Social, political, and religious divisions During the Hellenis.... greek philosoph

A special group of the scribes known as ?asidim (Greek, ), or Pietists, became the forerunners of the (middle-class liberal Jews who reinterpreted the Torah and the prophetic writings to meet the needs of their times) and joined the Hasmoneans in the struggle against the Hellenists, though on religious rather than on political grounds. Josephus held that the Pharisees and the other Jewish parties were philosophical schools, and some modern scholars have argued that the groupings were primarily along economic and social lines; but the chief distinctions among them were religious and go back well before the Maccabean revolt. The chief doctrine of the Pharisees (literally Separatists) was that the Oral Law had been revealed to Moses at the same time as the Written Law. For them Judaism centred on the Temple; but about 10 years before the destruction of the Temple in 70 , the Sadducees in effect disappeared from Jewish life when the Pharisees excluded them from entering the Temp! le. Outside the pale of Judaism in most, though not all, respects were the , who, like the Sadducees, refused to recognize the validity of the Oral Law; and, in fact, the break between the Sadducees and the Samaritans did not occur until the conquest of Shechem by John Hyrcanus (128 ). In the first place, as many as 2,5003,000 words of Greek origin are to be found in the Talmudic corpus, and they supply important terms in the fields of law, government, science, religion, technology, and everyday life, especially in the popular sermons preached by the rabbis. When preaching, the Talmudic rabbis often gave the Greek translation of biblical verses for the benefit of those who understood Greek only. The prevalence of Greek in ossuary (burial) inscriptions and the discovery of Greek papyri in the Dead Sea caves confirm the widespread use of the language, though few Jews, it seems, really mastered Greek. Again, there was a surface Hellenization in the frequent adoption of Greek n! ames, even by the rabbis; and there is evidence (Talmud, So?a ! ) of a school at the beginning of the 2nd century that had 500 students of Greek wisdom. Even after 117 , when it was prohibited by the rabbis to teach one's son Greek, Rabbi , the editor of the Mishna (authoritative compilation of the Oral Law) at the end of the 2nd century, remarked, Why talk Syriac in Palestine? The rabbis never mention the Greek philosophers Plato or Aristotle or the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, and they never use any Greek philosophical terms; the only Greek author whom they name is Homer. greek philosoph