What Is Ancient Jewish Culture?

Culture is a highly ambiguous term. It often has, at least residually, the sense of “great achievements of the human spirit.” A democratizing view may regard the products of the modest or the disenfranchised as also worthy of collection and scrutiny. Popular culture may have a place together with high culture, because it, too, may be aesthetically worthy or valuable. But even this version of “culture” may have a romantic tinge, as it is still committed to ascribing aesthetic value of some sort. These value-laden versions of “culture” are of questionable analytic utility in general and, when applied to antiquity, are so anachronistic and raise so many questions that we are forced to rethink the concept altogether.

There is no question that some classical Greeks elaborated a highly self-conscious type of aesthetic appreciation, especially for spoken or written expression and the plastic arts, so that sensual pleasure in the visual and the aural was, as most people thought, part of what it meant to be Greek, or at any rate, Athenian. And because both the theory and the practice of Greek aesthetics came to be profoundly influential in Europe, they are familiar to us in ways that tend to disguise the fundamental otherness of their world.

An Ancient Jewish Aesthetic? 

But did other peoples—including Jews—in the ancient world have an aesthetics? We can only guess. The very wide distribution of archaic (800–500 BCE) and classical (500–300 BCE) Greek painted pottery and, to a lesser extent, statuary throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins and north into Europe demonstrates that people in those places liked possessing pretty things. In most cases, however, such items were either dedicated to temples or deposited in graves; they were, above all, expensive imported goods that marked the status of the dedicant or the deceased. Their beauty was likely part of their value, but it is noteworthy that no local artisans in Syria or Tunisia seem to have ever tried to imitate such items, nor did they become a regular part of the fabric of life in non-Greek cities.

The existence of an oral/aural—and eventually also a literary—aesthetic is also very difficult to judge. Certainly, no ancient Jewish text to our knowledge reflects self-consciously on literary or rhetorical beauty. While the Greek literary tradition regularly alludes to Hellenism in terms of a good spoken and literary style, the ancient Jewish tradition contains nothing of the sort. Some portions of the biblical canon may be beautiful (the David cycle in 1–2 Samuel or Isaiah 40–49), charming (Ruth, Tobit), suspenseful (Esther), or attractively bleak (Ecclesiastes, Job), but we can also be fairly certain that these qualities were not the primary reason they were copied and preserved. There is in fact no evidence that ancient Jews ever made linguistic excellence a central societal value, that anyone studied Hebrew grammar, or, for that matter, that the concept of Hebrew grammar even existed before the medieval period.

If we are going to understand the ancient Jews properly, we must not make the mistake of selecting from their largely literary cultural production items we happen to find pleasing. Nor should we simply highlight only those texts of the Jewish tradition that later generations found valuable. Among the Posen Library’s ancient offerings, then, culture is used in its anthropological sense, to denote human social behavior in general—the socially transmitted knowledge and behavior patterns shared by a group of people. In other words, it is the set of ideas, rituals, beliefs, and attitudes that underlies the various relationships constituting society.

So defined, however, culture may seem to be a poor basis upon which to construct an anthology of ancient sources; culture is everything people do, and anthologies normally, and by definition, deploy criteria for selection. Whatever the values they embody, they are necessarily value-laden. Instead, let us imagine the Posen Library as a kind of random (but very large) sampling of a society as a whole that may, if successfully presented, provide the reader with a fuller view of Jewish society in antiquity because of its many vantage points. The material in this collection will thus afford the reader an unparalleled opportunity to appreciate ancient Jewish life as fully as possible.

One important goal of the Posen Library is to let the reader share in the creative work of scholars who have labored to understand what being Jewish meant in the period of the formation of the Jewish people. We therefore also point users to a brief introduction to the historical sources and a historical survey of the ancient period. The historical survey outlines key moments of the period and sets the stage for our treatment of Jewish culture throughout antiquity. It also introduces readers to three central questions that scholars of ancient Jewish history have debated over the years and that underlie our discussion directly and indirectly: first, the relation of Judaism and Hellenism, especially in the context of the Maccabean revolt; second, the reasons for the collapse of Roman-Jewish relations in the late first and second centuries; and third, the emergence of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism and the impact of the two on each other.