‘The Lord Has Forsaken the Land’: Radical Explanations of the Military and Political Defeat of the Jews in Tannaitic Literature

Abstract

Scholarly literature devoted to ‘Jewish responses to the destruction of the Second Temple’ rarely attempts to explore the full range of explanations given by Palestinian Jews of the late first and second century CE to their political and military defeats in their wars against the Roman empire. Rather, it is commonly assumed that these Jews followed the old prophetic line of self-accusation, and ascribed the downfall to the people’s own transgressions. As a result, only slight attention is given to other, much less ‘pious’, explanations, existing in classical rabbinic literature. This paper explores some of these explanations and points at the existence of a state of mind among first- and second-century Palestinian Jews which came to question God’s very existence, His interest in the world or His ability to rule it. Although as a rule these stances were rejected by the Rabbis, surprisingly some of them appear to have been embraced by some of the Rabbis themselves.