James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (68 page)

“
It is related that the children of Zadok the Priest, one a boy and the other a girl, were taken captive to Rome (by Vespasian and Titus after the fall of the Temple in 70
CE
), each falling to the lot of a different officer. One officer
resor
t
ed to a prostitute
and gave her the boy (as a slave). The other went into the store of a shopkeeper and
gave him the girl in exchange for some wine
(this, in order to fulfill the text from Joel 4:3 in which is written: ‘
And they have given a boy for a harlot and sold a girl for wine’
). After a while the prostitute brought the boy to the shopkeeper and said to him, ‘
Since I have a boy, who is suitable for the girl you have, will you agree they should marry and whatever issues
(
from the union
)
be divided between us
?’ He accepted the offer. They immediately took them and placed them in a room. The girl began to weep and the boy
asked her why she was crying
? She answered, ‘
Should I not weep, when the daughter of a High Priest is given in marriage to one
(
such as you
),
a slave
?’. He inquired of her
whose daughter she was
and she replied, ‘
I am the daughter of Zadok the High Priest
’. He then asked her
where she used to live
and she answered, ‘
In the upper market place
’. He next inquired, ‘
What was the sign above the house
?’ and she told him. He said, ‘
Have you a brother or a sister
?’ She answered, ‘
I had a brother and there was a mole on his shoulder and whenever he came home from school, I used to uncover it and kiss it
’. He asked, ‘
If you were to see it
,
would you know it now?
’ She answered, ‘
I would
’. He bared his shoulder and they recognized one another.
They then embraced and kissed till they expired
.
Then the Holy Spirit cried out
(this in both Lamentations
Rabbah
and
Gittin
), ‘
For these things I weep
!’
”

Lamentations
Rabbah
then follows this up with more stories about ‘
Miriam the daughter of Boethus
’, though here she is called ‘
Miriam the daughter of Boethus
Nahtum
’ (
thus
– that is, ‘
Nakdimon
’
), once again clearly indicating the mix-up between the patronyms ‘
Nakdimon
’ and ‘
Boethus
’. Most likely we are probably dealing with Nakdimon’s daughter and not Boethus’ but, however this may be, the tradition which is conserved here claims that whichever ‘
Miriam
’ or ‘
Mary daughter of Nahtum
’ this was ‘
was taken captive and ransomed at Acco
’.
55

Because she was by this time so poor, the people had bought her a shift which, when she went to wash it in the sea, was carried away by a sudden wave, whereupon they bought her another one and the same thing happened. At that point she r
e
fused any further help and the story which, like the several Jesus ‘
Parables
’ in Luke 7:40–43, 16:1–13, and Matthew 18:12–35, also uses ‘
debt
’, ‘
debtor
’, and ‘
debt collection
’ language to have her conclude parabolically, ‘
Let the Debt Collector
(meaning, God at ‘
the Last Judgement
’
and for her sins
)
collect His debt
’, whereupon her garments were miraculously restored to her – a clearly symbolic resurrection story.

In the Maccabean-style ‘
Seven Brothers
’ martyrdom story that immediately follows – after the death of six of her other sons and quoting a whole series of biblical proof-texts
a propos
of these, this
Miriam
/
Mary
actually alludes to her remaining child – much like the several Gospel recitals above evoking ‘
being with
’ or ‘
sitting down with Abraham in the Heavens
’ – ‘
g
o
ing to talk to the Patriach Abraham
’. To review these: in Matthew 8:6–13
the Centurion
who wants his servant to be cured, but stops Jesus in the nick of time from entering his house, is complimented for having such ‘
Great Faith
’ as to enable him to ‘
sit down with Abraham while the Children of the Kingdom shall be thrown into outer Darkness
’; Luke 13:24–35 puts this parabolically, alluding to ‘
seeing Abraham
’ while at the same time uses ‘
casting out
’ language, refers to ‘
shutting the door
’ and ‘
standing outside
’, makes the ‘
killing the Prophets
’ accusation to predict the destruction of Jerusalem, ends – in a total parody of Qumran ideology – with the proverbial ‘
the First shall be Last and the Last shall be First
’; and finally in 16:22–31 ‘
Poor Lazarus
’, after having ‘
his sores licked by dogs
’, is ‘
carried away by Angels into Abraham
’
s bosom
’.

For its part, the woman Lamentations
Rabbah
is calling ‘
Miriam
’ or ‘
Mary
’ encourages her only remaining son to ‘
Go to the Patriarch Abraham and tell him … that your mother actually built seven altars and offered up seven sons in one day. Whereas yours was only a test
(cf. Hebrews 11:17 on Abraham’s ‘
only-begotten
’ test)
,
mine was in earnest
,’
at which point, ‘
while she was embracing and kissing him
,
he was slain in her arms
’. Tractate
Yoma
gives the name of this child as ‘
Do
’
eg ben Joseph
’ (
i.e.
, parodying ‘
Jesus ben Joseph
’ again?
56
) and ‘
the Sages calculated
’
his age at
‘
two years
,
six months
,
six and a half hours
’.

Not only have we already shown in this period the relationship of all such allusions to Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac to the ethos of the
Sicarii
suicide on Masada – itself clearly being reinforced by this episode, as we contend it is by the same example, evoked in James 2:21–4, of Abraham offering up Isaac, ‘
being justified by works
’ thereby and ‘
called a Friend of God
’ – but the story concludes, both realistically and pathetically, ‘
a few days later
’ when ‘
the woman became demented and fell from a roof
’
.
Furthermore, at this point a ‘
Bat Chol
’ (
Heavenly Voice
) issues forth, quoting Psalm 113:7–8 about ‘
raising the Poor from the dust and setting him up among Princes
’ (another ‘
Ebionite
’ text also quoted, as we shall see below, in the War Scroll in its exegesis of the Messianic ‘
Star Prophecy
’
57
), and, once again, ‘
the Holy Spirit cries out
(as, indeed, it perhaps should), ‘
For these things I weep
’!

Of course, the tender pathos of the story of Zadok’s two children as slaves in Rome, finding each other and dying in each other’s arms, is surpassed in its affectiveness only by the Old Testament Joseph story, the
Recognition
theme of which is ana
l
ogous (as it is in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
), though the outcome less tragic – obviously the times were less brutal. Whatever one’s religious orientation, historically speaking it, has to be admitted that this Talmudic story is more convincing, at least as a representative picture of its times and the suffering endured, than any comparable story in the Gospels or Acts about ‘
Heavenly Voices
’ crying out about human affairs,
e.g.
, those depicting ‘
the Holy Spirit
’ (also a setpiece of this story) descen
d
ing on Jesus ‘
as a dove
’ while ‘
a voice out of Heaven
’ cried out,
‘
This is my beloved son. In him I am well-please
d
’ (Matthew 3:16–17 and
pars
.), to say nothing of the other ‘
Voice
’ out of Heaven in Acts 10:11–16 announcing concerning forbidden foods, dietary regulations, and ‘
table fellowship
’, ‘
Arise Peter
,
kill and eat
’!

But this, of course, is a matter of artistic taste and we are, once more, back in the contrasting worlds of Talmudic physica
l
ity and this-worldly quasi-realism and the New Testament one of other-worldly idealization and incorruptibility or, what in some vocabularies would be called, ‘
spiritualization
’ or ‘
Hellenization
’. For the present writer, this episode, so tragically re
c
orded in the
Talmud
, is real in the sense it represents what could have and, doubtlessly, did happen; the other being more in the nature of romanticization or mythologization in the manner of the foregoing Greco-Roman man-god traditions or retr
o
spective theological polemics, completely unaffected by and casting a cold eye on these too-tragic times.

Martha’s Demise, the Fall of Jerusalem, and Levirate Marriage

So famous was the demise of ‘
Martha the daughter of Boethus
’ that there is yet one more story about her precipitous fall now, with even more tragic overtones. Picking up from the ‘
casting out
’ by Rabbi Zadok of the already-chewed fig-shred f
i
bers,
Gittin
now quotes this final tradition as follows: ‘
When Martha was about to die
,
she brought out all her gold and silver
(
cf
. James 5:3 on the ‘
gold and silver
’ of the
Rich
)
and
cast it
into the street
,
saying
“
What good is this to me
,”
thus giving effect to the verse
, “T
hey shall cast their silver into the streets
(Ezekiel 7:19).”’
1
Here we have the
pro forma
reinforcement by a scri
p
tural proof-text as well as another variation of Matthew 27:3–5’s version of Judas
Iscariot
’
s
demise, which we have already characterized as both derivative and malicious.

Not only does the
Talmud
identify this
Martha
as
one of the Richest women in Jerusalem
, but in Tractate
Yebamoth
she is pictured as
paying a bribe
(another favorite theme in New Testament recounting), seemingly to Agrippa II – called in the trad
i
tion ‘
King Yannai’
, the last Herodian King before the destruction of the Temple. It would appear that this was not simply to have her husband
– again
, Josephus’ friend Jesus ben Gamala
–
appointed High Priest (c. 64
CE
), but also to circumvent the normal levirate-marriage waiting period – she apparently having already been ‘
a Rich widow
’ once before – so that he could, in line with her family’s traditional High-Priestly status, then be appointed High Priest. Here, too, just as in New Testament r
e
porting, the Rabbis speak in terms of there being ‘
a conspiracy
’ to secure his appointment and circumvent Mishnaic Law fo
r
bidding the consummation of such a marriage on the part of a High Priest
–
to say nothing of the implication of
there actually having been a bribe.
2

In the description of this bribe to Agrippa II, the nephew of Herodias and brother to and alleged consort of the infamous Bernice, the amount is put at ‘
a
tarkab
’ or ‘
a measure of
dinar
s
’
–
approximately two bushels. Not only do we have here the ‘
dinar
’ theme again, but it is not unlike the ‘
hundred measures
(
cors
)
of wheat
’ in the Lukan Parable of
the Unrighteous Steward
and the ‘litra’ or ‘
measure of precious ointment of pure spikenard
’ in John 12:3’s ‘
Mary sister of Martha
’/‘
Judas Iscariot
’ r
e
monstrations. Nor is this to mention ‘
Nicodemus’
bearing
the ‘
hundred litra measure of myrrh and aloes
’ in John 19:39’s later portrayal of the ministrations surrounding Jesus’ burial.

In Tractate
Yoma
, all this is further reinforced (and with it, the parallel with Gospel portraiture) by the statement recorded in the name of Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta, ‘
And why all that
,
because they bought the (High) Priestly Office for money’
,
3
though in
Kethuboth
, as we saw, at a seemingly later time she is also trying to recover her marital-contract security, which was a very high one.
4
Therefore, to close this subject, not only do we again have the language of the Judas
Iscariot
affair, both in the matter of the ‘
bribe
’
of
‘
thirty pieces of silver
’
(
in Matthew 27:6, designated as ‘
the price of blood
’) and the related sum of the ‘
three hundred dinars
’ of his and others’ complaints over ‘
the Poor
’, but also in the fact of the direct designation of the money involved
as a
‘
bribe’
. In this convergence of motifs from these parallel, contemporary traditions, despite the disparity of their two sets of contexts, there is also just the faintest indication of
the ‘High Priests’
and either their involvement or that of their ‘
Office
’ in the situation in some way.

Of course in the Talmudic traditions, the motives are quite different and, more in line with the Rabbinic generally, quite mundane or material, having to do, for instance, with bypassing Levirate marriage-rule maneuvering or recovering marital-contract surety in the face of one’s own or one’s family’s economic situation having suffered a disastrous collapse, while in Gospel portraits the point is always the same: to portray those making or accepting such bribes as conniving at or bringing the blundering or incompetent Roman Authorities around to schemes for the execution of Jesus as ‘
the Messiah
’ or ‘
the Christ
’.

This is to say nothing of how Martha’s
silver
in
Gittin
is at the time of her death ‘
being cast into the streets
’ and not
into the Temple
or its
Treasur
y, as in Judas
Iscariot
’s supposed action and the reaction to it of these same
High Priests
, as pictured in Matthew 27:5–7. To add to this, there is the matter of Matthew 27:9 supposedly quoting ‘
the Prophet Jeremiah
’ – when in reality he is paraphrasing
Zechariah
– to characterize these events as a
fulfillment
of prophecy; while here
Gittin
is
accurately
quoting Ezekiel 7:19 and applying it to the analogous matter of Martha’s ‘
gold and silver
’
being
‘
cast into the street
’. Such a citation contributes the noteworthy additional implication of connecting the first fall of the Temple to the second, which is exactly the way the Damascus Document will handle similar passages in Ezekiel we shall consider in due course below.
5

To extend these New Testament parallels just a little further into the presentation of the story of John the Baptist: in the
Mishnah
, the implications are that the ‘
bribe
’ allowed Martha to bypass normal ‘
levirate
’ marriage restrictions in order to marry Jesus ben Gamala since, as we just suggested, she seems to have been ‘
a widow
’ – that is, her first husband
had apparently a
l
ready died
. In such a situation, the theme of ‘
levirate marriage
’ and/or the bypassing of the regulations concerning it makes sense, whereas in the Gospel variation of it – in the matter of John the Baptist’s objections to Herodias’ remarriage – it does not. The reason was that Josephus explicitly noted that Philip ‘
died childless
’ which specifically means that
Herod Antipas could very well have been seen as raising up seed unto his brother
had he married
Philip
’s wife. Moreover, since he did not and since this
Philip
’s wife was not Herodias but, in fact,
Herodias
’
daughter Salome
, none of it makes any sense whatsoever and, in the writer’s view – as we see these cross-currents in thematic materials developing – most of it was drawn and rewritten from either improperly-digested or refurbished Rabbinic materials of the kind we have just set forth above anyhow.
6

However this may be, it is doubtful whether
levirate marriage
even entered into the affair where pseudo or questionable Jews such as the Herodians were concerned, but then the Gospel writers, operating from the sources we are trying to delineate and in an overseas context, were presumably unaware of the opposition to ‘
niece marriage
’, ‘
divorce
’, ‘
polygamy
’, and ‘
ma
r
riage with close family cousins
’ in the Scroll documents. All of these, as we have been emphasizing, figured prominently in
Herodian
marital practices and were apparently the issues between such
Herodians
and teachers like John the Baptist and the ‘other’ Simon who wanted
to bar Herodians from the Temple as foreigners
, which is to say nothing of their ‘
uncleanness
’ as a result of all these behavioural patterns and concerning which, of course,
Peter
learns just the opposite in Jesus’ admonishment of him in Matthew 15:15–20. In any event, as Josephus tells us,
Philip
never was married to Herodias
,
but rather to Salome her daughter
.

Again, a footnote to all this is that Jesus ben Gamala whom Boethus’ daughter Martha appears so desperately to have wished to marry and Josephus seems to have so loved, is killed alongside and in the same manner as the individual responsible for James’ death, Ananus ben Ananus. The persons responsible for these deaths are those Josephus is now formally willing to designate ‘
Zealots
’ (he had not, as already underscored, used the terminology as such previously – only
Sicarii
7
) and their ‘
Idumaean
’ supporters.
In other words, in such a context both groups (the so-called ‘
Zealots
’ and ‘
the Idumaeans
’) would a
p
pear to be
taking vengeance for the death of James
.

In fact, this killing causes Josephus to forget his previous apparent rancor towards Ananus and rail against
the ‘Zealots
’, in particular, in the most intemperate manner conceivable. In excoriating the ‘
Impiety
’ of those who flung the naked
corpses
of these two High Priests outside the city without burial as food for jackals, he also makes the point that seems to have wound up – like so many of these other notices – as part of the narrative in the Gospel of John, that is, that
so scrupulous were the Jews in burial of the dead that they never even left the corpses of those who were crucified
‘
hanging up
’
on the crosses past nigh
t
fall
– though as John 19:32 frames this, it was rather on account of ‘
the Sabbath
’ (‘
a High Holy Day
’) that they did this.
8

Martha ‘
Casts her Gold and Silver into the Streets
’ and R. Yohanan is ‘
not Pierced
’

Before proceeding along these lines further, it would be well to go back to
Gittin
’
s
descriptions of ‘
Ben Zizzit
’ where it was claimed that he derived his name from, not only the ‘
seat
’ or ‘
cushions
’ he sat upon or ‘
his fringes
’ which ‘
trailed on cushions
’ (
keset
), but also because ‘
his seat
(‘
kiseh
’ playing off ‘
keset
’)
was among the Great Ones of Rome
’. Though here in
Gittin
‘
he sits among the Great Ones
’ or ‘
Nobility of Rome
’, in the
ARN
, as will be recalled, ‘
he used to recline on a silver couch before the Great Ones of Israel
’ (once again, one should pay attention to the constant allusion to ‘
silver
’), both make it seem that ‘
Ben Zizzit
’ was perhaps a derogatory expression for one or another of the Herodians – possibly Agrippa II, since his father Agri
p
pa I was probably too respected in Rabbinic tradition to be characterized in such a manner.
9
However ludicrous traditions such as these may appear on the surface, all do display a certain peculiar, native Palestinian playfulness, as we have been unde
r
scoring, punning on the Hebrew for terms like ‘
seat
’, ‘
cushions
’, or ‘
couch
’.