Creating Judaism

The newspapers are reporting the discovery of what appears to be Herod’s tomb in the fortress that he built, Herodium. Archaeologists discovered pieces of an elaborately carved sarcophagus, but no bones or inscriptions indicating who was once interred within it. Nevertheless, the identification might well be correct. At the end of book 1 of his work the Jewish War, Josephus mentions Herod’s burial:

So there was an acclamation made to Archelaus, to congratulate him upon his advancement; and the soldiers, with the multitude, went round about in troops, and promised him their good-will, and besides, prayed God to bless his government. After this, they betook themselves to prepare for the king’s funeral; and Archelaus omitted nothing of magnificence therein, but brought out all the royal ornaments to augment the pomp of the deceased. There was a bier all of gold, embroidered with precious stones, and a purple bed of various contexture, with the dead body upon it, covered with purple; and a diadem was put upon his head, and a crown of gold above it, and a secptre in his right hand; and near to the bier were Herod’s sons, and a multitude of his kindred; next to which came his guards, and the regiment of Thracians, the Germans. also and Gauls, all accounted as if they were going to war; but the rest of the army went foremost, armed, and following their captains and officers in a regular manner; after whom five hundred of his domestic servants and freed-men followed, with sweet spices in their hands: and the body was carried two hundred furlongs, to Herodium, where he had given order to be buried. And this shall suffice for the conclusion of the life of Herod. (Whiston translation)

It is not very surprising not to find the golden accouterments described by Josephus; grave-robbers would have taken these years ago.

The real interesting story here is not the possible discovery of Herod’s tomb but the fact that it entered mainstream media. Historically, the discovery of Herod’s tomb doesn’t really tell us anything; we don’t need more evidence that Herod once lived. Nor do modern religions venerate Herod; he’s made out in many Jewish and Christian texts (perhaps a bit undeservedly) as quite the villain. So why should anyone care?

That people in fact do care about all kinds of archaeological discoveries tangentially related to the Bible and their own faith commitments is both puzzling and fascinating in its own right. Is this a case of craving some material, palpable connection to the past, and/or is there an element of “contagion,” as if being in the presence of such material artifacts brings us close to greatness? (This reminds me of the many houses with plaques that George Washington once slept there.) The Biblical Archaeology Society publishes two periodicals appealing to this desire, but it is the desire itself that deserves further reflection.

I recently read A Kingdom of Priests: Ancestry and Merit in Ancient Judaism (Jewish Culture and Contexts) by Martha Himmelfarb. Himmelfarb, a professor of religion at Princeton University, highlights the tension between ascribed and attributed authority, that is, whether the claim to “authority” (that can also loosely be understood as including having the status as a covenanted people of God) is based in biological ancestry or by acts that remain open to all. Himmelfarb argues that Jews during the Second Temple period struggled with tension, and ultimately different groups “solved” it in different ways, although the preponderance of non-sectarian evidence points toward a preference for the importance of merit. She then suggests that the Rabbis, responding to early Christian claims that they, by virtue of merit, were the new Israel, reemphasized the importance of biology.

What interests me here is the inherent tension between these two modes of authority and the way that all later Jewish communities attempt to solve it. Is Israel a “kingdom of priests” based on their genes or their (present or past) actions? What are the material and historical conditions that tilt a community in one direction or the other? Most modern Westerners are inherently more comfortable understanding authority as theoretically open to all; the racial component can cause discomfort.

This makes me think about “Jews by choice.”  According to classical rabbinic and later halakhic texts, non-Jews can become Jews and in so doing are equivalent to Jews in every significant way; they in fact are said, legally, to lose their former identity and family ties (hence raising a question of whether a man who converted to Judaism can marry his mother or sister, who ceases to have this relationship to him post-conversion).  Yet in antiquity, Jewish converts typically marked their grave epitaphs with the designation “proselyte” - even in death they were not simply “Jews.”  (This might complicated Himmelfarb’s thesis that the emphasis on biology was a rabbinic response to Christianity; it might have been a more popular preference for other, unclear reasons.)  Today, quite unscientifically, I notice a similar trend in the tendency of Jews by choice to identify themselves as such, and Jews by birth to note (although not necessarily in any negative way!) the converts among them.  It would be interesting to explore further why this might be.