SBL Meeting in November

I'm back from a trip to Haiti. While I was gone, the SBL released the online program for its Fall meeting. I'll be participating in back-to-back sessions on Saturday.

S22-217 Greek Bible 11/22/2014 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM Room: Room 30 D (Upper level) - San Diego Convention Center (CC)Theme: Open Session Ed Gallagher, Heritage Christian University Augustine on the Greek and Hebrew Bible (30 min) Francesca Schironi , University of Michigan Origen and P.Grenf. 1.5 (30 min) Courtney Friesen, University of Oxford Getting Samuel Sober: A Plus in LXX 1 Sam 1:11 and Its Ethical Afterlife (30 min) Dirk Büchner, Trinity Western University Thoughts on the Influence of the Pentateuch on later Translational Praxis. (30 min)

S22-316 Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity 11/22/2014 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM Room: 400 A (Level 4 (Sapphire)) - Hilton Bayfront (HB)Theme: Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings in Africa Ed Gallagher, Heritage Christian University The Antilegomena in Rufinus of Aquileia (30 min) Hany N. Takla, St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society The Change in the reception of the Old Testament Apocrypha (Deutrocanonical) in the Coptic Church (30 min) Jack Collins, University of Virginia "Degraded from Their Heavenly Vigour": Fallen Angels, the Testament of Solomon, and the Demonology of the Early African Church (30 min) Pierre Johan Jordaan, North-West University (South Africa) The Reception of The Martyr texts in 2 Maccabees 6 and 7 in a Multicultural South African Environ ment (30 min) Business Meeting (30 min)

The Jewish Revolts and the Beginnings of the Rabbinic Movement

I've read another couple chapters (specifically, chs. 4-5) in Seth Schwartz new book on ancient Jews. (Previous posts are here and here.) I'm reading the Kindle version, so I'm citing the Kindle location numbers rather than page numbers.

Chapter 4 covers the period of the Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries, and ch. 5 discusses the Rabbis. Here are some notes:

On the significance of 70 CE:

The destruction of Jerusalem in the summer of 70 constituted as sharp a turning-point as any in Jewish history. This bears emphasis, because a revisionist trend in Judaic scholarship argues otherwise (D. Schwartz 2012; Klawans 2012). (loc. 2138). 

The year 70 CE marked transformations in demography, politics, Jewish civic status, Palestinian and more general Jewish economic and social structures, Jewish religious life beyond the sacrificial cult, and even Roman politics and the topography of the city of Rome itself. In the pages that follow I will briefly address each of these issues. (loc. 2160)

You'll have to read the section to see if you think Schwartz makes his case. On the whole I think so, though I'm not sure that he really nails it on the transformation of Jewish religion. He says that it was transformed "even beyond the very significant fact that at least for the time being cult and pilgrimage--the central features of pre-70 Judaism--were impossible" (loc. 2201). But then he goes on to talk about how the loss of the cult must have been traumatic. Indeed. But it reads a bit like a guess. In the next chapter Schwartz mentions a story in the Palestinian Talmud [without citing the passage, as far as I can tell] about a Jew in Rome "who observed Passover not with a seder but with the sacrificial slaughter of a lamb, something the rabbis strongly opposed," and just below this Schwartz mentions the account of Philo, when the temple still stood, about some Jews who observed Yom Kippur by fasting and praying; "evidently some Jews had figured out ways to observe the essentially cultic Jewish festivals outside Jerusalem" (loc. 2637). The only religious element "beyond" the cult that he mentions as having been transformed is that Jews might have thought that their God had been defeated by the Romans. It's hard to argue with that guess. Anyway, it does make sense to me that Jewish religious life, at least in Palestine, was significantly altered by this event, and the other areas Schwartz mentions--especially demography, economy, social structures--were certainly affected.

Why do we have to take guesses about this post-destruction period?

Aside from some bits of information about his own later life at Rome, Josephus' account comes to an end with the reduction of the last rebel stronghold, Masada, near the shore of the Dead Sea, in 73 or 74 CE. His works are the last extant general Jewish narrative history for many, many centuries to come, arguably until late in the Italian Renaissance. This means that even the most basic facts about how the Jews organized themselves and conducted their lives in the wake of the destruction have to be laboriously reconstructed from poor and scattered sources, often from material whose very relevance to the questions it is called on to answer is uncertain. (loc. 2241)

Despite this lack of narrative history,

there seem excellent grounds for supposing that these events [the Diaspora Revolt of 116-117 and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-135] were catastrophic; all evidence for Jewish presence in Egypt fails for almost two centuries after 117, and archaeological surveys and excavations appear to confirm the claim of Cassius Dio [Historia Romana 68.32.1-3] that the district of Judaea was largely depopulated by 135; it recovered only in the fourth century, and then as a Christian district. (loc. 2249)

In the note (n. 12): "Barring new discoveries, there will be little to add to Pucci Ben Zeev 2005 on the subject of the Diaspora Revolt."

Further on our lack of knowledge:

[On the Diaspora Revolt:] we do not even know whether the disturbances in Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, Mesopotamia and elsewhere were connected and, if so, how. (loc. 2297)

[On Bar Kokhba:] Who exactly Shim'on ben Kosibah was, where he came from, what sort of military experience he had and where he got it (there is a single possible answer to this, in effect: the Roman army), why he would have thought that anyone would regard him as the messianic saviour predicted--according to the type of reading common in the first and second centuries--in the Hebrew Bible, indeed, whether he did so (see Schäfer 1981; 2003), we will probably never know. (loc. 2375) 

In ch. 5, on the Rabbis, Schwartz argues against the "maximalists" (his term) that take the rabbinic accounts about their own history, or, let's say, who take a traditional reading of rabbinic accounts about their own history at face value. Schwartz is an admitted minimalist, who thinks that rabbinic sources don't tell us a whole lot about what Judaism was like right after 70. In one passage where Schwartz cites the opinion of "the distinguished Jewish historian Salo Baron (1985-1989)," a maximalist, Schwartz says that it is "revealingly unclear" what evidence Baron can cite for his own position. I like that phrase: revealingly unclear. That says a lot.

Schwartz starts at the point when we actually know something. He says by the time the Jews emerged out of the Dark Ages and into the Medieval Islamic and Christian worlds:

1. Greek was lost
2. Hebrew was revived, though the linguistic situation was varied
3. Jews were organized in local communities with limited autonomy. "The Torah was back in business as the constitution of the Jews, but in most places it was refracted through the interpretation of the rabbis--experts who drew their authority from their mastery not only of the Bible but, much more importantly, of the Talmud." (loc. 2556)

How far back can we date this type of organization. Should we think it was already in place before 70 with the Pharisees serving as the proto-Rabbis?

The view that local Jewish religious life was controlled by the Pharisees is not supported by any evidence beyond a single dubious and hard-to-parse statement by Josephus (Ant. 18.15). (loc. 2589)

On the origins of the Rabbis:

• "It bears repeating that there were no rabbis before 70. Rabbinic literature itself never applies the title 'rabbi' even to pre-70 figures who clearly played an important role in rabbinic prehistory, such as Hillel (often erroneously called Rabbi Hillel by modern writers), a contemporary of Herod. It has often been supposed that the rabbis were simply the post-70 version of the Pharisees--a supposition fundamental to the maximalist view: if the rabbis were Pharisees, and the Pharisees actually did control Jewish life outside the temple before 70, then they could simply continue after 70 to exercise the authority they had achieved earlier. If by contrast they were a new group, they had to struggle for legitimacy and for a role in Jewish life. But were they in fact Pharisees?" (loc. 2665). 
• Schwartz' answer is no, because the Pharisees and Rabbis (Schwartz does not capitalize "Rabbis," but I learned to do so, so I'm going with what my teachers said) had different organizations; the former were a religious sect, the latter a professional class. 
• The first post-destruction generation has some figures famous from rabbinic literature (e.g., Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Tarfon) that are unknown outside of that literature (except in some late patristic works). In other words, Josephus doesn't mention them. So who are they? Since Josephus does mention political leaders and rebel leaders: "We can infer that the earliest rabbis, with one or two exceptions, were neither. It stands to reason that they were the remnant of the Judaean clerisy; about half of the first generation of rabbis were identifiably priests, but with one exception not members of the high priestly families (the one exception is someone called Hanina, Captain of the Priests, apparently formerly a high-ranking temple administrator, but peripheral in rabbinic tradition). [Schwartz cites m. Pesahim 1.6 and several other mishnayot.] Presumably the future rabbis had been mostly the sort of people Josephus did not mention: not political leaders, great landowners or leading high priests, but administrators, judges, scribes. The lower priesthood, the main sectarian groups, and the religious and civil administration of pre-66 Jewish Palestine probably heavily overlapped, and the rabbis were their remnant. That so few names of the first generation were remembered reminds of of how thoroughly the Jews' institutional centre had been crushed in 70" (loc. 2688). 
• Schwartz then goes on to talk about the family of Gamaliel, Simon, and Rabban Gamaliel II. The first Gamaliel is mentioned in the NT (Acts 5:34-40; 22:3), his son Simon is mentioned by Josephus (B.J. 4.159). Both Gamaliels are mentioned in rabbinic literature. 
• "There is thus no prosopographical justification for positing a special relationship between Pharisees and rabbis, but the idea may have some basis nonetheless. Some of the views Josephus and the New Testament attribute to the Pharisees strongly resonate with views expressed in rabbinic texts. These range from lofty theological notions to odd details of religious law. Pharisees and rabbis (but also Christians!) believed in bodily resurrection of the dead at some future point (M. Sanhedrin 10.1); both believed that the law of the written Torah was supplemented by a body of legal traditions transmitted orally, though the Pharisees called this 'the tradition of the fathers', and the rabbis, 'the oral Torah', or simply, 'the Torah' (M. Avot 1.1); both required Jews to tithe even herbs--the most negligible agricultural product--and offer them as gifts to priests and Levites (Matt. 23:23; Luke 11:42; M. Demai 2.1; M. Ma'aserot 4.5)." (loc. 2706-12). 
• "Nevertheless, there is no justification for supposing that even the earliest rabbinic text, the Mishnah (c. 200 CE), can be used to reconstruct Pharisaic law. It certainly contains a few such laws, and may even contain many, but our ignorance of Pharisaic law is nearly complete, so we simply have no way of knowing" (loc. 2717). 
• "The Mishnah's single report of Pharisaic law (Yadayim 4.6-7), which the text seems to identify as 'ours', is vestigial, and the much more common rabbinic self-identification with the Pharisees found in the Talmuds, and a similar identification scattered about in patristic literature, are due in one case to rabbinic antiquarianism, and in the other, to Christian anti-Jewish polemic" (loc. 2734). 

The conclusion to a section titled "New Values" (beginning loc. 2745) starts in this way: 

Given what we know from archaeology, epigraphy and papyrology, we can say with certainty that Judaism ceased to function not only as an authorized set of religious and legal norms, but also as an informal component of public life even in the most heavily Jewish areas of High Imperial Palestine. Without any known shift in demography, the formerly Jewish cities of Palestine were now standard Greco-Roman cities in every way, including in their religious life, and larger villages in their territories emulated them. (loc. 2883)

This is after discussing the Babatha archive and the archaeology of some Palestinian cities, especially Sepphoris and Tiberias, chosen because they had the highest Jewish population in the second century CE.

On Schwartz' reckoning, the Rabbis started to take off near the turn of the third century, and the Patriarchate around the same time, though the latter institution had already lost its authority near the beginning of the fifth century.

"Life is too short to learn German"

The latest issue of Books & Culture arrived in my mailbox today, and I immediately turned to p. 14 and started reading Timothy Larsen's "Academic Divisions" (requires subscription for full access), a very positive review of the new book by James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton). This book is sitting on my desk, though I haven't done more than study the table of contents.

I found this passage by Larsen especially entertaining:

Alas for the advance of scholarship in the English-speaking world, German was a fashion that was slow to be adopted. At one point in the early 19th century, there was not a single member of the faculty of the University of Cambridge who could read it. England's greatest philologist at the start of that century, Richard Porson--languages being his expertise notwithstanding--reputedly pronounced: "Life is too short to learn German."

Notes on Schwartz' Ancient Jews

I'm still reading through Seth Schwartz' new book Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge), mentioned earlier. As I predicted, it's really good, and I'm learning a great deal. I just finished ch. 3, on Herod. Up next is the period of the revolts, so that'll be fun. I've been taking notes, and here are just a few of the things I think are interesting.

Again, I'm reading the Kindle version, which does not at this point include page numbers for this book, so I'm referencing the Kindle location numbers.

• Schwartz thinks that the Hasmonean family were non-Aaronides. That is, rather than questioning whether the priestly family of the Hasmoneans were Zadokite or not (an issue I've discussed before on this blog), Schwartz thinks they weren't priests at all (loc. 1173, 1217).
• "Herod is the best attested of all ancient Jews, of all Roman client kings, probably one of the best attested of all Romans, Josephus having devoted over four books of his œuvre to the king's life and career (Jewish War 1; Ant. 14-17)" (loc. 1547). 
• "Herod was not necessarily worse than his famous violent predecessors and contemporaries, but suffered from worse press" (loc. 1574). 
• Herod "tirelessly used his connections at Rome to defend the interests of vulnerable Jewish communities in Asia Minor and elsewhere (extrapolating from Ant. 16.27-65; Richardson 1996: 174-214)" (loc. 1635). Just later Schwartz says: "Among the Jews, Herod worked to bring about integration, within his kingdom, in the Jewish world as a whole, and between the Jews and the Roman Empire (Baltrusch 2009)." This helps to explain why the pilgrimage festivals became so massive in Herod's days and not before (loc. 1664-70). 
• "Herod had a total of ten wives, many of them concurrently, making him the only Jew in the Hellenistic and Roman periods known to have practised polygamy (in itself odd, since both biblical and rabbinic texts take the legitimacy and diffusion of the practice for granted; Katzoff 1995)." (loc. 1581). 
• I wasn't familiar with the Talmudic story about Herod's necrophilia with Mariamme's corpse. Schwartz cites this article. 
• "The last known Hasmoneans are some early to mid-second century Roman senators from Asia Minor who served in the college of quindecimviri sacris faciundis; so the descendants of the men who had fought to purify Jerusalem of idolatry supervised the municipal temples and priesthoods of the city of Rome (Kokkinos 1998: 254-8)." (loc. 1605)

Schwartz on Ancient Jews

Cambridge is about to publish a new book by Seth Schwartz on ancient Judaism, Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad. You have to wait another few weeks for the print book (scheduled for July), but Amazon will sell you the Kindle version now. That's the one I'm reading, and so far I've gotten through the introduction. Though the book is designed to be an introduction "for students and scholars" (from the book's description), I can tell I'm going to learn a lot. Schwartz says in the preface that this is designed to be "an abbreviation, rethinking, updating and re-orientation of Schwartz 2001" (Kindle loc. 59). Since I haven't gotten all the way through that earlier book, I'm glad to have this abbreviation and updating of it.

By the way, once again this book on Kindle does not include page numbers, at least not at this point. (Maybe they will magically appear at some point?) So, I'll be citing Kindle location numbers. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Here are some notes Schwartz' Introduction:

Schwartz sets himself the task of describing ancient Jews "from the Battle of Issus, 333 BCE, to the Arab conquest of Syria and Palestine, 638 CE, with an inevitable focus, due to the nature of the sources, on what may be called the long first century, from the accession of King Herod in 40 BCE to the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, and on the relatively well-attested fourth century CE" (loc. 424).

He wants to investigate "how to account for the emergence of the Jews as a distinct and enduringly distinctive group, their impact on their social and political environment and its impact on them" (loc. 187).

Schwartz discusses in this introduction the issue of how to categorize ancient Jews. Did they form a distinct group? What does that mean? What categories should we use to describe them? He wants to avoid anachronism.

One of my goals in this book is to produce an account of the ancient Jews which resonates oddly because so much of it (like so much of classical antiquity in general) is simultaneously uncannily familiar and completely unrecognizable. (loc. 248)

Schwartz then raises the question of whether we can or should use modern categories for understanding an ancient people, categories that might not have made complete sense to those ancient people. Schwartz argues in favor of this.

To take as an example a concept especially relevant to this book, it has been argued that the term 'religion' as we now use it is shaped by the concerns of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and so is invalid if applied to earlier cultural practice, or outside areas that are part of the European cultural sphere. This is because the word is too freighted with modern baggage to use without misleading, but also because the abstract concept 'religion' allegedly did not exist in any meaningful way before the Enlightenment. Now this second point is inaccurate, since medieval Christians--and Muslims and Jews--indubitably had the term, and it indubitably had a meaning related, though not identical, to its post-Enlightenment meaning. (loc. 254-60)

Schwartz goes on to say that the term 'religion' can be misleading, and that our modern concept 'religion' has no precisely equivalent ancient term, and not all varieties of modern Judaism can be thought of as 'religions' (Reform--yes; Zionism--no), and even to term 'Jew' doesn't necessarily correspond to an ancient reality.

But 'religion', if understood to refer simply to practices, social and cognitive, which embody people's relationships with their god(s), is too useful a term to discard, even if it admittedly has a dangerous tendency to mislead. Those who advocate the abolition of such terms, as opposed to their cautiously sceptical and self-aware analytical deployment, are forgetting that historians' primary job is translation or explanation, and that we can begint o make sense of worlds which are different from our own only by using concepts familiar to us with all due caution and self-consciousness. (loc. 277)

He cites his article in this journal issue for more.

Do we know a Jew when we see one?


This is the title of a helpful section in which Schwartz discusses whether ancient Judaism was recognizable as a distinct entity, whether anything bound ancient Jews together as one group. Some forms of modern Judaism do not distinguish its members from outsiders in any perceptible way, but medieval and early modern Jews were separated by their adherence to specific laws.

To be Jewish meant to belong to a distinct legal category and to live your life according to a well-defined (if not always and everywhere uniform) set of rules. It required at the very least conformity with the laws of the Torah as refracted through the Talmud and interpreted by contemporary rabbinic legal experts. (loc. 299)

What about ancient Jews? Shaye Cohen's answer is no (mentioned by Schwartz in a note at the beginning of the section; see ch. 2 of this book). Schwartz begins (at loc. 317) with previous answers. He says that it used to be assumed that ancient Jews were like medieval Jews, and outliers like Philo were regarded as non-typical and possibly heretical. The 1960s brought a reversal, as scholars began to think of ancient Judaism more in terms of the diversity of modern varieties of Judaism rather than in terms of the near-homogeneity of medieval Judaism. Schwartz praises this move, but also criticizes it, because "the new scholarship, for all its vigilance and caution, was not infrequently blind to its own ideological motivations, or at least it avoided revealing them" (loc. 369). Neusner's project of analyzing the various "Judaisms" revealed in the different rabbinic writings comes in for some critique, as do the theories of J.Z. Smith (esp. as articulated in this 1978 essay) which influenced Neusner (loc. 397).

There is some validity to this after all [i.e., Smith's insistence on multiple Judaisms with little in common], but Smith's illustration [= varying Jewish explanations for the practice of circumcision] actually proves two things, neither of them intended by Smith. The first is the danger mentioned above of understanding ancient Judaism through concepts like 'religion'. Smith strikingly, embarrassingly and presumably unconsciously, christianized: the idea that theology is what mainly matters about a religion, rather than ritual behaviour, is after all a peculiarly Christian one, and it is a categorical error to describe other religions, including Judaism, by emphasizing theology over practice, as Smith did, by privileging the divergent ancient explanations of circumcision over its shared practice. So it emerges that the texts prove (my second point) that at least in this case one can tentatively speak of a normative centre in ancient Judaism. All Smiths texts endorse the practice of male circumcision, which is why they are so keen to discern its meaning, and none opposes it or regards it as optional. (loc. 408-13)

Schwartz says that ancient Judaism should not be thought of either as equivalent to modern Judaism or to medieval Judaism, but perhaps somewhat in between--not as homogenous as medieval Judaism, not as diverse as modern Judaism.

One further note:

From the preface: "John [Ma] sent me [...] some not yet published papers which contain the most original ideas about the background of the Maccabean Revolt since Bickerman's" (loc. 70). High praise. For an online essay by Ma on this topic, see MRB. In that piece, Ma mentions a forthcoming book by Sylvie Honigman, now scheduled for August release.

The Rest of Satlow

I've posted several times on Michael Satlow's new book How the Bible Became Holy (Yale, 2014). (1, 2, 3). This'll be my last post on the book, covering its third part, on early Christianity (chs. 11-14) and the rabbinic movement (ch. 15). I'll just be going through the stuff I highlighted on my Kindle while reading through it.

Satlow says that "we can be relatively sure that most Jews in Judea and Galilee [at the time of Jesus] would have ascribed authority to most if not all of the books included in the Jewish Bible, [though] the limits of scripture--both what 'counts' and how it counts--were still fuzzy" (p. 209).

What he means about how it counts has to do with what kind of authority it possesses. In the epilogue (p. 278), he distinguishes three different kinds of authority: literary, oracular, and normative. Satlow insists that most of the time for most people, scripture functioned with oracular authority rather than normative authority. For instance, when Jesus read from Isaiah in Luke 4:

The choice of reading Isaiah, no less this passage in Isaiah, appears to have been entirely random, not part of any regular lectionary cycle. This, in fact, is an important feature of Luke's story: scripture plays an oracular function here. (p. 202)

I don't think this is quite right. Luke does not represent the choice of the Isaiah scroll as random; it was the scroll that was handed to Jesus. Luke does not say that it was a part of a lectionary cycle, but it may have been. The choice of the particular passage may have been random, but I don't think it was, since Luke says that Jesus "found" (εὑρίσκω) the passage. Now, that doesn't mean that the reading of this passage had been pre-arranged (as if following a lectionary), but it does seem to mean that Jesus chose it on purpose. But anyway, none of these caveats mean that the type of authority exerted by the Isaiah scroll was not oracular; I suppose I would agree with Satlow, but this seems an unremarkable point, so the scroll of Isaiah is filled with, well, oracles, so what other kind of authority should it exert?

The next chapter discusses Paul. "Like many Jews of his time, he understood scripture primarily as a collection of divine oracles" (p. 211). I guess I agree with this (cf. Rom. 3:2). Later: "Although Paul uses scripture in a variety of ways, he most commonly cites it for its oracular authority" (p. 220). I'm not sure that we should distinguish oracular from normative authority in the case of Paul. While Paul does think that prophecies are being fulfilled in his own day, he also uses scripture to guide the ethics of his communities. See e.g. Rosner. But maybe Satlow would not call this 'normative', I don't know.

On the Gospels (ch. 13):

• "Matthew, like Paul and Mark, locates the value of scripture in its prophecies" (p. 230).
• Regarding Luke 24: "Luke thus positions Jesus not just as the fulfillment of scripture but as the very key to their understanding: Jesus himself unlocks their true, secret meaning. This goes beyond Matthew. For Matthew, scriptural prophecies refer to Jesus; scripture and Jesus are distinct from each other. For Luke, scripture and Jesus are more completely intertwined" (p. 231).
• "The author of John is not ready to abandon scripture altogether, but he does displace its importance in favor of Jesus as the prime vehicle of God's revelation. Scripture was still relevant, but now theologically less so" (p. 234).

I appreciate his attempt to draw out some differences among the Gospels, but I'm not sure that he's been very successful. I would have thought each Gospel writer would have pretty much affirmed all of these points. Jesus is the key to scripture. He fulfills the prophecies. He is the prime vehicle for God's revelation.

About the canon(s) of Jewish scripture (ch. 14), Satlow says that Josephus' list in Against Apion "is not a description of a well-known and accepted Jewish canon. It is, rather, the somewhat wishful thinking of a Jewish intellectual" (p. 244). "I would like to suggest that Josephus' concept of scripture in fact developed specifically in Rome" (p. 245). Satlow means that in Palestine there was still no interest in defining which books were scripture, just as there was less interest in scripture at all in Palestine than in the diaspora. (This is a point that Satlow has been arguing for several chapters now.) When Josephus arrives in Rome, he's still thinking like a Judean, so "his earliest composition, when he was fresh in Rome, exhibits limited interest in and knowledge of scripture" (p. 246). That'd be the Jewish War. Even though Josephus says in that work that "many Jews before me have accurately recorded the history of our ancestors, and these records have been translated by certain Greeks into their native tongue without serious error," Satlow assures us that this "reference here is to the writings of earlier Jewish historians, not to the history told in scripture" (p. 246). But of course later his Jewish Antiquities displays a great interest in scripture, in other words, after he has been in Rome for some time. Satlow acknowledges that the contrast might be due to the genres of the respective works, but he rather thinks it is because Josephus only at this later time gave much thought to scripture.

Josephus relates that on the fall of the temple Titus gave him a gift of "holy books" [Life 418]. This is the term that Josephus uses most frequently in his later works to refer to scriptures, and it is possible that this was the first time that he had possessed a copy of them. Over the next two decades Josephus worked his way through them systematically [...]. (p. 247)

The rabbis occupy ch. 15. Satlow says that the rise of scripture's prominence among the rabbis "looked like a Sadducean victory" but "it was a pyrrhic [victory]" because the "text was objectified, almost fetishized" (p. 259). You'll need to look back at my post on ch. 8 to get the background for these ideas. The rabbis incorporated the earlier Pharisees and Sadducees into one unity movement. [I'm not sure how this works in terms of the rabbinic self-representation: the Rabbis usually seem to identify the Pharisees and not the Sadducees as their predecessors. I don't recall Satlow dealing with this point, but I may have missed it.]

Rabbi Ishmael's approach bore a strong relationship to that of the Sadducees: scripture was seen as the authoritative guide to proper practice. Rabbi Akiva's approach was Pharisaic: tradition took precedence, even when it seemed to conflict with scripture. (p. 263)

Even in second century CE, the position of scripture within some streams of Judaism was precarious:

If Bar Kosiba had any knowledge of scripture or gave to it any authority, he does not demonstrate it in his documents. Nor do these documents show any awareness of the rabbis. (p. 264)

But, finally rabbinic literature moves beyond viewing scripture as oracular and sees it instead as normative.

 Paul and the authors of the pesher literature and gospels primarily mined scripture for its oracles and prophecies. While the rabbis, like these authors, formally divided the citation of scripture from its interpretation, the use to which they put these divisions fundamentally differed from these earlier authors. The rabbis almost never used scriptural verses to verify or announce prophecies. Although at this stage they were probably still not reacting directly to Christian claims, they adopted a different approach to scripture. For the rabbis, it was not a collection of oracles but the source of all true knowledge. It was not just a historical record of God's revelation but the very place at which God continued to reveal his will to his people. (p. 268)

In the Epilogue:

Despite rabbinic insistence on the importance of the very text of the Bible, Jews would not come to a final consensus about a standard Hebrew text until the eleventh century CE. It was only then that Maimonides, a towering and revered intellectual figure in his time, declared that one particular text--that of the Aleppo Codex--was to be considered the standard. (p. 277)

Some dubious points:

• "Mark does one thing that Paul never does: he puts scripture in Jesus's mouth. Paul almost always directly quotes scripture in order to prove that Jesus 'fulfills' the scriptural prophecy. Mark apparently knew of stories that were circulating about Jesus. In retelling them, though, he added the scriptural citations, transforming Jesus into a citer of scripture. The scripture-citing Jesus of Mark and the other Gospels is thus not an accurate representation of the historical Jesus" (p. 227). How often does Paul ever represent Jesus saying anything? 
• On Paul: "some of his interpretations are so strained that he seems to be counting on the fact that his audience gives authority to scripture but does not actually know it well enough to take apart his arguments" (p. 220). I prefer the reading of someone like Hays. 
• On Mark's Gospel: "He ends it abruptly with Jesus' appearance, after he was entombed, to Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome" (p. 228). What version of Mark ends with the appearance of Jesus' to these women? The Gospel probably originally ended at 16:8 without any resurrection appearances. 
• "Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas are all 'gospels'; they tell the story of Jesus's life in narrative form" (p. 235). Thomas? Narrative? Later, he sort of corrects this: "The Gospel of Thomas, for example, is more of a collection of sayings of Jesus than a narrative story" (p. 237). 
• I found it interesting that on p. 238 (ch. 13), he attributes Colossians to Paul, though I'm pretty sure that back in ch. 12 he said he was limiting the Pauline corpus to the undisputed letters. 
• These two sentences appear back-to-back, though in different paragraphs: "prior to the second century CE, nobody thought to create a 'closed canon,' a definitive list of specific books that should be considered 'scripture.' The notion that Jews had a closed canon of scripture is first found in the writings of Josephus" (p. 244). Josephus is at the end of the first century. The dates are not that far off, but it is striking in juxtaposed sentences that Satlow would cite a first-century source for an argument about something that he dates to the second century. 
• About the reception of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities: "The book apparently received a mixed reception. One Greek intellectual by the name of Apion wrote what we would call a particularly scathing review, which we know only through Josephus' response to it" (p. 244). This is just silly. Josephus' Against Apion was in some ways written in response to criticisms of the Jewish Antiquities, but Apion was not one of those critics. Apion had never heard of Josephus; he died too early. See Wikipedia, or the new Schürer, 3/1.604-7.
• On Justin Martyr: "Since the Romans, however, had destroyed the Jewish temple, Justin needed to create another unbroken chain of reliable transmission. That chain, according to Justin, could be found in the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Bible preserved by the Jews" (p. 250). I'm not sure what Satlow intends to imply about Justin's view of the Hebrew Bible, but I'm pretty sure whatever the intent, it's wrong. See ch. 5 of my Hebrew Scripture in Patristic Biblical Theory. 
• "the author of 4 Ezra had essentially claimed that God continued to make his knowledge and will known through continuing revelation" (p. 267). But, just accepting the claim of 4 Ezra at face value, wouldn't that continuing revelation have been completed by the time of Ezra? So, the revelation wouldn't be continuing through the first century CE, would it?
• "To the vast majority of Jews [at the turn of the era--time of DSS], the Hebrew of scripture would have been almost incomprehensible" (p. 274). Perhaps an overstatement? I assume he's talking about Jews in Judea. Interesting to read this just at the time of the little dust-up regarding the language(s) Jesus spoke, ignited by a brief conversation between the Pope and the Israeli prime minister. See here, and further here with links. 

The High Cost of Books

I happened to be reading a 1987 review of a book on renaissance literature published by Columbia University Press, and I really enjoyed this comment from the reviewer:

Because these are such rich and insightful pieces and deal with so many major texts from the Renaissance, one must regret that the high price of the volume will put it out of reach for many readers and hope that the Press will decide to issue it in a less expensive paperback version. 

The price listed was $32.50.