ntroduction
To discuss the Am haAretz[1] of first-century Palestine, the period that corresponds to our Savior’s earthly ministry, it is helpful to consider as a backdrop the makeup, bent, and plenitude of the groups, parties, and sects within or influential to Judaism at that time (table 1).
We begin with the Scribes and Pharisees. The word of God stipulates that righteousness in His eyes is no less than perfect[2] obedience to His ordinances, precepts, statutes, and Law (Deuteronomy 6:24-25, Leviticus 5:17, James 2:10). In effort to do this, the Pharisees constructed a “hedge” around the Law with the hope that it would prevent violation of the Law proper. That is, they constructed a hedge consisting of traditions which were intended to prevent one from even coming close to violating God’s Law through strict adherence to a traditions-hedge of legal extensions known as Halakah[3] (figure 1). It was a detailed and complicated legal framework and Pharisees spent much of their time in study to learn it; an entire professional class known as the Scribes[4] became necessary for arbitration in matters concerning the Law and to provide the largely synagogue-based teaching known as Haggadah (homiletic teaching, i.e., practical theology). And while the Scribes expounded the Law, the Pharisees made it their determined business to observe the Law according to Scribal dictates (consider Luke 18:10-12—note the fasting, tithing; alms giving belongs here). Therein lies the mutual dependence the Scribes and Pharisees had for one another, and a natural affinity as well. But things got out of hand to the extent that the former through heady scholarship devised an ever-increasing mountain of legalism through which the latter might vaunt himself, but which neither really practiced (Matthew 23:13ff, “Matthew Chapter Twenty-three Commentary”). Therewith the Scribes and Pharisees managed to crush and condemn the common Jew (=Am haAretz, disparagingly deemed, literally, “ignoramuses” with respect to the Law).
A major tradition practiced by the Pharisees involved the notion of cleanness before God by way of ritual purity (e.g., John 2:6), an external vehicle, a hedge of sorts that a Pharisee believed would keep him spiritually clean from the contaminating agents of the world around him, but which our Savior condemned and rejected time and again, both verbally through reproof, and situationally through His and His disciples’ nonparticipation (Mark 7:1-9, Luke 11:37-40). Given the legal intricacies and reach of the Pharisaic burden, (Matthew 23:1-4, figure 2), it by default excluded all but the most privileged, for it was not possible for most Jews to avoid breaking these traditions during their daily lives. For example, how was a meat merchant to stay clean seeing he constantly contacted blood, which the Pharisees deemed particularly unclean and an agent of defilement? Likewise, a farmer who inevitably came into contact with things the Pharisees deemed unclean. Most of the working class in Judea would have been rendered unclean simply by going about their normal daily duties, excepting only those who worked in such a way as to never contact things the Pharisees deemed unclean. It is certain that in agrarian Palestine in the first-century AD only a privileged minority could do that. Furthermore, the intricacies of the tradition-augmented Law dictated fulltime commitment to master; again, only a privileged minority could afford the luxury of spending so great a time in study. Hence Pharisaism was not only burdensome, exacting unrealistic demands from the people, but it was highly discriminatory as well seeing it was tailored to those few who could effectively participate in it. For all the heady scholarship that went into it, and no doubt for all the well intentions with respect to keeping God’s Law, Pharisaism was, in the end, the antithesis of true religion (James 1:27, 2:8). To make matters worse for the common Jew, the Pharisees looked down on those who could not participate in Pharisaism, as though such were foolish and ignorant, and hopeless sinners in the eyes of God. It is true that the Pharisees were not powerbrokers like their blue-blooded, Sadducean counterparts, nor necessarily persons of means, still, to be a Pharisee implied privilege out of necessity, and that was not the lot of the majority. As concerns our study and as indicated by table 1, first-century Palestine was not teeming with Pharisees though they were well represented, second only to the Am haAretz in numbers (second by a very wide margin however).
Neither was it teeming with the elitist Sadducees. As a class of privilege, and they were particularly so, these guardians of the temple and the sacrificial rites were largely confined to Jerusalem and its proximity. Given their aristocratic, priestly makeup their numbers were relatively small. Unlike the Pharisees, the Sadducees espoused only the Torah. And while the Pharisees laid heavy burdens on the people with their superadded traditions, the Sadducees flipped the script and reduced the Torah, by their self-imposed authority, to those particulars that complemented their collaborationist bent and role. In consequence to their collaborationist bent, they disappeared after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Our Savior’s encounters with the Sadducees trace to the last week of His life; the Sadducees as go-betweens to the Jews and Rome wielded sufficient power to bring about our Lord’s incredibly speedy trial and His ultimate conviction and death.
Though they despised one another, on this issue they were united: both the Pharisees and Sadducees, for different reasons, saw Jesus as a threat. For the Pharisees, Jesus challenged their way of religion; nay, with His condemnation of their traditions, particularly their fascination with ritual purity, He destroyed it. Of interest for this study, Jesus’ inclusion of common folks, the Am haAretz, threatened the Pharisaic posture of religious exclusivity. Jesus made God “too accessible” to the ones whom the Pharisees looked down their nose at and disdained. In Jesus’ teaching of brotherly love and equality was implicit a relationship with these “sinners.” In a Pharisee’s mind then, could Jesus have been any less than a sinner Himself, seeing He embraced these “unschooled, defiled” masses constantly? But they had a problem in that regard—the exceeding Am haAretz witness to Jesus’ miracles, which miracles of course testified to His deity and laid to rest any questions regarding His (perfect) holiness. (John 12:17-19, John 6:11-14— the miracle of the loaves and fishes was probably witnessed by some 15,000 people, no doubt many of them were Am haAretz.) So, if the miracles cannot be refuted because of the exceeding Am haAretz witness, they must be explained away! How so? The source of Jesus’ power was called into question (Matthew 9:32-34, 12:24-26, John 10:36-38, 14:11). This is terrific, positive, Gospels criticism, for by way of “explanation” here, Jesus’ antagonists confirm the miracles—very strong evidence—because beneath the surface we see attestation of our Savior’s miracles by His misguided antagonists’ scramble to give the reality of what happened a different spin to the eyewitnesses, rather powerful testimony of their having taken place. God “turned the tables” on them in this and used their very profanation to accomplish His own purposes—God is never mocked, not even a little bit.
Turning to our Savior’s conflict with the Sadducees, His large following endangered their collaborationist posture with Rome. That is, His following and witness of miraculous power made Him a potential rallying point for revolt against Rome, a so-called messianic figure around whom the considerable number of Am haAretz could unite against Rome, in the spirit of the Maccabean revolt. And such an eventuality could be seen by Rome as Sadducean treason, for in exchange for the Sadducees’ soft-underbelly-privilege came the duty of keeping the Jews at bay for Rome. (Notice how the masses are involved in each issue of “conflict” just described, either as witnesses or great numbers in a popular revolt.) The masses, the Am haAretz, are the ones who found a home with Jesus. It is not terribly surprising that they were also a key catalyst that stimulated the mindset of our Savior’s antagonists, who at best saw them as a means to an unwelcomed end—quite contrary to our Lord’s concern and loving compassion for them.
These antagonists, the religious establishment of the day, had the same access and opportunity as the masses, they saw the same witness of power and heard the same words of wisdom, but most of them abused and rejected our God, they hearkened not; indeed, nor could they (Matthew 13:13-15).
Akin to the Pharisees, yet much, much stricter in their adherence to all aspects of Torah religion were the Essenes. The Essenes came into being around the middle of the second-century BC when Judas Maccabeus’ secular about face changed the nature of the Maccabean revolt from that of the pursuit of religious freedom to that of kingdom-building. Attending the change, a group of Hasidim freedom fighters withdrew to a region around the Dead Sea and formed the sect of the Essenes, the self-proclaimed “Children of Light,” who saw themselves as the last vestige of righteousness. Apocalyptic, ascetic, and withdrawn from mainline Judaism and life, following the course of a highly regulated commune preoccupied with sundry manners of self-subsistence, worship, prayer, and Hebrew Scripture copying, the Essenes are hardly to be numbered in first-century Palestine. It is a noteworthy aside though that their extremely conservative Judaism had in it threads of openness one would not expect. For example, their Canon was more open than our Old Testament Canon—study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revealed that they carefully and laboriously copied not only those Old Testament Scriptures which today are considered canonical, they also reproduced manuscripts of the Old Testament Apocrypha. Perhaps most surprising is their embracing the notion of the immortality of the soul. Death was welcomed, as they held that their bodies were corruptible, and the matter composing them was not lasting, but souls were immortal and lived forever. It is not recorded that Jesus ever encountered an Essene.
Like the Essenes, the Zealots were few in first-century Palestine. All told, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots together probably numbered less than seven to eight percent of the Jewish population at that time. (.075x550k=41.25k; cf. the Am haAretz: .85x550k=467.5k; both numbers are rough guesstimates, notwithstanding, the disproportionate number of Am haAretz is right on.)
Now we have presented this backdrop largely to make this point: The aforementioned masses, those that found a home with our Savior—first-century Jewish Palestine consisted mainly of them. They were called (the) Am haAretz, Hebrew for “The People of the Land.”
II. (The) Am haAretz
The Am haAretz were the uneducated (Law and otherwise), rustic population of Judea, as opposed to the learned factions of the Pharisees or Sadducees (2Kings 11:20, Ezra 4:4, 9:1, see esp. also).
“When they came down the slopes of the mountain, the disciples stood with Jesus on a large, level area, surrounded by many of his followers and by the crowds. There were people from all over Judea and from Jerusalem and from as far north as the seacoasts of Tyre and Sidon” (Luke 6:17).
It is very likely that most of the folks in this multitude, Jews and otherwise, were Am haAretz-esque. Common folks; hard-working, struggling with the various forms of challenge that daily survival presses on all of us. The bulk of the Jews therein consisted not of the religious establishment of the day; by and large the Jewish contingent would have embraced their Judaism, but they were not as scrupulous in all areas of its observance, particularly in the area of ritual purity, because largely this was a practical impossibility for most of them as noted above. Jesus saw in their faces—the whole lot of them—the mosaic of the Christian Church, and they saw in His…a Friend. Someone who was not ashamed to associate with them, to touch them, to eat and drink with them—He freely associated with them. Jesus had compassion on them, for, in His words, they were like sheep without a shepherd (Mark 6:34). It is interesting that Jesus became noticeably indignant when His Father’s House was denigrated, turned into a common market, and, when His followers—and that was predominantly the Am haAretz, were denigrated. Jesus defended His own (Matthew 18:6, Mark 7:1-9; please notice: as the Father is infinitely precious to our Jesus, so too is the believer infinitely precious to Him, and that parallel is too amazing to grasp). Lepers (Mark 1:40-41), Adulterers (John 8:3-11), prostitutes (Luke 7:37ff), tax-collectors, (Mark 2:14), the handicapped, (Matthew 15:30), and on and on, our great Savior God Jesus welcomed and loved the marginalized and the outcast, the battered and the bruised, and especially sinners, the lost (Luke 19:10). He was (is) concerned about them. Nay, the Greek captures our Savior’s compassion for them much better: SPLAGCNISQEIS, an aorist, passive participle derived from SPLAGCNON, that is, relating to the intestines; humanly speaking, Jesus was moved with compassion “to the depths of His inwards” for them as utilized in Mark 1:40-41.
The testimony of the Gospels is nearly unanimous in affirming that Jesus freely associated with and indeed found most of his following among the “people of the land.” He pitied them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Some of Jesus’ disciples ate with unwashed hands– that is, ritually impure– in the manner of the ‘Am ha-‘aretz. Jesus clearly took the side of the ‘Am ha-‘aretz against the scribes and Pharisees, and his association with lepers, handicapped, and sinners suggests his concern for those outside the pale of traditional religious expression, or for those suffering exclusion and prejudice. (Roetzel 44-45).
In His humanity, Jesus Himself may in some ways be deemed Am haAretz, with the important distinguishing features that He was always without sin, perfectly righteous, and that throughout His earthly ministry He was unquestionably always deity. With this in mind, we see that He was humble, simple, certainly outside the pale of superadded, traditional religious expression. He suffered exclusion and persecution, and so on, much like those whom He cared so deeply for. The Am haAretz could identify with Jesus. Yet more, in Jesus they saw real power (John 6:5-15), and heard real wisdom (Luke 4:31-32). In Jesus’ words was self-worth for an Am haAretz, that is, the eternal worth that could come to him through faith in Jesus, irrespective of the label Judaism attached to his class. In Jesus’ words all things were new, in Jesus’ words was the end to the prejudice and legalistic slavery of Judaism, in Jesus’ words was hope. (And so it is to the day.) Especially after our Savior’s resurrection and the advent of the Holy Spirit amongst us at Pentecost (Acts 2:1ff), the Am haAretz, the people of the land, became the people of the Christian Church. And after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, these Christians became a distinct entity, no longer masked by Judaism.
The Am haAretz as discussed to this point relates to Palestinian Jews in the first-century AD, but one can imagine Am haAretz throughout the Near East, indeed, in all lands across time; Am haAretz can surely be thought of universally as everyday people, irrespective of their religious conviction, united by the common bond particular to any coping with life and the challenges that it inevitably brings all along the way. Such are the ones who found (find) a home with our Savior, who admired (admire) Him, trampling on one another at times just to hear Him speak (Luke 12:1). Not surprisingly then, as Jesus’ words went forth to all people throughout Judea and the Hellenistic world, particularly these became convicted and found a home in His Church…which accordingly consists of, and exists for, such as them.
Thus, then, under a celestial influence and cooperation, the doctrine of the Savior, like the rays of the sun, quickly irradiated the whole world. Presently, in accordance with divine prophecy, the sound of his inspired evangelists and apostles had gone throughout all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. Throughout every city and village, like a replenished barn floor, churches were rapidly found abounding and filled with members from every people. Those who, in consequence of the delusions that had descended to them from their ancestors, had been fettered by the ancient disease of idolatrous superstition, were now liberated by the power of Christ through the teaching and miracles of his messengers. And, as if delivered from dreadful masters and emancipated from the most cruel bondage, on the one hand renounced the whole multitude of gods and demons, and on the other, confessed that there was only one true God, the Creator of all things. This same God they now also honored with the rites of a true piety under the influence of the inspired and reasonable worship which had been planted among men by our Savior. But the gratuitous benevolence of God, being now poured out also upon the rest of the nations, Cornelius was the first of Caesarea in Palestine, who, with his whole house, received the faith in Christ through a divine vision and the agency of Peter (Acts 10:1-35), as did also a great number of Greeks at Antioch, to whom the gospel had been preached by those who were scattered by the persecution of Stephen (Acts 8:1).The church at Antioch, also, now flourishing and abounding in members and the greatest number of teachers coming there from Jerusalem, with whom were Barnabas and Paul and many other brethren with them (Acts 15:1-35), the epithet of Christians first sprung up at that place (Acts 11:26) as from a grateful and productive soil. (Cruse 39, emphasis added)
III. Concluding Comments
We have prayerfully endeavored to point out in this study that the “people of the land,” the Am haAretz, made up most of the population in first-century Palestine, and that these were the ones who were drawn to Jesus, who followed and admired Him, and who ultimately populated the early Christian Church. In the process of doing this we presented a backdrop which reflected a remarkable diversity within Judaism in the first century; that is, it is impossible to think of one Jew from that period as representative of all Jews.
Starting in Christ’s day and down through the centuries, the Am haAretz have been the heartbeat of the Christian Church, and so it is today. It is largely they who fill the pews week after week, who hunger for Jehovah God’s counsels, who give back their God-given time, money, and skills to grow our Savior’s Church, and so honor and glorify God. These then, are the Bride of Christ, the much beloved of God. God’s entire Plan for mankind, conceived in eternity past, revolves around them then to a large degree. It is not possible to imagine their worth in God’s infinite mind—but this saying is true, each and every one is worth the life of the Son of God, which is of inestimable worth. (“A Letter of Invitation.”)
Praised be your Name in all the earth great savior God. Amen.