W. D. Davies

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.

Reflections on the Sermon on the Mount

Because the sermon on the mount (hereafter SM) has received as much attention as any text in all of world literature, informed attempts to interpret it should in some way come to terms with the history of the discussion. For this reason we shall commence by examining several traditional approaches to the SM. We fully recognise that ‘a history of the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount throughout the past two millennia would virtually amount to an introduction to the entire development of Christian theology and ethics’ — a fact which means that our own review is of necessity brief and piecemeal. Nonetheless, the following few pages do suffice to reveal certain important tendencies in exegetical history. Among them, and of first importance for our concerns, is the unfortunate habit of viewing the SM in isolation. Interpreters have again and again failed to take seriously the broader, literary context of Mt. 5–7 and have instead interpreted the chapters as though they were complete unto themselves, as though they constituted a book instead of a portion of a book. The considerable hermeneutical consequences have, on the whole, led away from the intent of the evangelist (our primary concern herein). It is our contention that any credible interpretation of Mt. 5–7 must constantly keep an eye on Mt. 1–4 and Mt. 9–28, for the part (the SM) draws its true meaning only from the whole (Matthews Gospel). Put otherwise, the proper interpretation of the SM must be at one with the proper interpretation of the First Gospel in its entirety.

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.