the Law's function (e.g., Gal. 2:16-19,21; 3:1-5, 10-12, 15-22; 5:16-18; Rom. 3:20; 4:14-16; 5:20; 9:30-10:4; 1 Cor. 15:56; 2 Cor. 3:6-11) with his positive evaluation of the Law's nature and his insistence that those in Christ uphold and fulfill the Law by the power of the Spirit (e.g., Rom. 2:12-16,17-29; 3:27, 31; ;7:7-8:4; 13:8-10; 1 Cor. 7:19; 9:21; 2 Cor. 3:7-11,15-18; Gal. 5:13-14; 6:2) on the one hand, and with his apparent relativizing of key aspects of the Law as matters of personal preference and conviction on the other (cf. 1 Cor. 7:18-19; 9: 19-23; Rom. 14:5-6, 13-14,20)' As this volume illustrates so well, the historical and theological issues surrounding Paul's view of the Law are notoriously complex. But it also demonstrates that the "assured conclusions" ofa previous generation have been destroyed without any new "scholarly consensus" in sight. In doing so, this volume raises afresh the fundamental question of what, for Paul, the significance ofthe death and resurrection of the Messiah "under the Law" actually was for the role of the Law itself, not only in the justification and reconciliation ofJews and Gentiles in Christ, but also in their continuing life "in Christ" as believers. The weight ofthis question cannot be overemphasized. May the potential frustration ofsuch a volume therefore not lead to despair, but to a renewed dedication to resolve this all-important issue for the meaning of Paul's thought and for the history of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Scott Hafemann Foreign Language Department Wheaton College Herod, King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, by Peter Richardson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 360 pp. $39.95. Richardson's study of the Herodian household and its antecedents has been hailed as "monumental," "thorough and authoritative," and as "history at its best": all these 126 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 encomiums coming from historians who, unlike this reviewer, are specialists in the area. This reviewer is further handicapped by a training in the social sciences that asks about social structures and patterns in a way that, with a few exceptions, goes beyond Richardson's purpose of giving as full and as reliable a description of events as possible. With regard to description, moreover, Richardson sets his sights fairly low. That is, the author seems to focus on whether a story seems coherent and makes sense rather than on what it was like to live in a certain period. In his judgments on individuals, he falls back on notions of what constitutes good or bad judgment or speculates on the pursuit of Realpolitik and on the rivalry of parties. His viewpoint is thus relatively modem and common sense; there is no willingness here to let the nose of the anthropologist, so to speak, get under the flap of the historian's tent. Thus he shows little interest in the question of whether a particular ethos was enchanted, or in the peculiar nature of brotherhoods in the Arab and Jewish world of the time in question, or in the role of crowds and apparitions. His assessments thus have a peculiarly commensensical and contemporary ring to them: not what one would expect in dealing with a Middle Eastern sultanate riddled with fratricidal and patricidal hatreds and haunted by its own crimes during a time when the usual rites seemed unable to contain suicidal panic and murderous passions. In this book we therefore enter a territory which, because ofRichardson's thorough command ofprimary and secondary sources, and a style that is brisk and lucid, seems all too accessible: more like the play ofpolitics in an important and ethnically complex part of a late twentieth-century empire, rather than like the inner workings and external alliances of the household of Saddam Hussein. Whatever mysteries remain therefore seem due to gaps and inconsistencies in the sources themselves, not to the sheer foreignness ofthe society in question. It is up to Richardson to tease out the strands of traditions and the double accounts in order to tell a story that makes sense. Of course, it is crucial to deal with the sources, which have enough problems of their own, and Richardson is expert in discerning double accounts, for instance, in the Gospels' stories about Antipas's fear of Jesus or in the Josephan narrative of the unhappy fate of Herod's wife Mariamne. Richardson is also very good at drawing on recent scholarship and on the earliest sources to elaborate the complex interplay of interests and exchanges between Herod and the Romans or the Nabateans. He is not reluctant to try to answer old questions about the popularity of Herod's regime or about the conversion of the Idumaeans. If, as Richardson tends to conclude, only a minority of the Idumaeans were converted by force, one is left wondering why the Idumaeans lent themselves to such a vicious and fratricidal attack on Jerusalemites during the civil war. If, as Richardson quite rightly indicates, Herod at times enjoyed considerable popular support, one might still want to know what it meant to be subject to attack by Jewish spies and soldiers under Herod's command or to live surrounded by so many Hellenistic monuments and displays. Terror, superstition, cultural fatigue, smoldering Book Reviews 127 ethnic hatred, and long memories figure less centrally in his account than the understandable strategies of generals and notables, kings and officials, for coping with threats to public order. Is it too much to ask the historian to consider, for instance, what sort of brotherhood was constituted by Herod and his brothers, or by his sons, along with their followers (the elusive "Herodians")? In some regards Herod and his brothers seem fairly ordinary: the son that preempts the role of the father or becomes elevated to a higher status than the others usually does become the object of fratricidal suspicion. Multiple wives do make problems ofsuccession more difficult. However, Richardson misses the opportunity to make some obvious connections with other societies where such structures dissolved into fratricide on a moment's suspicion, and he fails to analyze rituals as attempts to transcend the contradictions between fraternal and patriarchal forms ofsocial order. Richardson may be right that the Herodians "were a small group ofpersons politically committed to the fortunes of the family of Herod," butwere they more like a group oflobbyists or undercover agents, or a political action committee, or, as I would suggest, more like a warrior brotherhood? Like some other brotherhoods in Israel, the Herodians clearly had been provincial in origin, were open to exchange with outsiders, were eclectic if not entirely universalistic in their hospitality to foreign generals, games, technology, and gods, and may have embodied the interests and loyalties not only ofa large family but ofa clan. They may therefore have been at odds, one might expect, with brotherhoods having hereditary claims to elite status and longstanding ties to the cultural and political center, especially since such brotherhoods may have been suspicious of alien ideas, information, and influences. Richardson simply attributes the Herodians' openness to a legacy from Herod's father and grandfather: to patriarchal sources, rather than to the structure of brotherhoods rooted in peripheral ethnic groups with ambitions to capture the center. Sometimes Richardson does go beyond story-telling to interpretation or even explanation, but he does so within a very limited range of theoretical or empirical interest. Had Richardson pursued some of the obvious structural questions, he might have been able to shed some light on the affinities of Herod with the Essenes or on Herod's need for-but hostility toward-the Hasmoneans. Herod's alignments and oppositions may have a lot more to say about the rivalry among Israelite brotherhoods than about Herod's own ambitions and acquaintanceships. When Richardson does seem to have been disposed to entertain questions about the social order per se, he tends to resolve them by an extended and heavy reliance on one source: for instance, when he discusses Jewish patterns ofmarriage. There he engages in what to this reviewer seems to be a premature foreclosure of the structural questions that could well have arisen at that point in his discussion. Richardson also misses the opportunity to discuss the possible tension between patriarchal and matrilineal authority: a tension that helped to destroy the household ofHerod the Great and that may have played a major role in the 128 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 later ethnic politics ofHerod's successors. Clearly, Richardson's main interest is not in questions about the social order. Had Richardson wished to enter into questions about the ethos or structure of Israel during this period, he might well have noted in more detail the role of crowds and of apparitions of the dead. Certainly Josephus often calls attention to the role of such apparitions, especially in the guilty dreams of the living, and he speaks of the peculiarly volatile and intense imagination of gatherings ofpeople. No wonder, then, that Antipas would have been worried about Jesus and the crowds, and might have feared the return of John the Baptist. That part of the narrative calls for an anthropological interest, at the very least, in the subject matter. Instead, Richardson's attention is drawn there, as elsewhere, to the possible existence of two traditions that can be discerned within the texts, and he teases them apart in the interest ofrecovering a coherent and simple story line. In the hands of a textual analyst as skilled as Richardson, it may be possible to reconstruct a reliable narrative, but the need remains for another sort of historiography that owes at least as much to anthropological insight as it does to the historian's interest in a plausible story. While one is left feeling indebted to Richardson for his extraordinary effort in pulling together the very scattered and fragmented pieces of evidence on these topics into a coherent account, one is also left little the wiser as to what sort ofsociety he is discussing and what it may have been like to live within it, to suffer its weight, or to make sacrifices for it. Richard Fenn Department of Church History Princeton Theological Seminary Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, by Robert Chazan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 197 pp. $35.00. Many great empires, Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, and Roman, have seen it as politically viable policy to deport, slaughter, enslave, or disperse Yisrael. All this, of course, was done well before a small Jewish sect led by a carpenter came to be the arbiter of morality in the West. Indeed, recent Arab propaganda in Japan has been surprisingly effective in creating sin 'at Yisra 'el, while a cornerstone of Chinese communist policy has been continuing support for the enemies of Israel. Thus, it is surely curious that of all the peoples who were introduced onto the stage of history in the Hebrew Bible, few if any have endured for so long and prospered as well as the Jews. ...