Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

336 Journal of Biblical Literature
“controversy with Hellenistic liberalism in Jerusalem.” Ben Sira is first and foremost
apologetic (p. 136), and yet, in contrast to Qoheleth, highly critical of the dangers of a
drive for wealth (p. 137). His is a work, therefore, that displays partisan attitudes toward
the politics as well as the sociological ramifications, brought about by the penetration of
the Hellenistic style of life and foreign thought-forms into the Jewish upper class—it is
“apologetic-polemical.”
Hengel’s presentation of the religion is very much that of the intellectual tradition,
and his explanation for the criticism of traditional wisdom lies in the influence of Greek
philosophical liberalism. In this emphasis he has many European predecessors and successors
(e.g., Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion [New York: Columbia University
Press, 1940]; Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical [Oxford:
Blackwell, 1985]). Traditionally, writers on Greek religion have referred to a crisis under
the influence of philosophical skepticism evidenced from the pre-Socratics onwards.
The infamous mutilation of the Herms in Athens and the desecration of the mysteries in
415 B.C.E., and then the trial and execution of Socrates, are taken as emblematic of this
“spirit.” These events do, however, represent the intimate connection between religion
and politics (cf. Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History [Oxford: Clarendon, 1996],
202), and the way religion, as in the Maccabean revolt, is not so much the instigator but
the tool. Some have emphasized that the opposition between philosophy and traditional
religion has been exaggerated (e.g., P. Veyner, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?
An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988],
86–87), and that Greek philosophical skepticism was not a threat to traditional religion
(D. Babut, La religion des philosophes grecs: De Thalès aux stoïciens [Paris: Presses universitaires
de France, 1974], 1–2). For both the Greeks and the Jews, shrines, local cults,
and devotion were not weakened, and to speak of a “crisis” is to read too much into an
intellectual movement. Greater weight should perhaps be given to sociological questions
than intellectual (as S. R. F. Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999], attempts).
It has been assumed, nonetheless, that there existed a crisis in the religion at this
time, and that some Jewish authors, such as Ben Sira, reacted to it (e.g., David A.
deSilva, “The Wisdom of Ben Sira: Honor, Shame, and the Maintenance of the Values
of a Minority Culture,” CBQ 58 [1996]: 443). In Hengel a Jewish crisis is predicated on
the belief that there was already a crisis in Greek religion that was transmitted by Greeks
in Palestine. However, there is little in Ben Sira that could necessarily be seen as a
response to a religious crisis, and his emphasis on Torah and religious values are developments
and innovations of earlier themes. His interests can be seen much better as
political (e.g., J. K. Aitken, “Biblical Interpretation as Political Manifesto: The Seleucid
Setting of the Wisdom of Ben Sira,” JJS 51 [2000]: 191–208) and social (e.g., B. G.
Wright and Claudia V. Camp, “‘Who Has Been Tested by Gold and Found Perfect?’
Ben Sira’s Discourse of Riches and Poverty,” Henoch 23 [2001]: 153–74). One suspects
that, had we not had the evidence of the Maccabean revolt, which could be as much as a
generation later than Ben Sira, then the crisis would not be seen as inevitable. But the
competing groups in Jerusalem are for Hengel indicative of the growing unease with the
upper classes, who were aiming at an interpretatio graeca of Judaism.