Davide's Notes

Check out Diversity and Unity in Judaism before Jesus. Schematic differences:

• Pharisees - while "The Sadducees persuade only the well-to-do and have no popular following, [...] the Pharisees have the masses as allies." (Ant. 12.297-298).
  • Fate: certain events are the work of Fate, but not all; as to other events, it depends upon ourselves whether they shall take place or not.
  • Afterlife: the dead would be reconstituted with new physical bodies (cf. Dan 12:1).
  • Oral law: traditional teachings (Halakot) in addition to the biblical laws.
• Essenes
  • Fate: they believe that Fate is mistress of all things, and that nothing befalls men unless it be in accordance with her decree.
  • Afterlife: they believed in a non-corporeal afterlife.
  • Oral law: we know from e.g. 1QS that they had important purity rituals (cf Mk 7:2-4, where ceremonial washing is applied to Pharisees) not found in the biblical laws. Also, 4QMMT specifies that halakot are the reasons for their separation from the rest of the Jews.
  • The Bible: certainly the corpus of biblical texts found at Qumran does not coincide with what will later become the canon. Think of 1QapGen, or of the pesharim, or of the Psalms (containing a number of compositions not found in the canon later adopted by the rabbis).
• Sadducees - the Sadducees represent a religiously conservative element of Judean society. Their inability to assimilate new spiritual insights undoubtedly contributed to their extinction after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.
  • Fate: they do away with Fate, holding that there is no such thing and that human actions are not achieved in accordance with her decree, but that all things lie within our power, so that we ourselves are responsible for our well-being, while we suffer misfortune through our own thoughtlessness.
  • Afterlife: they did not believe in afterlife at all.
  • Oral law: they observed nothing apart from the Law of Moses (Ant. 13.297, 18.16).
  • The Bible: perhaps, given their attitude to oral law, they only accepted the Pentateuch as Scripture. Cf. Jesus in Mt. 22:23-32, quoting only Pentateuch passages when speaking to Sadducees (and not, for example, Dan 12).

Behavioral difference between Pharisees and Sadducees according to Josephus (Jewish War 2.164-166): "Now the Pharisees love one another and practice consensus in their community. But the Sadducees behave rather aggressively even towards each other. And they are as harsh in debates among themselves as with others".

On the concept of Fate in Josephus (cf Ant. 13.171), see the article The Fate of Josephus. In general, it seems clear that Josephus exaggerates the role of fate at least when he describes Essenes. Perhaps he was simply more concerned to express some overall differences (without particular concerns for accuracy) between strands of Judaism in a language that could be understood by his Hellenistic audience.

The pharisaic concept of free will is found e.g. in Pirke Aboth 3.19 (Rabbi Akiba: "All is foreseen, and free-will is given, and the world is judged by goodness, and all is according to the amount of work."), where free will is closely related to "the amount of work".

On the influence of foreign cultures for the development of theological concepts, esp. in the pharisaic strand:

• Resurrection of the dead: only appears after the Persian conquest, and may have been influenced by the Persian's Zoroastrian faith.
• Angelology/demonology: again, prior to the Persian era, angels were never named in the Bible.
• Hellenistic influence: note in particular the influence on Philo (less on Josephus, of Palestinian origin). At Qumran, a number of astrological texts were discovered among the Scrolls. Even though astrology was invented by the Babylonians, it was developed into a pseudo-science by the Greeks. It is this Greek form of astrology that appears in the Scrolls.

Qo 4:12 :

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.