Pseudepigraphy and the Judea–Diaspora Relationship

Recent scholarship on Early Judaism often presumes that Jews in the Hellenistic period embraced the diaspora as a place where Jews could practice their ancestral laws while enjoying the cultural benefits of living under the Hellenistic empire. These studies, however, primarily assess Jewish attitudes towards the diaspora by looking at diasporan texts. A study of Judean texts which engage with the notion of diaspora suggests a more complex reality: while most diasporan Jews did embrace the diaspora by disassociating it from the biblical interpretation of exile as divine punishment, at least some Judean Jews viewed the diaspora as evidence of God’s displeasure with the Jewish people. This view is expressed in Judean fictional documents such as 1 Baruch, which imagines the diasporan community admitting that their diasporic circumstances derive from the people’s collective sins. It also appears in personal correspondences that Judeans wrote to diasporan communities which implore them to observe newly established holidays that had been authorized by Jerusalem authorities. The Judean authors of these fictional documents and personal letters cite older texts which serve to authorize their requests and which imagine diasporan Jews as admitting that life in the diaspora signifies divine disfavor. Diasporan authors likewise depicted Jews on the other side of the diasporic line aspirationally, but towards different ends. The author of the Letter of Aristeas, for example, depicts Judeans embracing the Alexandrian Jewish community and its project to translate the Hebrew scriptures into Greek by embedding fictional letters into his story which speak in the voice of Judean leadership. This paper will analyze a set of diasporan and Judean texts which suggest that Judean Jews and diaspora Jews employed the practice of pseudepigraphy as a wish-fulfillment strategy to speak in the voices of one another in order to legitimize their theological understanding of the diaspora.