laws in a case called
McGowan et al. v. Maryland
, which wrote into legal history the bond between the Sabbath and civic consciousness. It’s unsettling to remember how recently Americans couldn’t work or shop on Sunday, except when medically necessary or when certain services or stores were deemed essential to fun on days off. What was wrong with letting people shop? Frankfurter glossed over the obvious point that it forced everyone in the retail sector to work and emphasized instead something less tangible:the bustling, humming feel of a street open for business, which, he said, had the power to destroy “a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.” Warren and Frankfurter maintained that the Protestant Sunday had evolved into a secular day of recuperation, a public good that promoted the health of the American people and the orderliness of its society. Therefore, they ruled, blue laws did not violate the First Amendment’s stricture against the establishment of religion.
6.
N EARLY FIFTY YEARS AFTER the Judahites were carried off to Babylon, Cyrus, the warrior king of the Persians, entered the city and took its puppet king prisoner. The Judahites hailed him as a savior. “He is my shepherd,” Isaiah has God say of Cyrus. Cyrus sent the Judahites home to reestablish their government and rebuild their Temple. The Bible claims that Yahweh inspired Cyrus’s generosity. Cyrus would have credited the principles of sound imperial administration. A shrewd and effective tyrant, he understood that he could ensure peace and stability in his kingdom by giving his subjects some control over their own destinies, but he handpicked their leaders to make sure that they were loyal to him.
The return took more than a century. The Judahites came in a trickle, then in waves. Their leaders were bookish, messianic, intense. Many of them hoped to restore the monarchy under Davidic rule. Rebuilding God’s house did not just mean rebuilding his Temple and protecting it with walls. It also meant disentangling his people from the seductive embrace of non-Judahites. The efforts of these determined favorites of the Persian kings enraged the locals, many of whom had mixed happily with their polytheistic neighbors and even married some of them. The Judahites who had stayed behind had their own ideas of what it meant to be a Jew in a post-Temple world, and many of them harassed their new leaders. It should be noted that,right around this time, the returning Judahites begin to refer to themselves as “Jews,” or “yehudin” in Aramaic—that is, residents of the colony the Persians called Yehud (Judah, in Persian).
Archaeologists disagree about exactly how many people really left Judah during the exile, how many remained, how many returned, and how returnees treated those who had been left behind. Most archaeologists doubt that the land ever lay as empty or ruined as the Bible makes it sound. But you don’t need archaeology to see that, as a class, the “assembly of the exile” had little respect for the Jews who had remained in Yehud, and that these leaders devoted themselves to creating a special group of insiders free of all foreign influence and syncretism, and ensuring its dominance.
The Sabbath played a crucial role in this effort. The Sabbath was the great obsession of Nehemiah, a cupbearer and eunuch of the Persian king Artaxerxes sent to rebuild and govern Jerusalem in 445 B .c .E ., and for Ezra, a priest and scribe sent by Artaxerxes to investigate the state of religious life in Yehud. (Ezra is the first person we know ever to stand up before a congregation—gathered, in this case, in front of Jerusalem’s water gate—and read the Torah aloud.) Nehemiah and Ezra wanted to revive the cultic calendar, and started by enforcing Sabbath laws, which had largely been forgotten. “In those days,” Nehemiah writes, “saw I in Judah some
McGowan et al. v. Maryland
, which wrote into legal history the bond between the Sabbath and civic consciousness. It’s unsettling to remember how recently Americans couldn’t work or shop on Sunday, except when medically necessary or when certain services or stores were deemed essential to fun on days off. What was wrong with letting people shop? Frankfurter glossed over the obvious point that it forced everyone in the retail sector to work and emphasized instead something less tangible:the bustling, humming feel of a street open for business, which, he said, had the power to destroy “a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.” Warren and Frankfurter maintained that the Protestant Sunday had evolved into a secular day of recuperation, a public good that promoted the health of the American people and the orderliness of its society. Therefore, they ruled, blue laws did not violate the First Amendment’s stricture against the establishment of religion.
6.
N EARLY FIFTY YEARS AFTER the Judahites were carried off to Babylon, Cyrus, the warrior king of the Persians, entered the city and took its puppet king prisoner. The Judahites hailed him as a savior. “He is my shepherd,” Isaiah has God say of Cyrus. Cyrus sent the Judahites home to reestablish their government and rebuild their Temple. The Bible claims that Yahweh inspired Cyrus’s generosity. Cyrus would have credited the principles of sound imperial administration. A shrewd and effective tyrant, he understood that he could ensure peace and stability in his kingdom by giving his subjects some control over their own destinies, but he handpicked their leaders to make sure that they were loyal to him.
The return took more than a century. The Judahites came in a trickle, then in waves. Their leaders were bookish, messianic, intense. Many of them hoped to restore the monarchy under Davidic rule. Rebuilding God’s house did not just mean rebuilding his Temple and protecting it with walls. It also meant disentangling his people from the seductive embrace of non-Judahites. The efforts of these determined favorites of the Persian kings enraged the locals, many of whom had mixed happily with their polytheistic neighbors and even married some of them. The Judahites who had stayed behind had their own ideas of what it meant to be a Jew in a post-Temple world, and many of them harassed their new leaders. It should be noted that,right around this time, the returning Judahites begin to refer to themselves as “Jews,” or “yehudin” in Aramaic—that is, residents of the colony the Persians called Yehud (Judah, in Persian).
Archaeologists disagree about exactly how many people really left Judah during the exile, how many remained, how many returned, and how returnees treated those who had been left behind. Most archaeologists doubt that the land ever lay as empty or ruined as the Bible makes it sound. But you don’t need archaeology to see that, as a class, the “assembly of the exile” had little respect for the Jews who had remained in Yehud, and that these leaders devoted themselves to creating a special group of insiders free of all foreign influence and syncretism, and ensuring its dominance.
The Sabbath played a crucial role in this effort. The Sabbath was the great obsession of Nehemiah, a cupbearer and eunuch of the Persian king Artaxerxes sent to rebuild and govern Jerusalem in 445 B .c .E ., and for Ezra, a priest and scribe sent by Artaxerxes to investigate the state of religious life in Yehud. (Ezra is the first person we know ever to stand up before a congregation—gathered, in this case, in front of Jerusalem’s water gate—and read the Torah aloud.) Nehemiah and Ezra wanted to revive the cultic calendar, and started by enforcing Sabbath laws, which had largely been forgotten. “In those days,” Nehemiah writes, “saw I in Judah some
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