ON MONDAY AFTERNOON I chaired the session of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group (S22-59) which held a panel review of Rachel Elior's book The Three Templess: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism. Her thesis is that the roots of early Jewish (Merkavah) mysticism are in secessionist priestly groups in the second temple period who had a sectarian view (compared to the mainstream temple cult after the Maccabean revolt) of holy time (calendar), holy place (temple), temple, and holy service (the temple cult). The reason why the Dead Sea Scrolls and the major pseudepigrapha are "external," noncanonical works is this secessionist viewpoint, although the Dead Sea Scrolls also preserve presecessionist priestly literature (e.g., the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice).

I think I've got that right. It is a very densely argued book and I have to say I understand it considerably better now that I've heard Elior explain it and reply to comments on it. The panelists were Rachel Elior, Jonathan Klawans, Ra'anan (Abusch) Boustan, April DeConick, and Alan Segal (with Elior getting both the first and the last word). The discussion was very wide ranging and it's hard to know where to start a summary. One theme that was discussed a lot was the calendar. The Qumran sectarians and others preserve material on the 364-day solar calendar, but it's hard to know how it was actually used. It's a very tidy system, since it divides the year into exactly 52 weeks with each festival happening on the same day of the week every year. The only problem is that it's a day and a quarter off the actual solar cycle, which means that it would depart rapidly from it and the seasonal festivals would soon become disconnected from their seasons. One possibility is that the users introduced some sort of intercalation: adding a day at certain points to correct the departure. The only problem is that, unless a week's worth of days was added at a time, the neat system would be disrupted and the festivals would no longer happen on the same day each year. Another possibility is that the departure was explained theologically as the result of human sin (cf., perhaps, 1 Enoch 80). Another unresolved question is which calendar the ancient temple used. There seemed to be quite a bit of sympathy for the idea that the second temple originally used the solar calendar. Elior said that there's evidence that Antiochus changed the calendrical system, presumably to the lunar calendar now used in Judaism, but I'm not sure what that evidence is.

The book was perhaps not as clear as it might have been about which texts Elior considered secessionist and which were presecessionist, and a good bit of the discussion, especially with Klawans, went into clearing this up. She thinks, for example - as I mentioned above, that the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice is a presecessionist priestly work rather than a Qumran sectarian work, and I think it's likely she's right. Boustan also argued that we are better off looking to the postrabbinic culture of Byzantine Palestine (and I would add, Amoraic Babylonia) for the origins of the Hekhalot literature. I agree with Elior that lots of ideas in the Hekhalot texts go back to the second temple period (and I've argued this in print elsewhere), but I think Boustan's point is valid too. The actual life situation of the material is in late antiquity or later.

April DeConick had a very interesting presentation in which she said that the fate of mystical traditions in ancient Judaism had a parallel in early Christianity. It started out with a belief in ongoing prophetic revelation but, as with rabbinic Judaism, it could not survive based on this tradition. Valentinus, in fact, knew a great deal about Jewish mystical and even priestly traditions and applied them to the elect. Also, Jesus is given many of the titles and functions of Enoch. So early Christianity provides a fascinating parallel to Elior's thesis. DeConick also raised the question of how the figure of Melchizedek fitted into the secesionist literature.

There were many issues that were raised but which we didn't get to (Alan Segal produced a long list of such questions, e.g., where the Sadducean tradition and the other Jewish temples at Leontopolis, Elephantine, etc., fitted in), but these are some of the things that we did discuss.

UPDATE: Blogger has been very uncooperative today, making it difficult to post. This usually happens when there's an embarrassing typo or misspelling in a post, as there was in this one. I've also taken the opportunity to add a few more thoughts on the session. But between Blogger and the fact that I'm busy with other things, I don't know how much more patience I'll have to chronicle the rest of the SBL sessions. I also attended the Early Jewish Christian Relations Section/New Testament Textual Criticism Section/Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds Group (S22-110) on Monday and the Pseudepigrapha Section (S23-14) on Tuesday, and they were both good sessions, but at least for now I'll just refer you to the online SBL abstracts for more information on them. But do note Robert Kraft's paper from S22-110, "From Jewish Scribes to Christian Scriptoria?: Issues of Continuity and Discontinuity in their Greek Literary Worlds," the full text of which is available on his web page.