Jewish life before the destruction

There was no single way of being Jewish before 70 CE: everything depended on whether one was Pharisee or Essene, clergy or lay, male or female, living in Jerusalem or in a Galilean village. Almost all this variety is lost. The written sources are the work of intellectuals, or else inscriptions, papyri and coins that mostly record business, public acts and legal matters.1

The Gospels show a first-century Palestine full of the poor, hungry and sick, sometimes reduced to begging, prostitution or theft. Jesus and, later, the rabbis cared about them and encouraged charity, though they distrusted those who practiced it for show. The poor themselves, however, left no texts; those with money flaunted it in decorated houses and tombs, and the poor had no means of leaving monuments.4

On slavery, Jews thought like the empire's other inhabitants and took it as normal, with exceptions such as the Essenes, who owned no slaves. Many free Jews lived by heavy labor out of necessity: fields on large estates, quarries supplying Jerusalem, salt extraction at the Dead Sea, fishing on the Sea of Galilee, as some of Jesus's disciples did. Neither slaves nor laborers left accounts of their own.5

The greatest gap is the voice of women, who appear little in the sources and almost never speak for themselves. In some places they may have been expected to stay out of public life: Philo, referring to Alexandria, says that the home is woman's place. Nothing ensures it was so everywhere, and in the Gospels many women approach Jesus freely; they do seem to have been expected, however, to cover their heads with a mantle.6

What set Jews apart from Greeks and Romans was a source of pride for Philo and Josephus, who claim that Jews would die before abandoning their ancestors' customs; the right to follow them was always at stake in dealings with Rome. Sectarian disputes went on, but shared loyalty to the laws of Moses and the tradition of the fathers united many Jews and gave their culture a profile of its own.2

The Temple was the heart of this tradition. At the three pilgrimage festivals, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, Jews were meant to go up to Jerusalem; it is not known whether they went every year, but under Rome the crowds ran to tens of thousands, and the Temple complex had to grow to hold them. Synagogues already existed, but worshiping God seemed unthinkable without the Temple; even the Dead Sea community, critical of how it was run, modeled itself on it and hoped to see it restored at the end of days.7

Philo describes crowds from countless cities, arriving by land and sea from every point of the compass, who made friends at the festivals and felt united. That was the ideal; in practice there was overcrowding, disorder and even riots. Those unable to travel paid the annual half-shekel, which funded the daily sacrifice. For the authors it is no exaggeration to say that loyalty to the Temple was what held together Jews scattered and divided by geography, politics and economics.3

Without Davidic kings, the priests, especially the top families, became Judea's elite, religious and political alike. Hence the efforts of Herod and the Romans to control the high priesthood: they meddled in appointments and even kept the high priest's vestments in their own hands. The priesthood as a whole, however, kept its prestige: Josephus displays his priestly origin as proof of nobility, and the labels 'priest' and 'priestess' (the second applied to wives and daughters) still conferred status centuries after 70.8

Outside the Temple, many Jews shared habits of their own, such as the Sabbath and the synagogue, upheld in Palestine and the diaspora alike. For reasons still obscure, ritual purity gained weight, at least in Jerusalem and Palestine. Impurity was thought of as a contagion, coming from bodily fluids, corpses or non-Jews defiled by idolatry; it was not an illness, but it had to be removed before drawing near the holy. To that end people used stone vessels, a material deemed immune to impurity, and the ritual bath, the mikveh.9

Each group had its own way of handling impurity. The Pharisees insisted on washing hands before eating. The Essenes rejected oil, which other Jews used when bathing, and relieved themselves out of sight, burying their waste, whereas other Jews, seeing no impurity in it, had no such concern.10

A Hasmonean palace at Jericho holds the oldest mikveh with a known date, believed to have been in use between 150 and 100 BCE. The Hasmoneans were priests, and other early mikvaot turn up in priestly settings; so it is supposed that priests were the ones who adopted the ritual bath, in order to enter the Temple in a state of purity. After 70, immersion stayed important for other reasons, such as women's purification after menstruation and conversion, a use that suggests Christian baptism may derive from it.11