History as A Science: The Difference of Method
- Steve Mason
- 2 hours ago
- 11 min read
Steve Mason on Yonatan Adler's Origins of Judaism
This is a part of our Forum on Yonatan Adler's The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal
Yontan Adler covers vast amounts of primary evidence and ponderous research with a light touch. He telegraphs what he is going to say, then says it, then tells us what he has said. Weedy debates go into endnotes. This clarity begins with the description of his method in the Preface and Chapter One, so let us begin there.
First, Adler stresses, the method is “data-driven.” This means that he is not after the ancients’ thoughts or ideas —that would be intellectual history for him—but rather social history, which is to say: ordinary Judeans’ “lived experiences” or “actual behaviors and practices.” These he labels Judaism on the ground that modern dictionaries define the word this way. He calls this an “etic” perspective, using categories devised and justified by the investigator. (A scientist does not ask what objects of study think.)
Seeking data, then, Adler identifies two potential sources: literary texts and archaeological finds. But these are not of equal value. Authors of texts were not only distant from the lives of the masses; the “basic fact” is that they were “fringe” or “esoteric” “ideologues.” Their products might be useful for intellectual history, but Adler is not doing that. Material remains, by contrast, reveal “actual human behaviors rather than ideal mental constructs,” not “ideologically laden narratives.” The latter require interpretation, but as long as they are “randomly sampled and widely distributed” (see further below), they can recover ordinary common life for us.
In case this sounds like the only sensible way to do things, readers should know that it is a particular kind of history. To situate Adler’s approach and my different vantage-point, we should glance back at the origins of academic history. The early 1800s brought a crisis for historians. The towering prestige of natural science (astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) set a new bar for all claims to knowledge, just as the new concept of a research university was catching hold. Until then, however, history had been written by amateurs interested in moral assessment of great individuals or societies. If historians were to sit at table with scientists, everyone saw the need to make history more scientific (wissenschaftlich). But how?
Many decided that the only way was to abandon the cherished illusion that individuals and their thoughts mattered, along with the mirage of “free will.” Scientists studied objects in the aggregate, using statistical methods and discounting individual aberrations. They sought generalizations that could reveal patterns or laws. Many historians decided that the times required them to retool their discipline, to look beyond individuals or events for the larger forces argued variously by Adam Smith, Comte, Marx and Engels, and Darwin. Fortunately, representative data—records of births, marriages and divorces, deaths, incidence of illness and suicides, imports and exports, wages and prices, census data, literacy and education—were becoming increasingly available, making the project plausible for modern history. Archaeology was born in the same period, with the opening of the Ottoman East to European explorers, and it became a major catalyst for the social history of antiquity.
Other historians, however, especially those who studied remote times, accepted the need for scientific rigor but thought that the nature of their work, lacking representative data, required them to focus on the other requisites for scientific knowledge: precise observation, careful description, and understanding of particular cases. They argued that if historians grabbed convenient “data” from a distant society’s texts or impressions from material remains, without understanding the nature of each particular in its context, any resulting generalization would be meaningless.
This outlook created event-oriented or episodic history as the main alternative to social-scientific. This was not intellectual history, a later subspecies closer to philosophy. Simply, these historians assumed that all human actions have, in R. G. Collingwood’s later language, both an outside (someone exploded a bomb) and an inside (Who did it and why?). Historians in this humanities tradition were unabashedly interested in human thought or consciousness as revealed in events. NB: social history can also be done in this way, building up from individual cases (e.g., W. and A. Durant, D. Sandbrook). Adler’s approach looks social-scientific, though he does not label it thus, because of its emphasis on data and statistical sampling and lack of interest in thought.
Ideally, we need both large-scale and episodic history, because each has blind spots. With their antennae conditioned to particulars, episodic historians are squeamish about drawing big conclusions, even concerning ancient family or slave or military life, literacy, economics and trade, urban life, or epidemiology. Yet we need such big pictures, and eminent historians have shown them to be possible. They recognize, however, that we have no representative records for antiquity, but only what has happened to survive.
Social-scientific history, for its part, is not equipped to explain individual divergences within a social class or abrupt change. It observes generations-long shifts in pottery styles or bathing practices, but cannot explain why John of Gischala fled his Upper-Galilean home for Jerusalem in late 67 or why Vespasian halted his campaign around 1 July 68. Nor will it explore the anguish that leaders (such as Ananus II) experience in managing conflicts or making big decisions. Whatever ends up happening looks like what had to happen. Maybe it did, but if we want to understand human experience, says the episodic historian, we must allow that they thought their decisions and actions mattered. That is why they were torn up about them.
Needless to say, the nineteenth-century split sketched above has morphed in countless ways in the meantime, mutating and cross-fertilizing on paths too numerous to list. I revisit it not to link Adler’s book or my response with some school, but to identify two basic, incompatible logics used by historians: long-span (“nomothetic”) generalization over against the “idiographic” focus on individual events, actors, and thought.
In fact, the many scholars interested in Roman Judea come with a far greater array of methods than these two, many of which do not declare themselves historical in biblical, theological, or rabbinic studies. The only respectful response for anyone working in this crowded field is: “Great! You do you.” Each of us tries to be clear about what we are up to and hopes that anyone who shares our methods will notice. Adler’s investigation is historical and he is clear about his method. Because the history I do comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, however, when the book appeared, I declined to review it. Its assumptions, categories, and methods seemed too far from mine for a review to be useful. But when Marginalia's Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Loncar, invited a contribution for this forum, I agreed because, as only one scholar and observer, I could reflect on these differences of method and their consequences as colleagues closer to Adler’s approach took up other questions.
The key term Judaism is a good place to start my reflection. As we have seen, Adler needs a category that covers Judean practice of Torah prescriptions, and modern dictionary definitions of Judaism fit that bill. Perhaps surprisingly, the notes explain that he has no stake in the word, presumably because it is for him an external (etic) category. When I have written on the subject (2007), by contrast, my concern has been with how the ancients thought about their world. Digital tools enable us to see (a) that no Greek, Latin, or Hebrew equivalent to Judaism was current in those centuries—we do not impose isms on other ancient groups (no Romism, Egyptism, or Syrism)—and (b) that this particular ismbegan as a Christian imposition, though it has long since been domesticated, somewhat as the western terms Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism. Politically ascendant Christians created Juda-ism (like Hellenism, barbarism, paganism) for polemical contrast with Christianism.
From my perspective, then, it was only History 101 to avoid such anachronism. I’d also inherited Judaism as a staple term from my teachers (and still have no problem saying that I study ancient Judaism). But when it came to understanding the pre-Christian world I had come to think that prevailing scholarly debates about the number of Judaisms, the nature of Judaism as a religion, and who was “within” Judaism were distractions from their concerns.
Adler expresses puzzlement at my conclusion, suggesting that if I had a more capacious definition of Judaism, with the dictionaries, I would see its value for the pre-Christian world. But this misses my argument, about the thought and language of the people we study. We are playing on the same board, but different games: chess and checkers.
Another example is Adler’s blanket characterization of literary texts as vehicles of ideology, and their authors as detached from common life. His first chapter places the libraries of Philo, Josephus, the New Testament, outsiders’ accounts of Judeans, Qumran Scrolls, apocrypha and pseudepipgrapha on this anvil. In Chapter 7, Ezra and Nehemiah join them as “ideological stories about the past” and “not histories.”
Of the many puzzles this presents for me, I’ll highlight two. First, because my sort of history does not expect to find data, the genre of a composition (a tricky category in ancient writing) is irrelevant. Poems, geographies, philosophical essays, and fictional works may all be grist for the historian’s mill, while self-declared histories require as much caution as any other survival. This is because the investigator’s questions and imagination—not data—drive our inquiry (see Bloch, The Historian’s Craft; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History). We identify a problem, interpret relevant survivals, whatever they are, then hypothesize scenarios using our imaginations, then test them to see which ones best explain the evidence. We need not reach a conclusion. If the evidence is not of sufficient quantity or quality to make “best hypothesis” a meaningful award, we blame the universe. Our only indispensable task is the contextual interpretation of what has survived. (Though space does not allow me to give examples, I could not follow some of Adler’s particular uses of Josephus or Macrobius.)
Second, having gone a few rounds with Josephus, especially, I don’t know what his ideology might be. He was a proud priest, to be sure, and so described the temple-based world at the heart of Moses’ “constitution.” But his account establishes the “common Judaism” of the first century that Adler (with E. P. Sanders) takes as a reference point. Otherwise, each of Josephus’ works has its own suite of themes. His later works freely adept episodes he had used to develop War’s themes to suit their new homes. King Herod, for example, the model ally of Rome in War, becomes an example of law-violating tyranny, a theme in Antiquities. The martyred Ananus II, paragon of courage and virtue in War, illustrates lawlessness and divine punishment in Antiquities. Conversely, the scumbag John of Gischala in War is a much more intelligible and well-connected, Josephus-like figure (at first) in the Life. Is ideology just having thoughts?
To counter the rampant humiliation of Judeans in post-70 Rome, Josephus’ War makes a theme of his nation’s toughness and contempt for death, sometimes at the cost of the storied legions, whose soldiers prove to be scaredy-cats as individuals. Josephus illustrates this theme not with members of his own class, many of whom he lambasts for precipitating Jerusalem’s destruction, but with Essenes and ordinary Josephs. Is this elite ideology? I don’t understand the term, though I see it widely used in postmodern critiques of history-writing.
What, then, of the material evidence or data? Adler is the expert here. With respect to historical method, however, two questions reoccurred as I worked through the book. First, do the material remains meet Adler’s criterion of “randomly sampled and widely distributed”? Here we need to be clear about what random sampling means. In statistics, it does not mean “whatever happened to reach us,” but the opposite. The idea is that, once all members of a population (notionally, all Judeans living in the Persian and Ptolemaic periods) are identified, the investigator ensures representative sampling by randomly choosing cases. Second, is Adler’s proposal that the Hasmoneans first promoted the Pentateuch as a law code the best explanation of the chalk vessels, stepped immersion pools, and a strict interpretation of the second commandment (forbidding images) that appeared during their rule?
It is hard to find grounds for an affirmative answer to the first question, or to see how random sampling is conceivable for antiquity. The Persian and Ptolemaic periods left notoriously negligible literary evidence. Given that Judeans moved beyond Jerusalem’s hinterland in strength only during the Hasmonean expansion, pre-Hasmonean (but post-Exilic) material evidence for Judean common life is also slender. Adler mentions the “precious few remains” of Persian Yehud. Papyri from the Judean garrison in fifth-century BCE Elephantine, Egypt, or the palace of the super-elite Tobiad family east of the Jordan (Ptolemaic era) seem hardly representative of ordinary Judean life during the fifth to third centuries BCE. Further, much pre-Hasmonean evidence is also pre-Exilic.
Adler realizes and affirms that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, though his language appears at times to suggest this: “there exists no surviving evidence” of Judean adherence to the Torah’s dietary laws; “no [compelling] evidence has survived”; or “the earliest surviving evidence for a widely practiced Judean way of life governed by the Torah never predates the second century BCE.” He is a conscientious scholar, however, and can also allow that “we simply lack the evidence” to know whether pre-Hasmonean Judeans forbade images. A passage in the final chapter may reflect the challenge posed by limited evidence (my emphasis unless noted “YA”):
Certainly, none of the evidence explored here demonstrates in any conclusive manner that the Torah had not emerged sometime during the Persian period as the authoritative law of the Judeans [the standard view]. … Nevertheless, the fact remains that no evidence [YA] has survived from the Persian period that necessarily indicates familiarity with Torah observance, while copious evidence [YA] has survived that reveals noncompliance with Torah laws. While this means that we cannot rule out the possibility that Judaism emerged as early as the Persian period, the sum of the evidence suggests that we would be better advised to seek the origins of Judaism in a later era.
Later still: “our analysis of the data could not establish that the laws of the Torah took hold specifically during the second century,” a proposal that is “admittedly a conjectural one.”
As for the second question, it is difficult for me to see how this is not about thought and motive: Why did stepped pools, chalk vessels, a stricter interpretation of the image ban, and the synagogue appear in the Hasmonean period? Some Judeans must have wanted them. Adler’s 2018 article on plastered immersion pools argued that, since the biblical requirement of ritual washing had not required immersion, these pools were an “evolution” or “conceptual development” in Torah observance, not its beginning. That seemed plausible, in part because of other changes during the period: the collection of bones after a year of decomposition (ossilegium), which ceased in central Judea by mid-second century CE; the gradual move away from red-slip tableware in the Galilee and Golan in favor of locally produced pottery and more communal eating styles (cf. Andrea Berlin’s research); rejection of gentile oil, which later Rabbi Judah (ca. 200 CE) did not support; the partial though not complete ban (cf. Tyrian silver coins and few amulets or seal rings) on images, which also faded in the second century CE; and the introduction of chalk tableware not subject to impurity while ordinary pottery continued to be used and purified.
If the beginnings of these practices in the Hasmonean period marked the beginning of Torah observance, how should we explain the motives behind their later cessation among Torah-committed rabbis? I do not know, but I congratulate Yonatan Adler on this boldly original study of an endlessly fascinating period that continues to generate basic questions.
Steve Mason is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Cultures in the Department of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins in the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Before moving to Europe, Mason spent most of his career at Toronto’s York University, lately as Canada Research Chair in Greco-Roman Cultural Interaction. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Mason edits Brill’s international series, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, the first full commentary to Josephus’ works, to which he has also contributed three volumes (War 2 and 4 and Life of Josephus). His other books include Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees (1991), Josephus and the New Testament (2003), Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity: Methods and Categories (2009), Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (2016), A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74 (2016), and Jews and Christians in the Roman World: From Historical Method to Cases (2023).
