Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B. C. E. to 640 C. E.

Introduction
IMPERIALISM AND JEWISH SOCIETY traces the impact of different types of foreign domination on the inner structure of ancient Jewish society, primarily in Palestine.1 It argues that a loosely centralized, ideologically complex society came into existence by the second century B.C.E., collapsed in the wake of the Destruction and the imposition of direct Roman rule after 70 C.E., and reformed starting in the fourth century, centered now on the synagogue and the local religious community, in part as a response to the christianization of the Roman Empire.
This book thus covers a longer period and has a broader scope than is conventional for books on ancient Judaism, aside from the not uncommon handbooks, which are characterized by varying degrees of comprehensiveness but the absence of an explicit argument. One reason I chose to treat a broad topic is the character of the evidentiary basis of ancient Jewish history. In brief, it is slender. This fact has paradoxically contributed to, though it is certainly not the only cause of, the common tendency to produce monographic studies of extremely limited issues, on the assumption that only minute study of small selections of material can yield reliable results. Clearly such work has its place, but, as I will argue in more detail below, hypotheses about the society that produced the artifacts must necessarily accompany their interpretation, and the evidence as a whole must be used to construct these hypotheses. Thus it seems worthwhile to get a sense of the entire system before, or while, examining its parts.
Swallowing the evidence whole is necessary but not sufficient for this task. It is intuitively obvious that the ancient Jews (assuming that they behaved like a recognizably human group) were profoundly affected by the imperial powers under which they were constrained to live.2 It is equally obvious that the effects of imperialism were not limited to reaction--to the impulse to "circle the wagons" that has so often been attributed to the Jews by historians and others. Nor can the effects of domination by Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire all usefully be crowded under the rubric of "hellenization." The effects of domination were complex, pervasive, and varied, and we cannot begin to apprehend the structure of the system without paying careful attention to them. This consideration explains the importance of power and its influence on social and cultural integration in the historical scheme that I propose in this book. For example, the rulers of the Jews in the later Second Temple period were empowered by their overlords to use the "ancestral laws" of the Jews--the Torah--as their constitution. I argue that this fact had profound but complex effects and cannot be ignored in a description of Palestinian Judaism before 70 C.E. Conversely, that the descendants of the Jewish leaders for several centuries after 70 had no such authorization helps to explain the importance of Greco-Roman urban culture in northern Palestine demonstrated by archaeological remains. The political marginality of "rabbinic Judaism" matters profoundly for our understanding of it and for our interpretation of rabbinic texts, not to mention for our understanding of the history of the Jews in the period of its consolidation.
Method
This book has four main methodological characteristics: First, it is moderately positivistic. I believe that it is possible to know something about the distant past. I do not think, however, that this knowledge can ever really claim to be more than a sort of hermeneutical model that can help us make sense of the paltry scraps of information that have come down to us.
Second, it combines induction and deduction in its interpretation of evidence. Historical remains, both literary and physical, are in reality opaque. Pure induction can never work because it assumes that the artifacts are meaningful in themselves and that the interpreter's job is merely to uncover this meaning and then reconstruct the relationship between the discrete artifacts. But this assumption seems to me false; even the most determined empiricist never actually works this way, whatever he or she may claim. It is best to be aware of what we are doing and, while not eschewing detailed examination of the evidence, at least admit our need for certain kinds of models.
Third, one of the components of its deductive structure is concern about how societies work. Every artifact is the product of social interaction; some theory of society, appropriately complex and nonreified, must therefore be involved in the act of interpretation. I am suggesting that a theory of society is just as essential an element of method as a theory about how to "read" the evidence.