Excerpts
People of the Land
Excerpt from The Jesus Sayings
Rex Weyler
Common sense tells us that Jesus was not a Christian; he was a Jew, but even this remains too simple. A peasant family in Galilee during the reign of emperor Tiberius might share blood and customs with neighbouring Canaanites, Samaritans, Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Aramaeans. The Galilean Jews spoke Aramaic more commonly than Hebrew, both Semitic languages related to Canaanite, Babylonian, and Arabic.
The name Galilee meant “nations district,” a place of ethnically mixed semi-nomadic Habiru descendents, caravan travelers, tent-dwellers, wanderers, and vagrants with Hittite and Mitanni blood from the north. Although repeatedly conquered, northern Israelites preserved a tradition of independence from foreign overlords including their Judean relatives to the south. Both Israelites and Judeans considered the other compromised. Judeans objected to Israelite intermarriage, and Israelites accused Judeans of collaborating with Persians and Romans. Yes, Jesus was a Jew, but in Galilee, he would have grown up among ethnically mixed neighbours and may have possessed mixed blood himself. He rejected Jewish convention and consorted with outcasts.
Although trade routes passing from Damascus to the coast brought worldly people through Galilee, the region stood remote from centres of power. Secluded caves and treacherous terrain provided cover for rebels, bandits, and renegade messiahs. Greek cities east of the Jordan infused Galilean culture with ideas gleaned from both east and west. The Judaism of Jesus would appear to us quite distinct from modern Judaism or Judaism practiced at the temple in Jerusalem, several days’ walk from the rolling hills of Galilee.
Because Galilean agriculture thrived on natural rainfall, their farming proved more durable, if less grand, than the irrigated city-states of Mesopotamia to the east. Canaanite peasants endured successive invasions by Egyptians from the south and by Hittites, Mitanni, Assyrians, and Aramaeans from the north. The habiru absorbed stories, rituals, and deities from their neighbours. Remnants of those stories echo in the deeds and sayings of Jesus.
Early Hebrew clans – according to Genesis accounts of Joshua, Isaac, Jacob, and Rachel – worshiped many gods. Evidence of Jewish polytheism appears on archeological artifacts and in the books of Exodus, Psalms, Kings, and Ezekiel. During the Jewish kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon, peasants worshiped the goddess Asherah, often in alliance with the Jewish god YHWY, leaving behind some forty references in the Old Testament.
After the glory days of Solomon, about a thousand years before Jesus, the Jewish world split between Judah and Israel, weakening both. Babylonians captured Judean slaves seven centuries before Jesus, but most peasant Jews in Galilee remained on the land and continued to mix freely with other tribes. When Persian king Cyrus defeated Babylon, he allowed captured Jews to return to Judea and practice their religion, albeit modified to place Cyrus in a role of honour. Persian overlords typically coerced client states such as Israel to abandon the peasants’ fertility deities for a single, infallible, male god similar to the Persian deity.
Just as Jewish historian Josephus wrote history for his Roman patrons, the post-exile scriptures record Jewish history with deference to Cyrus and the Persians. The Jewish Book of Isaiah names Cyrus as god’s anointed one, the only case in Jewish history of a Gentile messiah. The Book of Ezra denounces the Israelites who had remained on the land during the exile and had “taken strange wives” from among the Canaanites and Hittites. These books emphasize “purity” and launch a campaign to rid the land of mixed races. The Book of Ezra (10:11 ) instructs the Judeans:
“Separate yourselves from the people of the land.”
This centuries-old Jewish family feud between politically connected “people of the book” and poor, culturally mixed “people of the land,” continued into the time of Jesus. Our modern term “pagan” literally means “a country peasant.” The single male god was an urban, military, royal idea. In the countryside, indigenous peasants worshiped fertility deities and divine nature, practiced religious tolerance, and followed the custom of “derech eretz,” making the world right through “manners” or common decency.
According to E.P. Sanders in Jesus and Judaism, “[T]he sayings material, viewed as a whole, is not what we would expect of a prophet of Jewish restoration. It is not focused on the nation of Israel. … when collective terms are used they do not imply ‘all Israel’” Rather, Sanders points out, Jesus speaks of the ‘little flock’, the ‘poor’, and the ‘sinners.’ Jesus rose from and addressed the people of the land.
The mixed culture of Galilee, independent of Judea, provides context for Jesus’ warnings about duplicitous Pharisees and his instructions to love one’s neighbours. Jesus rejected temple puritanism for common sense ethics. Galilean farming communities in the first century lived on the edge of starvation, taxed into absolute poverty by three levels of government: the temple in Jerusalem, Herodian overlords, and the Roman state. Poverty, malnutrition, and unchecked infections led to pandemics of blindness and leprosy. The peasants clung to scarce promises of salvation from itinerant healers, redeemers, messiahs, and rebels. Josephus tells of multitudes following messiahs to the desert, only to be rounded up and slaughtered by Roman soldiers. Rome and the Herods did not tolerate assemblies of potential troublemakers. Into this political powder keg walks Jewish peasant Yeshua ha-Nazorean, barefoot, humble, outcast, but thoroughly unintimidated.
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From Chapter 5, “Into the Towns,” in The Jesus Sayings
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Resources:
E. P. Sanders on “the little flock” and “the poor”: Jesus and Judaism (Fortress, 1985) p. 222.
See: How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel
William M. Schniedewind, Cambridge University Pres, 2004): See Index: “am ha ’aretz, people of the land,” pp. 66, 76–77, 96, 107, 112, 113, 138, 150, 191–192, 228.
Who were the Hebrews, by Gerald A. Larue
The Am ha-aretz, the people of the land dismissed by religious authorities and People-of-the-Book.
Jewish peasants, People of the land, Talmidim ha Yeshua.
Israel’s Polytheistic background, by Mark S. Smith, Professor of Bible and Near Eastern Studies, New York University.
Jewish History, polytheism, Asherah: Compiled by David Steinberg, includes references to Biblical passages of other deities such as El and Asherah.
Polytheism in Genesis, by Sol Abrams