The Jewish Annotated New Testament (151 page)

With the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and then the disaster of the Bar Kochba revolt against Rome (132–35 CE), the rabbis recognized the dangers of claiming direct heavenly commission or revelation. In their view, the age of prophecy was over: knowledge of the divine will would come from study of the Written and Oral Torahs, not visionary experience and not charismatic claims. Consequently, rabbinic holy men and miracle workers such as
Ḥ
oni the Circle Drawer and
Ḥ
anina ben Dosa are domesticated from charismatic prophets to faithful scholars.

For the rabbis, study of Torah was more important than visionary experience and charismatic action. Consequently, rabbinic texts bring miracle workers such as
Ḥ
oni and
Ḥ
anina into the realm of the study house (see e.g.,
m. Avot
3.9, which quotes
Ḥ
anina: “He would say, ‘Anyone whose deeds are more than his wisdom—his wisdom will endure, and anyone whose wisdom is more than his deeds—his wisdom will not endure’”). For rabbinic Judaism, community voice was more important than individual charismatic activity; study of Torah held preeminence over miracle working.

On the other hand, Josephus called
Ḥ
oni “the Righteous” (
Ant
. 14.22), and
Ḥ
anina became in rabbinic tradition the prototype of the “men of deeds” or performer of prodigies. Early rabbinic theology treats both of them as “sons of God,”
Ḥ
oni because his familiarity with God resembled the relationship between a beloved child and his doting father, and
Ḥ
anina because a heavenly voice (
bat qol
, “daughter of the voice”) called him “my son,” a proclamation identical with that heard at the baptism and at the transfiguration of Jesus (
b. Ta’an
. 24b; see Mk 1.11 || Mt 3.17 || Lk 3.22; Mk 9.7 || Mt 17.5 || Lk 9.35). Furthermore, just as Jesus was seen by some of his contemporaries as the revived Elijah (Mk 8.28; Mt 16.14; Lk 9.8), so were both
Ḥ
oni and
Ḥ
anina (
Gen Rab
. 13.7;
b. Ber
. 34b, 61b). The rabbis even ascribe to
Ḥ
anina’s intervention the survival of the whole of humanity and attribute to his merits the creation of the world to come (
b. Ta’an
. 24b;
b. Ber
. 61b). Yet their domesticating of him and his fellow charismatic wonder-workers precluded these figures being identified as in any way “messianic” or “divine.”

Although both Ḥoni and
Ḥ
anina lose their importance in the post-Talmudic centuries, they do not vanish altogether. The great tenth-century luminary, Saadia Gaon, was thought to be of
Ḥ
anina’s lineage (
Sefer ha-Kabbalah
). The eleventh-century Spanish-Jewish convert to Christianity, Peter Alphonsi, violently attacked the credibility of
Ḥ
anina’s miracles, which in his mind detracted from the uniqueness of the miracles of Jesus (Migne,
Patrologia Latina
157, col. 569).

JEWISH FAMILY LIFE IN THE FIRST CENTURY CE

Ross S. Kraemer

The topic “Jewish Family Life” is likely to strike many readers as straightforward and unproblematic. Yet what, exactly, was a “family” in the first century? Was Jewish family life homogeneous? Was it distinctive from the surrounding cultures? And perhaps most important, are our sources sufficient to answer these questions?

In recent years, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean world have drawn on a rich collection of law codes, personal correspondence, histories, biographies of illustrious men, epigrams, epitaphs, legal documents, and representations of families in plays and novels, all of which offer persuasive portraits of families and family life, both idealized and actual. For families in Roman-period Judea, we have much less evidence: the writings of Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, some personal papyri from Egypt and the Judean desert (of which the Babatha archive—a trove of documents from the life of a second-century Jewish woman, Babatha, deposited in a cave around the time of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE—is perhaps the richest), some burial inscriptions, and the depictions of families in late Hellenistic Jewish writings such as the book of Tobit and of Susanna, an addition to the book of Daniel. Each type of evidence presents particular challenges as we try to reconstruct the reality that lay behind it. Virtually all of the literary evidence comes from elite male authors: the voices of others, including elite women, are perceptible, if at all, only in some of the documentary evidence.

Families in ancient Judea, including the first century CE, seem similar in many ways to those of the larger Greco-Roman Mediterranean culture. With complex arrangements that might have seemed more familiar to Americans a century ago, many Judean households consisted of several generations: an older, free adult male, his wife, their grown sons, the wives of those sons, and the minor children of the second generation. Grown daughters of the older generation typically became part of the households of their own husbands and lived elsewhere; this could be as close as another courtyard in the same village or town, or much farther away. High maternal mortality rates also meant that households might consist of a free man, his children by one or more prior wives, one or more daughters-in-law, and grandchildren, one or more current wives, their children from a prior marriage, and the children of the most recent marriage.

The domestic arrangements depicted in the Tanakh, while rooted in earlier practices, illuminate various features of ancient Judean families, including polygyny (one man married to two or more women) and slavery. By the first century CE, few men were able to afford more than one wife and the attendant children, but polygynous marriage remained permissible under Mosaic Law (and in rabbinic thinking), and seems to have been practiced at least occasionally. Some members of the Herodian royal family may have participated in such marriages, and the early-second-century personal papers of Babatha of Ma’oza indicate that her second marriage was polygynous, (see
P. Yadin
26). Slavery was licit throughout the ancient Mediterranean and widely practiced in the first century (and far beyond): Jews participated in these systems both as slaveholders and enslaved persons. The multigenerational, patriarchal household would regularly have included some enslaved persons.

These enslaved persons often had families, but their own biological relationships had no social significance or legal consequence. Considered part of the households of their owners, slaves lacked the legal capacity and agency to form their own families. Children born to enslaved women had no licit fathers, and their mothers had no rights to them (even free women had little if any legal control over their children). Enslaved children could be separated from their mothers and sold by their owners. Male slave-owners had the legal right to have sex with the persons they owned, both male and female, children and adults. A child born to an enslaved woman was automatically enslaved, even when, as often seems to have been the case, the child’s father was the mother’s owner. Male slave-owners did sometimes free female slaves with whom they wished to have licit children.

The demographics of ancient Jewish families seem to have been fairly similar to those of non-Jews. Free women seem to have married for the first time between the ages of about twelve and twenty, to men who were typically ten or even fifteen years older. Although rabbinic sources envision regular early first marriage for girls, the available demographic evidence (mostly from burial inscriptions, occasional personal documents that survive on papyrus, and infrequent literary accounts) suggest that this is an idealized construction. The Herodian princess Berenice was about sixteen when she was married to her paternal uncle, a second marriage, after a very brief first marriage. Berenice makes a brief appearance in Acts 25.13–26.32, where she and her brother, Agrippa II, preside at a hearing where Paul pleads his case. A burial inscription from Egypt in the second century BCE (
CPJ
1513;
JIGRE
36) memorializes a young Jewish woman of twenty who died on the eve of her marriage. First marriages were regularly a matter of family arrangements, often negotiated between the couple’s fathers, or between the bride’s father and her future husband (e.g., Tob 7.9–13). Subsequent marriage arrangements might often involve more active participation by the woman herself, particularly when her own father was no longer alive.

Many if not most free persons were married more than once, facilitated by the substantial age differential for many marriages and high maternal mortality rates. Some marriages terminated in divorce. Later rabbinic law, from the Mishnah (generally thought to be collated around 200 CE) and later sources, presumes that only husbands initiate divorce proceedings (e.g.,
m. Git
.), but there is some evidence that Jewish women did occasionally initiate divorce proceedings in the first century. The wealth, Roman citizenship, and elite status of women in the royal Herodian family, for instance, may have enabled them to take actions unavailable to ordinary women. Josephus says that Salome, the sister of Herod the Great, gave her husband Castobarus a divorce decree, although he represents this as transgressive. Particularly intriguing is a controversial document from the Judean desert [
P. Se’elim
13, dated to the second century CE] that some scholars read to be a “
get
” (a divorce decree) from a woman named Shelamzion to her husband, Eleazar.

In the absence of other factors such as illness, diet, and infertility, women who were sexually active could expect to continue to become pregnant every two to three years. Women who did not die in childbirth, and who remained married throughout their childbearing years, might thus expect to give birth to many as eight children (not to mention miscarriages), several of whom would die either as infants or as young children. An optimally fertile family, then, might produce four or five children who lived to be adults.

In the ancient Mediterranean generally (as in many modern societies), much ordinary social life
was
family life: that is, social relations took place within kinship networks. Many men continued to live in close proximity to their parents, grown brothers, and younger siblings. Women, by contrast, regularly moved away from their natal families when they married, whether to the next courtyard, the next village, or a far distant town. Such practices also likely differed for those living in cities like Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, or Rome, all places with substantial Jewish populations in the first century, and for those from elite families as opposed to those eking out a living.

Many ancient sources, Jewish and otherwise, idealize the love between parents and children; often these envision father-son relationships, and to a lesser extent, mother-son relationships. The realities, as always, were more complex. Although many families may have had an older patriarch at their head, the tendency of men to marry late, and remarry even later, often meant that sons (and daughters) lost their fathers at an early age. Jewish literature from this period says little about mother-daughter relationships, idealized or otherwise. As in many cultures, sons were generally more desired than daughters, a reality reinforced by marital practices that required potentially expensive dowries for daughters, and removed girls from their natal households at a relatively early age. Many daughters would have been closer in age to their mothers than sons (and daughters) to their fathers, although it is hard to know how, if at all, this would have affected mother-daughter relationships.

Many children may have had strong affective ties to their wet nurses, and perhaps others who raised them. Wet-nurse contracts apparently employing Jewish women survive in small numbers from Egypt in this period.

Demographic realities had other likely consequences, for Jews and non-Jews alike. A first-century wedding with four grandparents in attendance would have been a very rare event. While some men lived to see their grandchildren born, and even reach adulthood, most did not. Women had the best chance of seeing grandchildren from daughters but also from sons, especially sons they had borne relatively early. Men had a better chance of seeing grandchildren from daughters than from sons.

Sibling relationships might often have had the greatest social weight, especially those between sons of the same father, though significant evidence concerning this important question is largely lacking.

Demographics played a significant role in marital relationships. First marriages between girls in their early to late teens and men thirty or older would have been highly asymmetrical, even were both husband and wife from families of similar standing. Marriages, especially first ones, were often contracted with little regard for the affection between, or even acquaintance of, the prospective spouses. How much power daughters (or even sons) had to refuse these matches is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, Jewish (e.g., Tob 4.3–4) and non-Jewish (e.g., the writings of Plutarch) sources from the early Roman period idealize harmonious relations between husbands and wives, although frequently a harmonious marriage was taken to mean one in which the wife acquiesced to her husband’s judgments, tastes, and values, deferred to his authority, and comported herself with modesty.