A Roadmap to the Heavens

Book excerpt: Description The challenge of this book has been to rethink prevailing ideas about the social map of Jewish society during the rabbinic period in Israel. New insights were made possible by using anthropological theories and tools. The book explores the rich and complex relationships among the sages, priests, and laymen who competed in social, cultural, and political arenas for hegemony. It demonstrates that this struggle was not a simple case of displacement of the priestly elite by a new scholarly elite. In the process of constituting a counter-hegemony of the sages, there was a complex push-pull process: attraction-rejection, imitation-denial, and co-operation-confrontation. They undermined the old order by using the old hegemonic priestly discourse. Whereas the sages proposed a new order based on intellectual achievement, they nevertheless created on top of the earlier hegemonic order a new order of group nepotism, endogamy, ritual purity, and secret knowledge and education provided only to the proper social classes. Ben-Zion concludes that even in the process of resistance and disengagement from the priestly hegemony, the sages could not free themselves from the bondage of the priestly discourse and praxis.