The Rise of Torah in Jewish Antiquity
The process by which the Torah emerged and became authoritative over the course of the Second Temple period is opaque, and the existence of variant versions of texts and of closely related but ultimately noncanonical material (see, in particular, BIBLICAL CHARACTERS AND STORIES) tells us that the notion of scripture was contested and in flux for several centuries.
One theory for the early emergence of Torah is Persian imperial authorization. According to this theory, when the Persian Empire allowed the exiled Jews to return to Judaea—then called Yehud—and rebuild the Temple in the late sixth century BCE, they also authorized the Jews to live by their own laws and norms, likely existing in some early form of the Torah. Support for this theory appears in Ezra 7:26 and its parallels from the Apocrypha and in other contemporaneous documents that testify to subject regional groups living by their own laws under the Persian Empire.
The first written translation of the Torah was the Septuagint, an Alexandrian Greek translation from the first half of the third century BCE. The wondrous (and apocryphal) story of the Greek translation is recounted in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas, which describes the arrival in Alexandria of majestic scrolls of the law written in golden ink, a practice that would later be prohibited by the rabbis. Although scholars for many decades have recognized that the narrative in the Letter of Aristeas is more literary than it is historical, today there is increasing agreement that the Greek-speaking Ptolemies likely wanted access to the ancestral laws of the Jews, according to which the Jews lived as a politeuma, a self-governing political entity. Differences between the Septuagint and the received Hebrew text, known as the Masoretic Text, show that the text of the Torah was still not totally fixed in this period.
The books of the Maccabees present the Hasmonean family as leaders in a conflict between those who submitted to Seleucid efforts to suppress the observance of the Torah and the Judeans’ ancestral laws and the Hasmoneans, champions and defenders of the Torah. By the time of the oppressive decrees of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175–164 BCE), Judaea had already long been subject to Greek cultural influence. Thus, even as the clash between the Seleucids and the Hasmoneans is traditionally understood as a clash between Greeks and Judaean traditionalists, the Hasmoneans themselves were already quite Hellenized. The practices that they championed are best understood as designed to counter the cultural influences of the Greeks. At the very least, the books of the Maccabees testify that the Hasmonean family wanted to be remembered as champions of the Torah, although what precisely that meant is not always clear. (For more on the Hasmonean family, see HELLENISTIC PERIOD.)
By the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were being written and copied, in the second and first centuries BCE, the Torah was known and authoritative. In addition to the oldest extant manuscripts of the biblical text, the Dead Sea Scrolls include numerous sectarian writings, such as the Damascus Document and the Community Rule, that evince knowledge of the Torah and assume its observance, often by taking issue with those the community perceived as having departed from the Torah’s strictures. Although the Torah was authoritative, the Dead Sea Scrolls, like the Greek, also differ in places from the Masoretic Text, constituting additional evidence for the continued fluidity of the biblical text in this period.
Around the turn of the era, Caesar Augustus (r. 27 BCE–14 CE), who was largely benevolent toward the Jewish diaspora, decreed that the Jews of Cyrene (in North Africa) “have liberty to practice their own customs according to their ancestral law” and specified further that the Jews’ treasury and holy books must be protected. Josephus recounts this event, as well as one that took place during the procuratorship of Cumanus (48–52 CE), in which a Roman soldier on a mission to plunder “seized a copy of the Mosaic laws” and blasphemously tore it to pieces. The Jews took great offense on behalf of the Lord, “whose laws had been desecrated.” This episode reflects the extent to which Jews were committed to the Torah as both ethos and symbol by the mid-first century CE.