The Bad Faith Argument in Ancient Jewish Thought

Abstract

Though much scholarly attention has been devoted to the relations between Jews and gentiles in antiquity, surprisingly little literature has investigated how Jews constructed and portrayed the religion of gentile pagans. This study will seek to investigate one question within that broader topic: how did Jews explain to themselves the existence of these other forms of worship? After evaluating the scholarly literature on Jewish explanations for other worship in Chapter 1, the remainder of the dissertation will focus on one such explanation in particular: the portrayal that we label the “Bad Faith Argument,” namely the rejection of the sincerity of worship seen as transgressive. After establishing in Chapter 2 that the biblical sources do not apply this kind of argument to the worship of other gods and the reverence of their icons, Chapter 3 will demonstrate the emergence of Bad Faith portrayals of these forms of competing worship in the mid-Second Temple period and continuing into tannaitic literature. Chapter 4 will then directly juxtapose texts from the biblical period with thematically-similar texts from mid-late Second Temple and tannaitic literature, highlighting the shift toward a Bad Faith portrayal of the worship of other gods. Chapter 5 will apply this framework to m. ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4. Chapter 6, the Conclusion, will then attempt to unravel some of the broader implications of the emergence of this Bad Faith portrayal of the religion of the Other.