Louis Finkelstein

The Hasmonean revolt and the Hasmonean dynasty

Great and sudden were the changes which the Hasmonean family brought to the character and religion of the Jews. Yet the members of the family never saw themselves as breaking with tradition. Their first revolutionary acts were in response to an unprecedented challenge, the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus IV, and they always took the patterns for their deeds from Scripture. To understand the changes which the Hasmoneans brought, we must consider what most believing Jews then seem to have taken for granted. To judge by the surviving literature, all believing Jews then accepted as true the books of the Torah and the prophets. The teachings of the prophets kept pious Jews loyal to their God even after the disaster of 586 b.c.e. Their God had not been defeated when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. Rather, their almighty God was punishing them for their sins when he placed them under foreign domination. Prophets taught the Jews that refusal to accept Gods sentence upon them would bring catastrophic punishment, as when Zedekiahs refusal to accept the sentence of subjection to Babylonian rule had brought the destruction both of Gods Temple and of Zedekiahs kingdom of Judah. The Jews in their long years of submission were indeed a peculiar people. There could be misguided hot-heads among them, but the nation never rebelled. Even the fall of Babylon did not end the sentence, though one might have thought so on reading Isaiah 40 to 66. Rather, instead of liberating Israel, God gave to Cyrus of Persia and his successors ‘all the kingdoms of the earth’, and though independence and glory would eventually be restored to the Jews, it would come not by their own ‘might and power’ in rebellion, but only through the act of the ‘spirit’ of the Lord.

The Oldest Midrash: Pre-rabbinic Ideals and Teachings in the Passover Haggadah

The researches of the last three decades have conclusively shown that toward the end of the third century B.C. a profound change occurred in the spiritual life of the Jews. Literary prophecy, which had been declining since the time of Haggai and Zechariah (ca. 518 B.C.), now definitely came to an end. The noble tradition had been in its death throes for no less than three centuries. In vain did the Joels, the Obadiahs, and the Deutero-Zechariahs seek to save it from complete eclipse. Its hour had passed. In the meantime, new forces were arising to contend for its place in the spiritual leadership of Israel.

The Pharisees: their Origin and their Philosophy

The brilliant light thrown upon the Pharisees and the Sadducees by the careful studies of Geiger and Wellhausen, and their many disciples, has not completely dispelled the obscurity whieh surrounds the origin and being of these ancient groups. Geiger, whose views have in the main been accepted by Graetz, Detenbourg, Weiss, and Klausner, conceived of the conflict between these sects as intrinsically similar to that which developed in his own day between the reform and orthodox Jews in Germany.

The geography of Palestine and the Levant in relation to its history

Geography has been defined as the study of space relationships, and it is in this sense that the geography of Palestine must be considered, for upon these relationships very much of its history depends. They are threefold in nature and involve the relation of each region within the country with the other internal regions, of Palestine with the Levant coast of which it is a part, and finally the relation of the Levant with the larger outside world. This world was enormous indeed, for it was in York in England that Constantine was first proclaimed emperor, an event which was to alter the face of Palestine and bring much grief upon the Jewish people, and it was the rich Asian trade, ranging as far as the East Indies and China, which made the Romans so determined to maintain the Provincia Arabia. In this context two facts are of fundamental importance: the centrality and the extraordinary smallness of Palestine. The entire Middle East is dominated by three great barriers to settlement and easy movement: the towering mountain chains of central Europe and Asia, the dry, forbidding deserts, and the penetrating fingers of the seas, which hold the whole area in their grip. This constriction has determined both the main concentrations of population and the course of the major routes, followed for century after century by both merchants and warriors. Although the notable trading cities of Tyre, Damascus, Palmyra and Petra lay just beyond the Palestinian borders, the routes they served crossed its territory; for here at the south-western end of the Fertile Crescent the desert, closing in upon the Mediterranean, brings cultivation to an end, and all the roads from Asia to Egypt came together at Gaza, where also the opulent caravans from southern Arabia, bringing the riches of the East to Rome, finally reached the sea.

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