Early Jewish Life-Cycle and Ritual Practice

Biblical literature offers a few glimpses of how life-cycle events—birth, marriage, divorce, and death were marked by ancient Israelites. Circumcision of male infants on the eighth day after birth is prescribed as a sign of the covenant with God and regarded as a distinct ethnic marker (Genesis 17:9–14; 21:4; 34:13–24; Joshua 5:2–8). Marriage and divorce are dealt with in passing in Deuteronomy 24:1–4. Mourning and burial customs are described in Genesis 23, in the context of Sarah’s death, and are alluded to elsewhere, where the text tells us in passing that a deceased person is “gathered to their kin” or that their spirit “goes down to Sheol.”

In both Jewish and pagan literature from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, circumcision is recognized as a marker of Jewish identity. Jewish apologists such as Philo and Josephus often had to justify the custom to their Hellenistic and Roman readers, who regarded it with contempt. Attempts to prohibit circumcision by foreign political overlords of Judaea (the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the Roman emperor Hadrian) sparked Jewish rebellion and, often, further retribution.

Philo and Josephus paraphrase biblical passages about marriage and divorce. Josephus also notes instances during the Roman era in which several royal women initiated divorces themselves, contrary to Jewish practice, which limited this right to men. The rabbinic rulings about marriage and divorce procedures are prescriptive rather than descriptive, but there is also some epigraphic evidence of nonrabbinic marriage contracts that address the same concern with providing a property settlement for the wife in the event of divorce or widowhood. Expanding on concerns that arise in the Bible, rabbinic texts also deal with the situation of suspected adultery and the trial by ordeal that a suspected adulteress had to undergo.

Jewish funerary inscriptions from Greco-Roman Egypt indicate, through adherence to conventions of both style and content, how thoroughly Hellenized their authors were. It is only through the appearance of certain recognizably Jewish names such as Rachelis (Rachel), Jesus (Joshua), and Dositheus (Jonathan) and by location (Leontopolis) that they can be identified at all as Jewish.

Burials in Judea during the late Second Temple period were generally performed in rock-hewn caves, where the corpse was left exposed to decay over a year and the bones would then be gathered into an ossuary that was deposited in a niche in the cave (so-called secondary burial). Later rabbinic literature understands this period of decay as effecting atonement for sins committed during the lifetime of the deceased. Rabbinic literature also describes and prescribes mourning customs and the recitation of blessings to comfort the mourners.

Jews were particularly distinguished from their gentile neighbors by their dietary practices. It was well known in the Greco-Roman world that the Jews abstained from eating pigs and hares. Rabbinic law also prohibits the combination of meat and milk products as an extension of the biblical injunction against cooking a kid in its mother’s milk (Exodus 23:19; 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21), although the prohibition does not appear in prerabbinic Jewish writings. Concerns for ritual purity in the handling of foodstuffs outside the Temple, in imitation of priestly purity, appears both at Qumran and in early rabbinic literature. These purity-based regulations prohibit table fellowship between Jews and gentiles and between more and less observant Jews.