The Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Sacred: Meaning and Ideology in the Halakhic Controversies Between the Sadducees and Pharisees

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THE SADDUCEES, THE PHARISEES, AND THE SACRED: MEANING AND IDEOLOGY IN THE HALAKHIC CONTROVERSIES BETWEEN THE SADDUCEES AND PHARISEES

Eyal Regev Bar-Ilan University

In the Hasmonean and Herodian periods, a group called Sadducees had a prominent share in the political and religious governing institutions. The Hasmoneans John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaus, as well as the high priests Joseph Caiphas (who headed the Sanhedrin that turned Jesus in to Pilate) and Annaus son of Annaus (who sen- tenced Jacob, the brother of Jesus, to death), were all Sadducees.1 However, the Sadducees were the Jewish group in the Second Temple period about which our knowledge is the most scarce and obscure. Here I introduce some of the results of my study of the Sadducees, The Sadducees and Their Halakhah: Religion and Society in the Second Temple Period,2 in which I reconstruct the Sadducees’ law, religious ideology, and social history, and by doing so also juxtapose the parallel religious history of the Pharisees and early rabbis with the Sadducees. Although the Pharisees and the Sadducees were perhaps the most inﬂuential religious group in Second Temple Judaism, Josephus, the New Testament, and other contemporary sources do not describe their views concerning law and theology in detail.3 The richest evidence about what the Pharisees and Sadducees aimed for and how they interpreted the Torah is found in the Rabbinic corpus, especially

1 Ant. 13:288–96 (Hyrcanus). Ant. 13:399–404 ( Jannaus); Acts 10:17 (Caiphas); Ant. 20:199 (Annaus son of Annaus). 2 Jerusalem, 2005 (in Hebrew). 3 For Josephus’s reports on the Pharisees, mainly on their beliefs, see S. Mason, Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees (Leiden, 1991). For Pharisees and Sadducees in the New Testament, see idem, “Chief Priests, Sadducees, Pharisees and Sanhedrin in Acts,” in R. Bauckham, ed., The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, VI: The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting (Grand Rapids, 1995), pp. 119–77; A.J. Hultgren, Jesus and His Adversaries: The Form and Function of the Conﬂict Stories in the Synoptic Tradition (Minneapolis, 1979).

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in the Mishnah (but also in the Tosefta, the halakhic midrashim, the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds). This is unfortunate, since, for two reasons, such evidence may not be reliable and accurate. First, the Rabbinic corpus was edited centuries after the destruction of the Temple, when the Pharisees and Sadducees ceased to exist; how, then, were the rabbis able to know what these groups thought and how they acted? Second, in many cases the Rabbinic accounts are tendentious, showing Pharisaic superiority and achievements. After all, the rabbis were the heirs of the Pharisees.4 For these reasons, reconstructing the religious and ideological world of the Pharisees and the Sadducees might seem impossible.5 To address these diﬃculties, I suggest a new approach to the halakhic disputes between the Pharisees/rabbis and Sadducees/Boethusians.6 The key to this reevaluation lies in examining the Rabbinic descriptions without prejudice, searching for pieces of information that do not seem polemical and that do not seem to be a product of a later imagination. I believe that authentic and reliable information can be sifted from the Rabbinic evidence if one is conscious enough of the diﬃculties raised above but is nevertheless sensitive to traces of halakhah and religious ideology that the rabbis could hardly have fabricated. As I will try to show below, when the Rabbinic records are closely analyzed in light of our knowledge of Second Temple Halakhah (especially having in mind the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls), the con- clusion that appears is very clear: the rabbis were extremely consistent in portraying the Sadducees as holding stricter views than the rabbis

4 J. Neusner, The Rabbinic Tradition about the Pharisees before 70 (Leiden, 1971), 3 vols., discusses the non-halakhic evidence. 5 R. Leszynsky, Die Sadduzäer (Berlin, 1912); Le Moyne, Les Sadducéens (Paris, 1972) already showed that the Sadducees were a religious (and not only political) group and that they held stricter views than the Pharisees. Still, some scholars erroneously regard them as Hellenized (“secular”) aristocrats. See, for example, E.P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (London, 1990) pp. 214–54. 6 For sources in which rabbis (and not Pharisees) confront the Sadducees, see E. Rivkin, “Defining the Pharisees: The Tannaitic Sources,” in Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41 (1969–1970), pp. 205–49. I take the Boethusians as another name for the Sadducees or as being a sub-group within the Sadducees as a whole. I also see no reason to confuse the Sadducees or Boethusians with the Qumran sectari- ans and to argue that the rabbis actually had disputed with the Qumranites. The first were high priests and aristocrats, whereas the latter separated themselves from the rest of the Jews and hardly influenced the governing institutions. See Regev, The Sadducees, pp. 32–58.