This research examines the attitude of rabbinic literature to poverty and the poor after the destruction of the Second Temple. In the Hebrew Bible there are instructions to care for the poor and to be compassionate toward them. However, in Wisdom literature there is also criticism of the poor depicting them as lazy. The Torah obligates the individual Jew to support the poor though tithes from the produce of the fields, giving charity and free loans, but does not advocate establishing public funds for the relief of the poor. Rabbinic literature from after the destruction of the temple shows that the rabbis advocated community responsibility for helping the poor. It shows compassion toward the poor and encourages the Jews to support them through charity. They amended religious laws in order to enable the poor to have more to consume. This seems to be a change from the way the rabbis related to the poor prior to the destruction as is depicted by the New Testament. Examination of actions attributed to sages from before the destruction shows that the rabbis related positively primarily toward poor who were “sons of good” citizens. The other poor were “others” and were left to charity and tithes. After the destruction all poor are “ours,” sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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See G. Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine (Berkeley: University of California, 1990); R. Ulmer and M. Ulmer, Righteous Giving to the Poor: Tzedakah (“Charity”) in Classical Rabbinic Judaism (Piscataway, nj: Gorgias, 2014).
G. Hamel, “Poverty and Charity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine, ed. C. Hezser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 308-27.
See B. Z. Rosenfeld and H. Perlmutter, “The Poor as a Stratum of Jewish Society in Roman Palestine 70-250 CE: An Analysis,” Historia 60 (2011): 273-300.
Sir 33:22; 40:28-31. S. L. Adams, “Poverty and Otherness in Second Temple Instructions,” in The ‘Other’ in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of John J. Collins, ed. D. C. Harlow et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 189-203.
C. M. Murphy, Wealth in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 163-66, 172-76, 178-80, 184-92, 196-98, 207-8. There is much information there about the poor and poverty and social stratification that is beyond the scope of this paper since it is based on later literature of the sages.
See Murphy, Wealth, 242-46. The idea of the rich mocking the poor is also found in 4Q501 (4QApocrLam B) 1-4.
Philo, Prob. 12.79; Philo, Hypothetica (cf. Eusebius, Praep. ev. 8.11.2); Josephus, B.J. 2.122-124. For an extensive analysis of the above sources, see Murphy, Wealth, 415, 429-30, 450.
M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California, 1973), 41; F. W. Danker, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 220, 695, 795, 896. J. P. Louw and F. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1999), 50, 57.
See M. Davies, “Work and Slavery in the New Testament: Impoverishments of Traditions,” in The Bible in Ethics, ed. J. W. Rogerson, M. Davies, and M. D. Carroll, JSOTSup 207 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), 315-47, esp. 323-24. She emphasizes that the story in Mark 10:17-31 describes Jesus telling people to give their wealth to the poor. It does not describe the actual giving. The abandonment of wealth was merely a preparation to enter the “Kingdom of God” and not a way to help the poor. See also Matt 26:9-11 (par. Mark 14:5) concerning the woman who poured expensive oil on Jesus’s head, and when his disciples said it could give 300 dinar to the poor he answered them that the poor will always be with them but he himself would not always be around. On the relation to the rich in the New Testament see J. Marcus, Mark 8-16, ab 27/2 (New Haven: Doubleday, 1999), 735-37.
W. A. Meeks, “Social and Ecclesial Life of the Earliest Christians,” The Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. M. M. Mitchell and F. M. Young, 9 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1:145-73, esp. 156-59; F. Cardman, “Early Christian Ethics,” The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S. Ashbrook Harvey and D. G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 932-56, esp. 941-43. The main organizational change was in the fourth century, see P. Horden, “Poverty, Charity, and the Invention of the Hospital,” The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. S. F. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 715-43, esp. 718-20.
See D. Goodblatt, The Monarchic Principle: Studies in Jewish Self-Government in Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 176-275, esp. 256-57.
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This research examines the attitude of rabbinic literature to poverty and the poor after the destruction of the Second Temple. In the Hebrew Bible there are instructions to care for the poor and to be compassionate toward them. However, in Wisdom literature there is also criticism of the poor depicting them as lazy. The Torah obligates the individual Jew to support the poor though tithes from the produce of the fields, giving charity and free loans, but does not advocate establishing public funds for the relief of the poor. Rabbinic literature from after the destruction of the temple shows that the rabbis advocated community responsibility for helping the poor. It shows compassion toward the poor and encourages the Jews to support them through charity. They amended religious laws in order to enable the poor to have more to consume. This seems to be a change from the way the rabbis related to the poor prior to the destruction as is depicted by the New Testament. Examination of actions attributed to sages from before the destruction shows that the rabbis related positively primarily toward poor who were “sons of good” citizens. The other poor were “others” and were left to charity and tithes. After the destruction all poor are “ours,” sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 313 | 100 | 25 |
Full Text Views | 242 | 8 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 131 | 24 | 3 |