Antiquities of the Jews, fit the twenty-sixth

[lethargic_man]

From time to time Josephus gives an explanation of the differences between the Pharisees and Sadducees; that in XIII.10.295 agrees with what I would have generally have thought to be their biggest difference:

What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. And concerning these things it is that great disputes and differences have arisen among them, while the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, and have not the populace obsequious to them, but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side.

The Pharisees, and their theological descendants the rabbis, claimed these traditions of their ancestors to go to back to Moses on Mt Sinai, and to be a Oral Law parallelling the Written Law of the Pentateuch. From an objective perspective, it is obvious some form of oral tradition paralleled the written tradition; without oral tradition there is no way of understanding, for example, what is meant by Deut. 11:18:

You shall put these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall tie them for a sign upon your arm, and they shall be as totafot between your eyes.

Similarly, the Bible does not describe how a wedding is carried out (though it does for divorce!), but fairly obviously such knowledge did exist. The interesting question is to what extent the traditions of the Pharisees went back to antiquity. Some of them definitely did not: why else would the Sadducees reject them so thoroughly? This is why, as liv originally pointed out to me years ago, the Pharisees tried to justify them by referring to Moses as מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּינוּ "Moses our rabbi" despite that fact he lived well over a thousand years before there were any rabbis; and why they invented traditions of the Patriarchs inventing the daily services, attending yeshivos and so forth.

Further evidence for not all traditions going back to antiquity can be found in the Mishna where the halacha is decided from amongst variant traditions, or other places where it's evidently being worked out, possibly where the original tradition has been lost.

The question of to what extent the Oral Law goes back before the time of the Mishna is difficult to answer, because at the time there was a taboo against writing it down: It only got written down at the time of the Mishna because there was a risk of the knowledge being lost, due to persecutions of the Jews.

This is why I keep posting evidence from Josephus attesting Oral Law traditions from long before the time of the Mishna, for example this one from three and a half centuries before the Mishna was written down. At the beginning of Antiquities Josephus mentions his intention of writing a treatise on Jewish law; and it would have been fascinating to read this, but unfortunately it looks like he never did, or died with it incomplete (or he did, but it was not transmitted down to us), which is a shame.

[Please comment at my collected Book XIII notes post, on Dreamwidth for preference, or on LiveJournal.]

Josephus notes