The Divine Symphony: the Bible's many voices

Chapter Eight - The Emergence of the Sects in Ancient Judaism

123 CHAPTER EIGHT The Emergence of the Sects in Ancient Judaism I N CHAPTER 1 WE EXAMINED THE SAYING OF SHIMON THE Righteous that appears in The Sayings of the Fathers: “The world stands on three things: the Torah, the Temple services, and acts of loving-kindness.”1 I emphasized the priority of the study of Torah over the Temple sacrifices, and noted this as a sign of the revolutionary change that had occurred in the Judaism of the day. The study of Torah became a general, public virtue—open to all. I linked this revolution with the activity of the Holiness School, the circle that, in my view, was responsible for editing the Torah and promulgating it among the entire people. This school of thought sought to blur—or to do away with completely—the barriers between the priesthood and the people and to allow the people as a whole to participate in the experience of studying Torah (including the Priestly Torah) and to participate in the Temple services. The integration of the Priestly heritage with elements of popular faith is the most striking characteristic of the Holiness School. In this sense, both the members of the Great Assembly, who stated that one ought to “raise many students” (Avot 1:1), and Shimon the Righteous, who gives 124 priority to the study of Torah, continue the policy first implemented by the Holiness School. As I mentioned in previous chapters, the issue of divine reward and punishment, on both the personal and the national level, was also central to the thought of the Second Temple period. The sage who studied under Shimon the Righteous and took his place after his death, Antigonos of Sokho, offers an interesting approach to this question. His saying appears immediately after that of Shimon the Righteous. But before discussing his ideas, I would like to draw attention to his name. It is clearly of Greek origin, and it indicates that Antigonos lived in the Hellenistic period, when the heirs of Alexander the Great ruled the Land of Israel, at about the year 200 B.C.E., or perhaps later. According to Sayings of the Fathers, he said: “Do not be as slaves who serve their master in order to receive allowance,2 rather be as slaves who serve their master on the condition not to receive allowance”3 (Avot 1:3). That is, the important value in the eyes of Antigonos of Sokho is the worship of God for its own sake. Worshiping God does not entail the expectation of any reward.4 Antigonos’s saying seems to have caused a deep spiritual stir among his disciples. In Avot de-Rabbi Natan, an exposition of Sayings of the Fathers, we read: “Antigonos of Sokho had two disciples who repeated this doctrine to their disciples and their disciples to their disciples. They rose up and examined the matter, saying: ‘Why did our predecessors say this? Is it right for a laborer to toil all day and not receive his reward in the evening?’” Is it possible for someone to work all day without reward? It is not, according to the disciples. Why then, they wondered, did Antigonos say that people ought to be as slaves who serve their master not in order to receive reward ? “Had our predecessors known that there was another world and that the dead would be resurrected, surely they would not have said this,” said his disciples. Apparently, they reasoned that Antigonos believed humans should not expect a reward because there truly is no reward. “They separated THE DIVINE SYMPHONY 125 themselves from Torah. Two sects emerged from them: the Sadducees, named for Zadok; and the Boethusians, named for Boethus” (Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version A, chapter 5). According to this source, the cause of the split in Judaism was the issue of divine reward and punishment. Is there a reward for the worship of the Lord? Should one expect reward, in this world or in the world to come? The sects that were founded in the Hellenistic period—the Sadducees and the Boethusians—disputed, according to the passage in Avot deRabbi Natan, the existence of a reward in this world or in the next. Though the tradition in Avot de-Rabbi Natan contains some aggadic elements5 and might have been written in a later period,6 its historical reliability is confirmed by an early Christian source.7 According to...