The Invention of Judaism is really a book about the status of the Torah in ancient Judaism, and its complexities, that also considers how its varying construal impacted questions of Jewish or Judean identity. In this capacity, Collins successfully problematizes our understanding of the place of the Pentateuch as authoritative Scripture in the Second Temple period by highlighting its surprising absences. His work points to a real need for further theorizing concerning the nature and use of the Torah.
As such, The Invention of Judaism represents an important advance over standard accounts of the formation of the canon. These histories have tended to focus on a canonical series of core texts, such as the prologue to Ben Sira and 2 Maccabees, to determine whether they reflect a closed canon or one that remains open. Such a procedure presumes a relatively uniform concept of authority and, invariably, a process of linear development. Instead, Collins considers the more fundamental question of how directly various groups of Judeans even related to the Torah. In the process, he succinctly reviews many key debates in the field, making characteristically judicious choices among them. Collins's evenhandedness and clarity makes the book quite useful and highly readable for students and scholars alike.
“Introduction: Jews, Judeans, and the Maccabean Crisis” reviews current thinking about the nature of ioudaios as a form of identity. Collins seems to side with the view that “religion” was embedded in a wider web of ethnic identity, but that “Judaism” did not exist in an “unembedded” form. For Collins, much of the question hinges on the place assigned to the Judeans’ “ancestral law,” a concept that helpfully identifies how issues of practice and identity intersect. As such, Antiochus IV Ephiphanes's attack on Torah observances, which provoked the Maccabean crisis, could be seen as a form of political repression, deprivation of the right to follow one's ancestral customs, rather than an implausible direct assault on religion.
In “Deuteronomy and the Invention of the Torah,” following several recent scholars, Collins makes the case for the Deuteronomic Code never constituting a comprehensive, prescriptive source of authoritative law, but serving instead an educational or propagandistic purpose. “Torah in the Persian Period” notes the striking absence of Torah in early restoration texts as well as in the records preserved from the Jewish community at Elephantine. That picture fits the sense of novelty around the Torah's position in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. There too there are questions about the version of the Torah in use, as well as the vagueness of references to it, but it is clear from the frequent use of the formula, kakathub, “as it is written,” that there is in view some concern for actual adherence to a textual authority.
Despite the clear emergence of the Pentateuch from the Persian period on, “The Persistence of Non-Mosaic Judaism” questions whether according primary importance to the Torah was basic to Judean identity in the Hellenistic period. Indeed, its acknowledgment is surprisingly absent from entire corpora of literature—the wisdom tradition prior to Ben Sira, Enochic literature, and diasporic tales such as Esther and Daniel 1–6. As noted in “Torah as Narrative and Wisdom,” even so-called “Rewritten Bible” texts, so clearly dependent on the Torah, fail to relate to it explicitly as works of exegesis. Ben Sira recognizes the authority of the “Law of Moses,” but associates it with a broader sense of wisdom and refrains from explicit citation; Tobit references the “Law of Moses,” but only in general terms of piety, and even attributes to it laws not found there. “Torah as Law” looks at how observance of ancestral law, an important focus after the Maccabean revolt, could be a basis for a common Judaism, but also lead to a heightened scrutiny of Torah as religious law, evident in such texts as the Temple Scroll and Jubilees, that ultimately helped generate sectarian divisions, as seen in 4QMMT. Despite such developments, papyri from the Roman period still show little influence of Jewish law. While early apocalyptic texts with their dualistic, deterministic theology seem quite separate from the Torah, “Torah and Apocalypticism” explores how the apocalyptic world view could merge with an interest in the Law, as seen in the sectarian texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and, later, in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, despite their continued interest in other, higher revelation.
Two final chapters, “The Law in the Diaspora” and “Paul, Torah, and Jewish Identity,” show how Jews in the Diaspora focused their discussion of Torah around more universal philosophical and moral principles: monotheism, and social and sexual morality. After surveying the extensive literature on the topic, Collins points out that Paul viewed the Torah like other Hellenistic Jewish writers, as a series of general ethical principles, and that he opposed a more particularist approach to its halakhic details. He also shows a commitment to the notion of a “higher revelation” through Christ, one that supersedes rather than supplements the Law, which remains a valid mode of living, even if he ultimately deems it insufficient.
Important to Collins's argument is the idea that the Torah could have an “iconic” value even if ancient Jewish writers failed to relate to it directly as a textual authority. I believe that this is a significant point that should be developed further. To restate the case, readers of the Bible rarely engaged the text as it is or, more specifically, as it is to us. The existence, distribution, and even knowledge of a text does not determine the nature of its use. The same text whose laws could be seen as representing specific instances of general ethical principles could be seen as a detailed resource for halakhic argumentation. What is needed is a theory of textuality that allows us to recognize a maximal range of possibilities for the ongoing construction of what the Torah is as an object, while acknowledging the continuity of its presence as a text in the world of ancient Judaism.
