The Pharisees and the Temple-State of Judea

by Richard A. Horsley

Far from being a stable situation, the historical context in the late Second Temple Era was full of conflict at the level of the empires and that of the rulers in Palestine. Ordinary people, including both Jerusalemites and villagers, periodically mounted resistance and even revolts against exploitative and/or domineering rulers. Pharisees and scribes, sometimes as retainers of the temple-state but sometimes as dissident retainers, usually attempted to mediate tensions and conflicts but also offered resistance at certain crisis points. With broader critical assessment of the sources and a clearer sense of the changing social-political context, it is possible to construct a (provisional) history of the Pharisees’ political position and role in, or in opposition to, the temple-state in Judea under imperial rule.

—from the Introduction

245 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2022

Reviews

[Logan Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book suffers from problems of organisation (due to the fact that they are older essays somewhat haphazardly clustered together), but it achieves its primary function: offering a rebuttal to Neusner's _From Politics to Piety_, utilising socio-economic models to argue that the Pharisees persisted in their political activities until their disappearance. Some of the claims are certainly overblown, such as the notion that the Pharisees especially forced people to tithe and somehow functioned as emissaries for a kind of surveillance temple-state. The picture of Jesus as a 'spokesperson' for the peasantry who prophetically indicts Pharisees for the enforcing (in Horsley's view) exploitative tithes/taxes gives the impression that Horsley is engaging in a materialist rewriting of a well-worn Christian paradigm wherein the Pharisees are stand-ins for whatever someone thinks is wrong with the world. For a more thorough analysis, see Daniel R. Schwartz's review in _Review of Biblical Literature_ (https://www.sblcentral.org/home/bookD...).