History of Judaism

Josephus speaks of three groups: the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes.

The Jewish group that concentrated on the study, teaching and application of the Torah was and is the Torah-sages and their many disciples, from Abraham down to today.

The word "Pharisees," which is based on a Greek misspelling, doesn't convey the meaning which it should. It actually refers to the Sages of the Talmud. (The Hebrew word "p'rushim," to which he referred, means people of temperance; the opposite of epicurean.)

Josephus' referring to Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes may convey the mistaken impression that the Pharisees were just one "sect" among others, when in fact Josephus himself admits that the Pharisees (Torah-sages) with their disciples constituted the large majority of the Jewish people.

The Pharisees were very egalitarian. They believed that all men were created in God's image and that all had the same rights, and the same right to an education, etc. They were devoted to the practicing of kindness, the fulfillment of mitzvot, the study and teaching of Torah and the education of all people, regardless of status in society. They detested hypocrisy and actively sought it out and criticized it whenever they encountered it. The Pharisees were the only movement to survive the destruction of the Second Temple and were the ancestors of modern Judaism.

Our traditional Jewish beliefs today, including the afterlife and the resurrection, are traditions continuing from the Prophets and the Sages of the Talmud ("Pharisees").

The Sadducees were men of politics and secular life. They had abandoned various parts of Judaism; and they claimed no earlier source (tradition) for their attitudes. They harassed the Torah-sages; and, like the miniscule breakaway group called the Essenes, disappeared at the time of the Second Destruction, just as the earlier Jewish idolaters had disappeared at the time of the First Destruction.

Note that there is a common conception that the Sadducees, like the later (and now largely defunct) Karaites, made a deliberate decision to reject the Oral Law and reinterpret the Scriptures.

However, a careful perusal of the Talmud reveals that the Sadducees were actually opportunists who had nothing much at all to do with religion in any fashion. They were lax in Judaism; they were men of politics who weren't interested in Torah-matters.

The group that did (on rare occasions) argue with the Torah-Sages concerning subjects of religious observance, were a tiny sect called the Baitusim (Boethusians), who quickly died out.

The Essenes were a small sect in Judea who eventually went extinct. They styled themselves "observant; pious ones." The normative, majority religious community viewed them as breakaways from the common stream of Jewish tradition, because of their beliefs and practices. Their beliefs included an excessive amount of dabbling with the names of angels, messianic fervor, gnosticism and eschatological speculation; and their practices were more like Christian monasticism than the generally accepted Jewish way of living. The practices of the Essenes included vegetarianism, dwelling in isolated groups, communal ownership, monastic asceticism and avoidance of money, commerce or private property, and (among some of them) celibacy. Also, they had some forms of non-traditional observances (such as round phylacteries [tefillin]). Some researchers identify the Essenes as a form of early Christianity, taking also into account the fact that early Christianity was far from uniform and was, for a time, thought of as a kind of modified Judaism.

Social classes:

The more wealthy could typically include those close to the king. Middle income could include tradespeople, merchants and artisans; and the least income would be that of unskilled laborers. However, in Israelite society, the Torah and Prophets put so much emphasis on social justice that the people tended to avoid the practice of neglecting the poor or judging people by their financial status. There were twenty-four types of tithe-"taxes" given to the Kohanim; a full ten percent of produce was given to the Levites; and ten percent was given to the poor. The result of all this was that the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the people was much less than in other nations.
As regards Torah-scholarship, anyone could become a great Sage; and in the study-halls, scholars of great wealth and of no wealth sat side by side and learned together.
But there were some individuals, men with positions of power, who misused that power. As was the case concerning the avoidance of idolatry, not everyone heeded the prophets.
Specifically, the monarchy and its hangers-on, and the judges and people holding public office, included a minority that took advantage of those who had no such power.

The Third Jewish Revolt is also known as the Bar Kokhbar War. This revolt against Roman rules took place between 132 and 135 AD. Based on the ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio, this armed conflict took place in Judea, under the reign of Emperor Hadrian. According to Dio the revolt was a disaster for both the Jews and the Romans. Highlights were:

* 580,000 rebels lost their lives;

* Romans legions destroyed over 1,000 Jewish villages;

* Many civilians died from famine and fires;

* Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina;

* Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem; and

* Dio Cassius provides no number of Roman deaths, only that "numerous Romans died".

This final large revolt intensified the Jewish Diaspora.

They sold him to Potiphar, the chief of Pharaoh's bodyguard in Egypt.

(Genesis 37:21-28, 36; 39:1)

The Sadducees were actually more of political sect. Among their numbers were some priests who served in the Temple. The Sadducees were part of the council that administered Temple laws.

Answer:

They didn't have any permanent position in the Temple. They took positions of power wherever and whenever they could, and drifted away when things became unfavorable. This is one of the major reasons why God allowed the Second Destruction to happen: at that time the Sadducees, Essenes and other breakaway groups left Judaism altogether.

The Jews' Great Revolt against Rome in 66 C.E. led to one of the greatest catastrophes in Jewish life and, in retrospect, might well have been a terrible mistake.

No one could argue with the Jews for wanting to throw off Roman rule. Since the Romans had first occupied Israel in 63 B.C.E., their rule had grown more and more onerous. From almost the beginning of the Common Era, Judea was ruled by Roman procurators, whose chief responsibility was to collect and deliver an annual tax to the empire. Whatever the procurators raised beyond the quota assigned, they could keep. Not surprisingly, they often imposed confiscatory taxes. Equally infuriating to the Judeans, Rome took over the appointment of the High Priest (a turn of events that the ancient Jews appreciated as much as modern Catholics would have appreciated Mussolini appointing the popes). As a result, the High Priests, who represented the Jews before God on their most sacred occasions, increasingly came from the ranks of Jews who collaborated with Rome.

At the beginning of the Common Era, a new group arose among the Jews: the Zealots (in Hebrew, Ka-na-im). These anti-Roman rebels were active for more than six decades, and later instigated the Great Revolt. Their most basic belief was that all means were justified to attain political and religious liberty.

The Jews' anti-Roman feelings were seriously exacerbated during the reign of the half-crazed emperor Caligula, who in the year 39 declared himself to be a deity and ordered his statue to be set up at every temple in the Roman Empire. The Jews, alone in the empire, refused the command; they would not defile God's Temple with a statue of pagan Rome's newest deity.

Caligula threatened to destroy the Temple, so a delegation of Jews was sent to pacify him. To no avail. Caligula raged at them, "So you are the enemies of the gods, the only people who refuse to recognize my divinity." Only the emperor's sudden, violent death saved the Jews from wholesale massacre.

Caligula's action radicalized even the more moderate Jews. What assurance did they have, after all, that another Roman ruler would not arise and try to defile the Temple or destroy Judaism altogether? In addition, Caligula's sudden demise might also have been interpreted as confirming the Zealots' belief that God would fight alongside the Jews if only they would have the courage to confront Rome.

In the decades after Caligula's death, Jews found their religion subject to periodic gross indignities, Roman soldiers exposing themselves in the Temple on one occasion, and burning a Torah scroll on another.

Ultimately, the combination of financial exploitation, Rome's unbridled contempt for Judaism, and the unabashed favoritism that the Romans extended to gentiles living in Israel brought about the revolt.

In the year 66, Florus, the last Roman procurator, stole vast quantities of silver from the Temple. The outraged Jewish masses rioted and wiped out the small Roman garrison stationed in Jerusalem. Cestius Gallus, the Roman ruler in neighboring Syria, sent in a larger force of soldiers. But the Jewish insurgents routed them as well.

This was a heartening victory that had a terrible consequence: Many Jews suddenly became convinced that they could defeat Rome, and the Zealots' ranks grew geometrically. Never again, however, did the Jews achieve so decisive a victory.

When the Romans returned, they had 60,000 heavily armed and highly professional troops. They launched their first attack against the Jewish state's most radicalized area, the Galilee in the north. The Romans vanquished the Galilee, and an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed or sold into slavery.

Throughout the Roman conquest of this territory, the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem did almost nothing to help their beleaguered brothers. They apparently had concluded-too late, unfortunately-that the revolt could not be won, and wanted to hold down Jewish deaths as much as possible.

The highly embittered refugees who succeeded in escaping the Galilean massacres fled to the last major Jewish stronghold-Jerusalem. There, they killed anyone in the Jewish leadership who was not as radical as they. Thus, all the more moderate Jewish leaders who headed the Jewish government at the revolt's beginning in 66 were dead by 68-and not one died at the hands of a Roman. All were killed by fellow Jews.

The scene was now set for the revolt's final catastrophe. Outside Jerusalem, Roman troops prepared to besiege the city; inside the city, the Jews were engaged in a suicidal civil war. In later generations, the rabbis hyperbolically declared that the revolt's failure, and the Temple's destruction, was due not to Roman military superiority but to causeless hatred (sinat khinam) among the Jews (Yoma 9b). While the Romans would have won the war in any case, the Jewish civil war both hastened their victory and immensely increased the casualties. One horrendous example: In expectation of a Roman siege, Jerusalem's Jews had stockpiled a supply of dry food that could have fed the city for many years. But one of the warring Zealot factions burned the entire supply, apparently hoping that destroying this "security blanket" would compel everyone to participate in the revolt. The starvation resulting from this mad act caused suffering as great as any the Romans inflicted.

We do know that some great figures of ancient Israel opposed the revolt, most notably Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. Since the Zealot leaders ordered the execution of anyone advocating surrender to Rome, Rabbi Yochanan arranged for his disciples to smuggle him out of Jerusalem, disguised as a corpse. Once safe, he personally surrendered to the Roman general Vespasian, who granted him concessions that allowed Jewish communal life to continue.

During the summer of 70, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem, and initiated an orgy of violence and destruction. Shortly thereafter, they destroyed the Second Temple. This was the final and most devastating Roman blow against Judea.

It is estimated that as many as one million Jews died in the Great Revolt against Rome. When people today speak of the almost two-thousand-year span of Jewish homelessness and exile, they are dating it from the failure of the revolt and the destruction of the Temple. Indeed, the Great Revolt of 66-70, followed some sixty years later by the Bar Kokhba revolt, were the greatest calamities in Jewish history prior to the Holocaust. In addition to the more than one million Jews killed, these failed rebellions led to the total loss of Jewish political authority in Israel until 1948. This loss in itself exacerbated the magnitude of later Jewish catastrophes, since it precluded Israel from being used as a refuge for the large numbers of Jews fleeing persecutions elsewhere.

The ten commandments or the decalogue.

In Hebrew, they are called luchot habrit (לוחות הברית)