Sadducees
SADDUCEES. The Sadducees were one of the main Jewish political and religious groups (usually termed "sects") of the Second Temple period. By about the reign of John Hyrcanus I (135–104 BCE), they were a recognizable aristocratic group. Most of them were apparently priests or members of the families that had intermarried with the high priestly families. They tended to be moderate Hellenizers whose primary loyalty was to the religion of Israel but whose culture was greatly influenced by Hellenism. The Sadducees derived their name, Greek Saddoukaioi, Hebrew ṣāddūqim, from that of Zadok, the high priest of the Jerusalem Temple in the time of Solomon. In Ezekiel 40–48, the priestly duties were assigned exclusively to this clan. This family of high priests served throughout First and Second Temple times, except when foreign worship was brought into the Temple and when the Hasmoneans took control of the high priesthood. Sources mentioning the Sadducees are Josephus, the New Testament, rabbinic literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; there are no primary sources written by the Sadducees themselves.
The Sadducees rejected the "tradition of the fathers" that the Pharisees considered as law. For this reason the later rabbinic sources picture them as rejecting the oral law. The notion of some Church Fathers that the Sadducees accepted only the Torah as authoritative, rejecting the prophets and the emerging corpus of writings, is unsubstantiated by any earlier sources. The New Testament maintains that Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. Josephus writes that they rejected personal immortality, reward and punishment after death, and determinism, but that they believed strongly in absolute free will.
The Sadducees differed in matters of Jewish law from the Pharisees, according to rabbinic sources. The Sadducees required compensation for injuries done by a person's servant, whereas the Pharisees required it only in the case of one's animals, according to their interpretation of Exodus 21:32, 35–36. The Sadducees required that false witnesses be executed only when the accused had already been put to death because of their testimony (Dt. 19:19–21). The Pharisees imposed this penalty only when the accused had not been executed. The Sadducees criticized the inconsistencies in Pharisaic interpretations of the purity laws, and the Pharisees regarded Sadducean women as menstrually impure. In general, the Sadducees saw the purity laws as referring to the Temple and its priests, and saw no reason for the extension of these laws into the daily life of all Israel, a basic pillar of the Pharisaic approach.
A fundamental question is why the Sadducees disagreed so extensively with the Pharisaic tradition. Later Jewish tradition claimed that all differences revolved around the Sadducean rejection of the oral law. Based on this assumption, modern scholars argued that the Sadducees were strict literalists who followed the plain meaning of the words of the Torah only. Yet such an approach would not explain most of the views regarding legal matters attributed to the Sadducees.
Recent discoveries from the Dead Sea caves have illuminated Sadducean law. One particular text (4QMMT), written in the form of a letter purporting to be from the founders of the Dead Sea sect (who were apparently closely related to the Sadducees) to the leaders of the Jerusalem establishment, lists some twenty-two matters of legal disagreement. Comparison of these matters with the Pharisee-Sadducee disputes recorded in rabbinic literature has led to the conclusion that the writers of this "letter" took the view attributed to the Sadducees while their opponents in the Jerusalem priestly establishment held the views attributed later to the Pharisees. Examination of this document and related materials leads to the conclusion that Sadducees had their own methods of biblical exegesis and accordingly derived laws that were different from those of the Pharisees and their supporters.
The Sadducean party cannot be said to have come into being at any particular point. The priestly aristocracy, which traced its roots to First Temple times, had increased greatly in power in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, since the temporal as well as spiritual rule of the nation was in their hands. Some of these priests had been involved in the extreme Hellenization leading up to the Maccabean revolt, but most of the Sadducean lower clergy had remained loyal to the Torah and the ancestral Jewish way of life.
In the aftermath of the revolt, a small and devoted group of these Sadducean priests probably formed the group that eventually became the Dead Sea sect. They were unwilling to tolerate the replacement of the Zadokite high priest with a Hasmonean in 153–152 BCE, and they disagreed with the Jerusalem priesthood regarding matters of Jewish law. Soon after the Hasmonean takeover of the high priesthood, this group repaired to Qumran on the shore of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea Scrolls refer to the early leaders of the sect as "sons of Zadok," testifying to some connection with the Sadducean tradition. Other moderately Hellenized Sadducees remained in Jerusalem, and it was they who were termed Sadducees in the strict sense of the term by Josephus in his descriptions of the Hasmonean period and by the later rabbinic traditions. They continued to be a key element in the Hasmonean aristocracy, supporting the priest-kings and joining, with the Pharisees, in the gerousia. After dominating this body for most of the reign of John Hyrcanus I and that of Alexander Janneus, the Sadducees suffered a major political setback when Queen Salome Alexandra (r. 76–67 BCE) turned thoroughly to support the Pharisees. Thereafter the Sadducees returned to greater power in the Herodian era, when they made common cause with the Herodian dynasty. In the end, it would be a group of lower Sadducean priests whose decision to reject the sacrifice offered for the Roman emperor set off the full-scale revolt of the Jews against Rome in 66 CE.
Closely allied to the Sadducees were the Boethusians. Most scholars ascribe the origin of the Boethusians to Simeon ben Boethus, appointed high priest by Herod in 24 BCE so that he would have sufficient status for Herod to marry his daughter Mariamne (II). This theory is completely unproven, and certain parallels between Boethusian rulings and material in the Dead Sea Scrolls argue for a considerably earlier date. There certainly were some differences between the Sadducees and the Boethusians, but the latter appear to have been a subgroup or an offshoot of the Sadducean group.
The most central of the disputes recorded in rabbinic literature as having separated the Boethusians from the Pharisees was that of the calendar. The Boethusians held that the first offering of the Omer (Lv. 23:9–14) had to take place on a Sunday, rather than on the second day of Passover. Such a calendar, similar to that known from the Dead Sea sect and the Book of Jubilees, was based on both solar months and solar years. If so, the Sunday in question would be that after the seventh day of Passover (most interpreters have taken it as referring to the intermediate Sunday of the festival). Following this calendar, the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) would always fall on a Sunday. While this approach seemed to accord better with the literal interpretation of the words "on the morrow of the Sabbath" (Lv. 23:11), the Pharisees could accept neither this innovative calendar (the biblical calendar was based on lunar months) nor the interpretation on which it was based. To them, "Sabbath" here meant festival. (Attribution of this Boethusian calendric view to the Sadducees by some scholars results from confusion in the manuscripts of rabbinic texts.)
The approach of the Sadducees certainly had a major impact on the political and religious developments in Judaism of the Second Temple period, including the formation of the Dead Sea sect. There is evidence that some Sadducean traditions remained in circulation long enough to influence the medieval literalist sect of the Karaites that arose in the eighth century CE. Yet otherwise, with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the Sadducees ceased to be a factor in Jewish history. The sacrificial system in which they played so leading a role was no longer practiced. Their power base, the Jerusalem Temple, was gone, and their strict constructionism augured poorly for the adaptation of Judaism to its new circumstances.
Dead Sea Scrolls; Jerusalem, Overview Article.
Bibliography
LeMoyne, Jean. Les Sadducéens. Paris, 1972.
Schiffman, Lawrence W. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran. Philadelphia, 1994. See pages 83–89.
Schürer, Emil. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 BC–AD 135). Edinburgh, 1979. See pages 404–414.
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